What is Flighting In advertising?

Flighting in advertising is a media purchasing strategy that alternates between periods of actively running ads and rest periods. Flighting or “flight” is the time when ads are running, while the period with no advertising is called a hiatus.

An example of flighting in advertising is a soup company might want to flight during the colder winter months and pull back spend as things start to heat up over the summer.

Why do advertisers use flighting?

Flighting is used for two main reasons – to save budget or to take advantage of seasonality.

It is most commonly used in the context of television ads, which are expensive. A brand manager might not have the budget to run continuous TV commercials all year, but still want TV to be part of a broader strategy.

The theory is that the brand will continue to receive the residual impact of the ads that ran during the flight period while in hiatus. Marketing will have an influence on sales that will last longer than the timeline of the campaign ran. The brand gets to save budget and use that money as part of an omnichannel approach, while still helping to drive new sales through TV.

Some brands have a seasonal sales cycle. For those types of brands they are going to want to save money during their slow periods and advertise more heavily when their product has higher demand. Flighting helps these brands control spend and maximize the impact of their marketing in high-demand periods.

What are flight schedules?

The schedule is cadence of the flight and hiatus periods. The key to a successful flight strategy is finding the right schedule. You could flight for 2 weeks and go on hiatus for 2 weeks or flight for 4 and hiatus for 4. Keep reading to see our research on optimal flight schedules.

Alternatives to flighting?

Continuous Marketing

All things being equal, this is what Keen would recommend for the vast majority of brands. An even spend throughout the year is going to help brands see the highest return on their marketing investment.

Pulsing

This strategy is a mix of continuous marketing and flighting. Instead of going on hiatus, the brand lowers spend in one period and increases during the next period. This way the brand doesn’t completely lose the momentum from their campaign while maintaining some control over their budget.

The best flight schedules: Keen Research

At Keen, we help marketers plan their budgets and maximize. Using data from the Keen Platform, we took a look at different flight schedules to show the impact of these schedules on net profit.

Our case study compared three scenarios of linear TV advertising:

• Always-on: The brand maintained a consistent advertising presence, with no hiatus periods.
• 2-week flighting: Ads ran for two weeks, followed by a two-week hiatus.
• 4-week flighting: Ads ran for four weeks, followed by a four-week hiatus.

2 Week Flight

While Christmas in July means holiday movies or festive decorations for some, for marketers, it’s time to start thinking about holiday planning! 

The holiday season can be an especially crucial time of the year for certain brands, so it’s important that they get their budget right. For marketers looking to optimize their seasonal marketing strategies, we recommend they start with an analysis of their annual sales cycle to identify seasonal, cyclical spending patterns. This can include reviewing web analytics to see whether certain times of the year see an uptick in visitors or monitoring fluctuating advertising rates to understand the changes in the costs of marketing during various weeks. 

Following that, marketers should consider using short-term seasonal tactics in-season. Short-term tactics let brands drive sales for a few weeks or months by creating a sense of urgency and causing consumers to take immediate action. These low-cost, short-duration tactics are especially useful for seasonal campaigns.   

Additionally, marketers should adjust their peak spending to the point of diminishing return. During holiday peak seasons, there is a point where each additional dollar invested returns less than one dollar. Identifying this peak means marketers can adapt their plan to spend up to that level for each channel or week of your plan, or knowingly choose to spend past that point for a lower, but continued lift. 

Another tactic is to push the limits of the peak holiday season. While a brand can land sales year-round, it is important to know what time periods yield the highest return. Once this has been determined, a brand can then begin building and nurturing sales beyond peak. An easy way to start doing this is to extend each end of the peak a few weeks, activating marketing before the peak and continuing after it wanes to help extend the buying cycle. 

Lastly, brands should ensure that they’re maintaining marketing activity year-round. So long as a product is available, marketing support helps drive sales. Further, brand equity relies on continuously earning mindshare. By going dark, brand equity decreases and marketing costs increase long-term. 

Overall, effective seasonal marketing planning decisions rely on a brand’s ability to understand seasonal cycles and adjust their plan to invest profitably across both high and low sales cycles. Considering the above strategies will help brands drive more lift, consistently, year-round.  

Keen to learn more?  Contact us today.

Prime Day continues to be a hallmark yearly shopping event, generating $12 billion in sales in 2022. While the knee-jerk reaction from marketers is to shift their entire budget to this event as soon as it’s announced, the reality is that this is perhaps one of the worst decisions they can make. 

At Keen, we’re able to quantify the impact of every dollar in every week of the year, accounting for all the interaction effects across all marketing tactics and time to determine the point of diminishing returns for marketing spend in a given week, or even in a given day, so marketers can determine the real impact of investing in Prime Day advertising. 

Using our algorithms and post-modeling analysis, marketers would learn that they’d actually be spending more to support Prime Day because while a lot of consumers are coming in, the number is not as high as one would think. So, if you’re overspending on Prime Day, that means there’s an opportunity cost to spending outside of Prime Day, leading to fewer dollars being available to spend on the rest of the days and weeks of the year where there might be a more profitable volume of customers. 

This becomes incredibly important when thinking about marketing holistically, across all channels and tactics, which are becoming more complex and fragmented over time. 

Ultimately, it’s up to marketers to have a system that helps them to understand how to take their fixed budget and divide it across brick-and-mortar, ecommerce, different customer bases and retail media networks to be able to get to the optimal outcome that’s going to drive the best results. 

Using this approach, they’ll see that their brand is better off creating a more balanced marketing mix instead of investing blindly into Prime Day. 

Keen to learn more?  Contact us today.

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, advertisers have a plethora of options available to them when it comes to announcing a new product. Social channels like TikTok and retail media networks have become popular launching spots for new products, adding on to more traditional channels like linear TV or radio. Each channel has its own benefits and drawbacks, with some reaching different audiences than others. As such, advertisers must understand which channel will deliver the highest ROI and exposure to their target audience.

While many marketers still rely on traditional marketing mix models to help them plan new product launches, these tools are limited in the insights they deliver. These methods rely on historical performance and limited datasets without the ability to test a product launching, meaning marketers can’t truly understand how a new product will perform until it’s potentially too late. 

Keen uses a proprietary algorithm to predict future performance and deliver a test drive of a new product on a set of channels. Delivered in real-time, marketers can see which channels will be the most effective for launch. 

Keen also provides portfolio-level insights, meaning advertisers can see how the performance of this new product would perform against the other products in a brand’s portfolio. This level of insight can show how a new product would impact the sales of other product’s and whether it has long-term viability in the industry. For example, if a CPG brand was looking to launch a new line of cereal, they can see how it would impact the sales of that brand’s existing product portfolio and if it makes sense to enter new channels so as not to take away sales. Whether a large company or a smaller brand looking to expand its portfolio, having this information would be extremely valuable. 

Take a tour of the Keen Platform to see how it can help you make the best marketing investment decisions and achieve your goals.

AI has entered the mainstream. The technology has taken over nearly every industry and led to major questions about how it will impact the future of society. It started with ChatGPT and has since evolved to Microsoft’s AI chatbot and Google’s new Search Generative Experience. While many advertisers might be fearful of what this technology means for their jobs, AI has the power to help marketers stay agile and responsive in a fast-changing digital landscape. 

Many marketers still use outdated systems to plan their media mix, relying on Excel sheets or even pen and paper. AI can bring marketers to the next level, helping them synthesize and analyze loads of data and speed up the decision-making process. For instance, a snack company that just launched a new product wants to understand how the advertising tied to the launch is performing. Instead of waiting months to analyze the ad’s performance, AI can help marketers analyze the recent performance in an instant, allowing them to pivot if needed. 

Additionally, AI can help reduce wasteful spending, which is critical in a time of economic uncertainty. AI tools can scenario plan potential campaigns, providing real-time insights into how an ad would perform over the flight of the ad. This level of insight can help determine whether an investment is worth it or if it is necessary to pivot to another channel to meet ROI goals. 

Further, tools like ChatGPT can serve as a launching pad for marketers to bounce new ideas off of and will take away some of the tedious activities so they can focus on developing bigger ideas. Marketers can input the general idea of a campaign into ChatGPT and use that initial draft as a sounding board for other, larger ideas. For example, a CPG advertiser developing a new label for a product can input the color, font type and general look of a package into the tool to see what the product looks like. They can tweak or expand upon that package until they find the right fit. This saves the advertiser valuable time and allows them to think of their next big campaign or new product. 

Overall, AI can empower advertisers to uncover more powerful insights and create better, more data-driven campaigns. 

Want to learn more about how Keen utilizes AI in our platform to help teams achieve their goals?  Contact us today.

As the effects of climate change dominate the headlines, the advertising industry is becoming much more conscious of its eco-footprint. A recent study found that 71% of advertising executives are concerned about the negative impacts the ad industry has on the environment. As such, advertisers like GroupM are creating tools that measure the carbon footprint of media buys across various channels. Similarly, the IAB created a supply path initiative to accelerate decarbonization. Brands are also becoming more selective when it comes to working with agencies, with many making their selections based on an agency’s sustainability initiatives. 

While these tactics are all effective ways to reduce carbon emissions, advertisers should also consider scenario-planning tools to test their ad buys. Scenario-planning tools like Keen can help a brand show the ROI of investing in various channels before they hit the market. For instance, if a brand is deciding between a television ad or a print ad, they can test run their campaign to see how it performs and what ROI it generates. Should they see they get less ROI from a print ad, they will instead invest in television. This test run helps reduce wasteful ad spend and ensures that any emissions spent by delivering an ad are truly impactful. 

Scenario-planning can also be integrated into the tools or plans being utilized by agencies to measure the carbon output of their ad campaigns. Advertisers can integrate the scenario-planning tool into their existing marketing platform, making it easier for brands to see the ROI of a potential buy along with the carbon output, helping speed up the process and eliminating additional resource waste. This partnership could create a more sustainable advertising ecosystem and would ensure that advertisers have all the relevant information they need before making a decision that has future implications for their brand and the world at large. 

Take a tour of the Keen Platform to learn how our solution can help you make the best marketing mix investment decisions for your business.

The role of a marketer has changed significantly over the past few years as they learn to utilize new channels and emerging technologies like AI and VR/AR. As the landscape has become more complex and fragmented, advertisers have had to adjust their decision-making timeline to keep up with the quickened pace of ad buying. As a result, agility has emerged as a key competency for today’s marketer. 

In an industry where many marketers are still using Excel sheets or pen and paper to do their planning, this need for speed can be a terrifying prospect. It can be difficult to take the risk with a new channel without historical data or prior knowledge. For example, a company considering an investment in streaming TV for the first time might be hesitant to invest in it because they have no experience with the platform. 

However, tools like Keen help ease the transition and show marketers how these channels might perform in real-time, eliminating the fear of a bad investment. 

Keen’s proprietary solution helps marketers simulate the performance of a channel in both the short- and long-term to determine the ROI of an investment. For instance, if a brand is considering investing in a new social channel, they can see what the investment will look like next week or six months from now. This unprecedented level of clarity can help marketers determine whether a channel is worth the long-term investment or if its effectiveness is only temporary. 

Having this data available in a matter of minutes allows marketers to make decisions faster and keep up with the speed of the market, while also having a full understanding of the risk vs. reward of investing in a new channel. So, the marketer who was hesitant to jump into streaming might take the dive knowing that it will deliver twice the ROI of linear in less time than ever before. 

To learn more, contact Keen today!

Social media has been extremely unsettled over the last few months as TikTok faces a potential ban in the U.S. and Twitter has undergone a number of changes since Elon Musk’s takeover, most recently naming Linda Yaccarino as CEO. As a result, advertisers have been left in limbo as they try to determine the future of these social networks. 

Instead of waiting for the latest developments on these channels forcing them to react, marketers should look at other options and have contingency plans in place should they need to put their dollars into other channels. In the Keen Platform our scenario planning capability  helps marketers forecast different outcomes to determine the most effective channels to invest in. 

The “what if” feature allows marketers to run future-powered, timely scenarios that identify the best places and times to invest. For instance, if TikTok is no longer available in the U.S., an advertiser can look at what would happen if they move their spending from TikTok to another channel, like Instagram or YouTube, and whether that investment makes sense. Should it be a good match, Keen allows marketers to switch their spending instantly, which is not possible with other marketing mix models. In this instance, this can help prevent your brand’s ad from being placed next to unsavory or harmful content, keeping your brand’s image intact.

Similarly, as economic constraints continue to impact marketers, certain channel CPMs can be too much. If you find that you need to save on CPMs, Keen can help you find the right channel that will deliver the best CPM while maintaining your ROI. 

In a world where things can change in an instant, it’s important to have a marketing mix model that is equipped to handle the rapid shifts in the marketplace. Keen is here to help you plan accordingly, no matter what comes your way. 

Take a tour of the Keen Platform today to learn more.