As the CPG industry continues to navigate demand uncertainty in 2024, it’s embracing a renewed focus on advertising to spark innovation and drive sustainable growth. With limited scope for price increases, 68% of executives are increasing ad spend in proportion to revenue, focusing on core brand promotion – a tactic 66% of companies employ to maintain market dominance and protect pricing power. 

Privacy-Centric Approach to Personalization 

Given the increasing complexity in measuring ad spend effectiveness, the industry is pivoting toward personalized digital marketing to ensure higher investment yields. The sunset of third-party cookies has not diminished personalization efforts but has rather spotlighted the value of first-party data for those with direct consumer relationships. Publishers and their partners with direct, code-on-page relationships are well-placed to provide brands with actionable insights and targeted outreach opportunities.

Leading CPG companies are gaining an edge by adopting platforms that merge first-party data with predictive AI, crafting personalized marketing campaigns, and refining consumer journeys with data-driven insight. It’s an approach that reflects consumer expectations, with 82% expressing a preference for ads that are relevant to their needs.

Decoding Digital Attention for Brand Success

As CPG spending transitions from in-store to online – and in an environment of expanding digital content – attention metrics become crucial in understanding where to capture consumer interest. Research shows a direct correlation between attention and business outcomes throughout the funnel, with each extra second of active attention boosting brand recall by 7%. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can more confidently invest their newly acquired budgets, optimizing their spend to drive impactful and cost-effective campaigns.

Lancôme‘s adoption of attention metrics illustrates how CPG brands can leverage these insights to sustain market leadership. By combining Brand Studio‘s custom experiences with data-driven insights on the Onyx platform, Lancôme saw a remarkable 57% increase in Attention Unit score compared to standard display ads. This approach provided consumers with a non-intrusive space to explore products, effectively enhancing brand-building efforts that Lancôme can leverage to gain pricing power.

“The results were proof that attention as a metric can deliver quality and scale”

Nabil Ait Yahia, Trading Director, Publicis Media

Media Mix Diversification and the Open Web Opportunity

Consumer digital journeys are evolving into more complex and fragmented experiences across numerous online environments, prompting CPG brands to reevaluate their media mixes. The industry’s heavy reliance on social media, with 31.2% of digital ad budgets allocated to social networks, leaves brands exposed to risks from algorithm changes and potential regulatory shifts. It’s becoming increasingly necessary for brands to diversify their media mix, in a move that would lessen dependence on any single channel and expand opportunities for impactful consumer engagement across various digital touchpoints.

The CPG industry’s dependency on social media advertising overlooks the broader audience present on the open web, where 59% of U.S. consumers’ online time is spent, with 60% expected to further increase their usage. By capitalizing on the consideration moment that audiences have when browsing the open web, brands have an opportunity to create new demand and drive more customers down the funnel. Supporting this, data from the Outbrain platform indicates a significant 28% increase in mobile click-through rates for the CPG sector from 2022 to 2023, along with improved cost-per-click, highlighting the open web’s potential for advertisers to achieve incremental and quality reach.

CPG brands that adapt to the current shifts in consumer behavior and digital consumption can see substantial gains. With Outbrain’s cross-funnel solutions designed for impact, brands can reimagine their influence and secure real attention at the moments that matter most.