Silverpush is excited to highlight Arm Candy for our Partner Spotlight this week. We caught up with Dana Ventre (Director, Ad Operations), Zach Thompson (Sr. Director, Ad Operations), and Kelsi Jiang (Director, Product) to learn more about the agency and what the team is expecting in the ad market this year.
Here’s what they had to say:
1. Tell us more about Arm Candy. What makes the agency special?
Arm Candy is a full-service media intelligence agency combining smarter workflows, proprietary media intelligence technology, CYRIS, and a brilliant workforce to deliver the highest quality service and results for every client. Our clients value us as a full-service media service provider to manage investments across traditional, digital, and/or retail channels as well as for real-time data visualization across multiple data sources.
A lot of the time, our data models are built with data from sales, revenue, leads, website, and media analytics, and our team combines those metrics with a culture of accuracy, speed, and quality.
2. How did you end up choosing Silverpush as a contextual partner?
Silverpush’s Mirrors technology was an intriguing solution to a complex issue within the YouTube space – placing ads on the most relevant content. The Silverpush Mirrors AI solution identifies contextual placements by analyzing contextual signals across each video to understand relevance. Additionally, Mirrors is used in the upfront process, helping provide a comprehensive plan to target specific placements to give advertisers and brands a sense of where ads will be served.
3. How has the ad market changed over the past five years? Are there trends in your region that you’ve noticed specifically?
Over the past five years, we have seen some notable shifts influenced by technological advancements, changing consumer behaviors, and economic factors. Some of the key trends include:
- Digital ad spending has increased by over 10% year-over-year in the last 5 years, with consumers increasingly spending time online, leading to a shift from traditional media spend. The emergence of retail media is also significant, reflecting the growing importance of retail platforms in the digital advertising ecosystem.
- The digital advertising landscape has been reshaped by shoppable videos, the rise of short-form video content, and the dominance of vertical video platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reels. Brands increasingly use concise videos to maximize audience engagement. The integration of shoppable videos has further elevated the consumer experience by allowing direct purchases from the video, leading to a significant boost in conversion rates.
- The adoption of AI-driven advertising enables a platform’s ability to enhance its advertising solutions and offerings. For instance, Google’s Performance Max campaign type, Meta’s advantage+ feature across budget allocation, audience targeting, creative optimization, and programmatic vendors’ probabilistic modeling allow more precise audience targeting for better return, etc.
4. What ad channels are driving the best results for clients right now?
Ad channels can play different roles for a brand when it comes to different objectives. When evaluated based on attributed outcomes, we typically see lower funnel channels like Google Search driving higher ROAS or better CPA, especially for B2C clients. ABM and LinkedIn, on the other hand, usually yield better outcomes for B2B accounts with their precise targeting capabilities.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can be great for various objectives like conversion, traffic, and awareness. Similarly, programmatic media such as display, online video, and OTT/CTV are great for various objectives but thrive more in the middle and top of the funnel.
5. Are you noticing any specific trends in how brands are leveraging data or AI-driven tools to connect with local audiences?
Brands are increasingly leveraging new tools to connect with local audiences in different ways. Here are the top three ways we’ve seen value with AI so far:
- Predictive Analytics – Predictive analytics allows businesses to anticipate local market trends and consumer needs and proactively adjust their offering and marketing strategies to align with evolving demands.
- Personalization, Automation, and Segmentation – The adoption of AI in CRM enables easier management and better understanding of leads and customers for businesses. For example, managing unstructured data, sending the right content to the right person automatically, predicting the likelihood of a lead to convert before investing resources, and using AI chatbots to provide more real-time, localized customer services.
- Automated Content Creation – Generative AI assists businesses in content creation, which can help lower costs and improve the efficiency of producing variations of the same creative content that speak to different regions or audiences.
6. What are the biggest advertising challenges for brands today? What are the biggest opportunities?
We typically see clients having the biggest challenges in three key areas:
1. Attribution. Relying on media platform attribution data presents challenges like platform bias, duplicate conversions, short-term focus, and limited cross-platform visibility. These challenges create difficulties for businesses when it comes to comparing and evaluating channel effectiveness. While broader measurement approaches, such as unified measurement or media/marketing mix modeling, can be the solution, they are often not available due to data complexity, implementation cost, and delayed results for timely decision-making.
2. Data Privacy Regulation and the Decline of Third-Party Cookies. Data privacy laws like GDPR and the disappearance of third-party cookies are making tracking traditional user behavior difficult. This is pushing advertisers towards strategies that prioritize first-party data.
3. Balancing Performance Marketing with Creative Branding. Businesses struggle to find the optimal balance between data-driven performance marketing and creative brand storytelling, essential for long-term brand equity.
In terms of opportunities, Arm Candy is focused on four core strategies:
1. Scale with AI. Test AI-powered tools for personalized marketing, enhanced customer experiences, and efficient data analysis, enabling businesses to connect more effectively with their audience with greater precision.
2. Build a Model for Unified Measurement. Integrate multi-touch attribution (MTA) with marketing mix modeling (MMM) to gain a holistic view of both short-term and long-term performance.
3. Create a First-Party Data Strategy. Prioritize building a robust first-party data infrastructure to improve targeting, personalization, and measurement accuracy.
4. Embrace Short-Form Video Content. The rise of platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts offers a significant opportunity to bridge the gap between performance marketing and creative branding. Short-form videos inherently blend creative storytelling with data-driven performance insights.
By leveraging the interactive and algorithm-driven nature of these platforms, brands can quickly test and refine creative approaches, ensuring their messages resonate while also delivering measurable business results.
Want to learn more about Arm Candy? Visit the agency website here.
