2023’s top-spending display advertisers: Who they are & what they did

Digital advertising showed no signs of slowing in 2023, with global spending reaching an estimated $423.3 billion — accounting for approximately $3 in every $5 spent on ads worldwide. But who’s spending all that money, and how are they spending it? To answer those questions, we analyzed exclusive Adbeat data to identify the 10 biggest display advertisers in the US in 2023, representing a combined $4.6 billion+ of spending on video, direct, programmatic, and native ads throughout the year. ...

January 26, 2024 · 9 min · philnorris1985@gmail.com

Reimagine Home: How Zillow's using their $15.8M ad spend to dominate online real estate and fuel business growth.

Founded in 2006, Zillow is a real estate marketplace created by Spencer Rascoff (Cofounder of Hotwire), and former Microsoft executives + founders of Expedia—Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. Apart from providing the estimated value of homes across the United States, the platform also offers several other features including price comparison of homes in and around a certain area; price change of a property within a given time frame (from one, to five, or even 10 years), a “Make Me Move” price information (which is an informal way to pre-market a house); aerial photographs as opposed to satellite imagery; credit check and eviction history report; and more. In September’11, Zillow had over 24 million unique visitors, representing a year-on-year growth of 103 percent. Out of these users, the company claimed that more than three-quarters were looking to buy or sell real estate in the next two years. Currently, 2 million real estate professionals are listed on Zillow, and 186 homes are viewed on mobile every second. In cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Boston, 90 percent of all the existing homes have been viewed. In 2014, Zillow bought Trulia, a long-time competitor, for $3.5 billion.The company reportedly generated a revenue of $1.3 billion in 2018 (Q1 2019: $454.1 million) and currently operates out of 10 office locations across 2 countries (Canada + United States).Let’s take a look at some of their most prominent advertising campaigns over the years: 2013-2016: “Find Your Way Home” For the first seven years, Zillow didn’t have a dedicated advertising budget, and relied primarily on the many USPs of their product to attract prospective customers. According to Rascoff—something that he also repeatedly told the company’s investors—Zillow, despite being the “largest web and mobile player in their category” had little to no brand awareness. “88 percent of Americans can’t come up with Zillow when asked to name a real-estate-related website,” he said. As a result, the company decided to double their advertising budget (a $10M to $15M increase) and started testing out some TV ads before announcing their Find Your Way Home campaign. After raising $147 million in IPO (September’12), Zillow partnered up with Deutsch (an LA-based marketing agency that’s worked with the likes of Taco Bell, Volkswagen, and Dr. Pepper) to launch a nation-wide advertising campaign that’d showcase the diversity of homebuyers in the modern times and the unique set of challenges that they face on the daily. Featuring relatable use-cases like a millennial buying his first home, a young family turning over a new leaf, and a multi-generation household searching for a new living space, the company ran 60, 30 and 15-second TV segments across popular cable networks. ...

September 25, 2019 · 11 min · surbhiedhawan

Monday.com raises $150M more in equity funding: Here's an in-depth look into their $12M ad spend.

Formerly known as Dapulse, Monday.com is a team management platform that was founded in 2012 by Roy Mann (former C-level Executive at Wix) and Eran Zinman (former R&D Manager at Conduit Mobile). Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the company raised a $1.5 million in a seed funding round to build a “next-generation” collaboration tool that allows you to create tasks, share files, plan workloads, and ultimately, visualize projects and processes that your team is collectively working on.Aside from word-of-mouth, Monday’com’s initial growth was a direct result of hyper-targeting their target audience across social channels like Facebook and Instagram. In order to maximize their success, the company leveraged Facebook’s lookalike feature to upload a pixel of their existing customer database, in an attempt to find more people with similar personas. “Unlike the traditional B2B approach, [where we] target conventional decision-makers like CEOs and senior managers, [Monday.com] did something different and created a direct response advertising funnel,” explains Rotem Shay, Adwords Team Leader responsible for performance marketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. “Our target decision-maker [was] basically anyone [with] a computer [who] works with a team. Some might say that we hacked B2B to become B2C, but I say that our marketing approach has always been H2H—human to human.”After bagging $25 million in a Series B (2017) led by Venture partners, the company decided to move beyond Facebook, and ramp up their Adwords by targeting specific industries and verticals. In fact, 70% of their users came from the non-tech sector, like, construction, wedding planners, breweries, and even churches, amongst others. Since Monday.com is available in several different languages, the campaigns were tailored to reach prospects outside of the English-speaking market.Around the same time, the company also changed their name to Monday.com from Dapulse, that was “a big part of a maturity phase” according to Mann. “For billions of people all around the world, Monday means work. All that is good, all that is hard, and all that is real about work,” he wrote on the company’s blog. They even released a fun, light-hearted video announcing the rebranding, where they poked fun at their “dead name” and went over the unusual, yet hilarious reactions they’ve received for the same since inception. ...

July 31, 2019 · 9 min · surbhiedhawan