Episode 2: Essential Advertising Toolbox

Episode 2. Essential advertising toolbox

 

Let’s talk about practice. Which advertising tools are in and which ones are out? How to choose solutions that will fit exactly your business needs, whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or analytics? 

Our speakers:

Daria Gordeeva, Product Marketing Manager at Yango Ads

Rifki Novrian, Account Manager for Southeast Asia at Yango Ads

Our host: Neha Dawar, Business Development Manager at Yango Ads

TRAILER:

Daria: The pace of change is really crazy. It's kind of like ADHD for marketers, right? 

Rifki: So how do I keep up? How do you stand out among all of your competitors? How to make sure you're showing on top?

Neha: Everybody kind of just says, oh my god, we don't have the budgets. And I'm like, yeah, it's always you guys. 

Daria: Showing your campaign at the very right time and place for the users is critical.

Rifki: Right now, we only have artificial intelligence, not emotional intelligence, I would say. Neha: We're coming in with controversial opinions. That's what I live for. 

EPISODE:

Neha: Hi, everyone. My name is Neha, and you're listening to Points of Growth by Yango Ads.

This podcast is about the ad tech industry as we know it. It's questions, truths, and challenges. Here we meet with marketing and business people and discuss the advertising of today and tomorrow. In our pilot episode, we talked about the industry in general, current trends.

Now in episode two, we're diving deeper into what we see as the essential advertising tool set. What tools are currently on the rise and which ones are out of the game? How do you build the right tool stack to address your business goals? How do you know which tools you really need and which ones to kind of resist? 

Now let's meet our guest today. Today we will dive into the advertising tools with Daria Gordeeva, Product Marketing Manager at Yango Ads. 

Daria: Hello! 

Neha: And Rifki Novrian, Account Manager for Southeast Asia at Yango Ads.

Rifki: Hello everyone, thanks for having me.

Neha: Thank you and welcome. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about what you do on a daily basis? 

Daria: I'm a Product Marketing Manager for our advertising products, mainly Yango Ads Campaigns, which is a performance marketing platform that helps advertisers globally find new users in emerging markets.

Rifki: Well, in my case, as an account manager, I help to onboard clients. I help to set a strategy for the clients and definitely ensure to optimize the campaigns for better results of the client.

Neha: All right. Thanks, you guys. So let's take a step back from the tools and discuss what they are for in the first place. What are the biggest challenges advertisers face today in your opinion? Daria, do you want to kind of give your two cents here?

Daria: Sure. So I think that one of the top challenges is a lack of transparency because now each platform becomes kind of a bolt garden and where like six, seven years

ago, you could do full funnel analytics, no problem, now you need to analyze each platform separately. And with fragmented user journeys, understanding which ads or campaigns work becomes really difficult, which is especially the case with performance advertising. 

Rifki: I will take a different approach. For me, the number one challenge today is actually budget. With the current economic state, with a lot of businesses are tightening their marketing budget. So that means you would have to consistently bring good result then your marketing budget is actually being tightened so that's one challenge how you optimize your

existing marketing efforts and secondly there are so many platforms out there it will be very difficult for you to distribute the budget between the platform and of course in terms of marketing, we always have this expectation.

Like let's say you spend X amount in January and then everyone expects you to have a result in February immediately. So I would stick with the fundamentals like budget is the problem. Ensuring budget distribution is good. Ensuring you run on the right channel is actually one of the topics that I would like to bring for today's conversation. 

Neha: Wow, that's an interesting take i definitely do feel that because you know everybody kind of just says oh my god we don't have the budgets and i'm like yeah, it's always you guys, you're the first ones to get impacted! 

Rifki: Exactly, and it's very difficult for us to get things done. Daria: Yeah i would like to add here about also the distributing budgets for me marketing person, the pace of change is like really crazy. So it's not only about having tight budgets, but it's also about like, how do I distribute them correctly? And because everything's changing so much, and there are so many new platforms, so many new formats that you want to

try, it also becomes really hard. It's kind of like ADHD for marketers, right? So how do I keep up with everything? 

Rifki: Right.

Neha:  Actually, you kind of raised a really good point. And those ones that are like, you know, well known names, these guys get like big budgets, right? Whereas the new players that kind of come in, they're the ones who are just like, yeah, okay, you know, we don't have budget for you, or we have budget for you. But it's like, tiny, like, there's no kind of leeway to kind of, you know, move around and mess around with budgets. And I also understand things that have worked in the past or what businesses and marketers want to go back to. But again, there's no guarantee in terms of results, right? What if there's a new player coming into the market who can offer better results and degrees of success? And then you kind of shut yourself out of that. So let's say I'm an advertiser and my next question to you is how do I know which advertising tasks I can outsource to make the process smoother and which ones do I really need to kind of keep my hands on? How do you kind of balance automation versus like manual control for lack of better word? 

Rifki: This is actually a very interesting question. There is no one size fits all answer. it really depends on the size of your business your internal team's expertise how agile your organization is but you know a good starting point could look like everything you can keep in-house is like strategizing your campaign media planning audient researching those must be in-house you have to handle this on your own because it's the core of your business no one knows your business better than you you know how agile your company is you know what is the goal and the most overlooked stuff that a lot of marketers outsource is actually reporting.

So I don't know how it's on your end but as per my experience now like around 10 years now working with a lot of advertisers almost 90 outsource their reporting so that means they have someone else pull out all of the data for them analyze the data for them and also write down the summary the inside so that the in-house digital marketing team can have like ready-made report which for me this is actually a red flag because if you don't do the reports on your own you will not see the data on your own you'll basically seeing the data from someone else point of. So I think performance reporting should be done by the in-house team. I completely disagree if you outsource this. I oppose this strongly because trust me, like if you do the data on your own, like you download each of the reports from each platform, you analyze, you look at the trends and then you will understand deeper. Like it's not like someone else prepared the report for you. 

And in terms of what we can outsource, I would say campaign operation is okay to be outsourced because I have a like a very big clients with 100 campaign for each platform.

Like it's very impossible for someone to keep touch or 100, 500 campaigns per month. It will be very difficult. So you can outsource those efforts. Creative production, not all of the marketers are also creative producers.] It's a different topic than just running ads. Campaign strategy, audience research, and reporting should be in-house. What do you think? 

Neha: I am of the very same opinion. I mean, if you're not going to get your hands on the data

and you get these kind of reports that are just being fed to you, at what point do you kind of feed off somebody else's biases, right? What may be acceptable to you is not acceptable to somebody else or vice versa. I would rather kind of have my raw data in front of me and then kind of make my conclusions come up from there. Like, okay, technical stuff, operations stuff. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Outsource. You know, I'm of the same opinion, but I want to hear Daria's opinion now. Fire away, Daria. 

Daria: Actually, I would just like to meet those marketers that are not doing their reports because it feels like 90% of what I'm doing is trying to get some report together. So I would like to know where they found those people who are doing it for them. It doesn't sound like a good idea, but you know, like once in a blue moon, but I completely agree with you guys. I think that some, you know, repetitive tasks, something that doesn't really require your brain power, but more like your time and just like tedious repetitions, for example, you know, creating hundreds and hundreds of creatives for like a mobile app game or setting up new campaigns with like minimum changes for like testing. This is something that I would gladly outsource or automate. But for example, which platforms I'm using for those tests, like which channels I'm using for my marketing, which pain points or USPs I'm using in those creatives. Those, as far as I know, can't be really automated now because AI is really good at working with data. But gathering that data and going to the users and talking with them and finding the pain points, this is still the work of the product and the marketing teams. 

Neha:I actually was speaking to a client, I think it was sometime last month, and he mentioned to me that they go through an agency for all of their advertising

purely because the agency does send them all of the reports because they do it across all different channels. So you have all the tech giants that we talk about, and then they're like,

oh, can we just go through an agency because they do all of the kind of reporting and stuff for us. And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to say no to you, but do you not have that data?

But then he gets the raw data as well, and also gets reports. And then that is kind of taken into consideration. And then other reports are generated, like their own reports are generated before they kind of funnel that into the director of marketing.

Daria: See, that’s where I draw a line. If someone gathers the data for you and just sends it to you in a format that you can use to dig into it and draw some insights, that's completely fine, that's helpful, and that's saving you time. But if someone's sending you reports with conclusions drawn and maybe already dissected everything for you so you don't have to think about the data, you just have to sign it off, that's where I think, where's your work as a marketer then so that's where like i would kind of see it as separate work streams 

Rifki: i couldn't agree more i know that it is very tiring process you know like downloading the reports you have to sort out you know they comes in a different format the currency might be different in one platform the tables looks off. It's a very tiring process, but trust me, like once you're doing that on your own and then you understand, hey, turns out this creative doesn't really work. Like why did a lot of people tell me that this could work? You will get the insights on your own automatically. So it's a tiring process, probably a little bit boring. Probably it will consume a lot of your time, but doing performance reporting in-house is the only way. 

Neha: Excellent. We're coming in with controversial opinions. That's what I live for. All right. So do you think that we are heading towards a future of fully automated advertising or are human beings always going to be valuable?

Daria: You know, for now, AI can help with outsourcing some tedious tasks, scaling, but understanding the audience, the users, their pain points, it's still on the human side. And to be honest, I think maybe like, I don't know, five, 10 years, we would move somewhere where like AI would do research and it would, I don't know, draw campaigns. But I don't see it happening now. Two years ago when ChatGPT just launched and everyone was talking about AI, it seemed like in two years humans wouldn't be really necessary in marketing and creative and design. And now it's 25 and we're still here. So I don't think it's that fast as we thought two years ago. So we still have some time. 

One more thing is that I see that AI can't really work without a good prompt. So there's still human operating it. There still should be like a good product or marketing manager doing good prompts, understanding where exactly they should put this AI power. So fully automated, no human required. I don't think we're there yet. And we're not gonna be there for at least several more years.

Rifki: In this case, I have a very similar opinion with Daria. In my early days, maybe like nine years ago, back in the day, we have to bid for keywords one by one guys like I have to put exact match ancient days ancient days you know like I have to raise my bid in certain days like in on Monday for example and then on Tuesday I have to lower the bid I have to basically

check everything manually one by one I have to decrease or increase my bid I have to do a lot of forecasting on a daily basis and i have to calculate my budget like should i spend x amount

in here and y amount in there it is actually very tiring back in the day however nowadays a lot of platforms will automatically distribute everything for you so just create one campaign i will select

the keywords for you i will select the targeting for you but when it comes to the strategy i would say no because right now we only have artificial intelligence not emotional intelligence i would say so the you know the emotional part marketing requires emotional you know understanding people requires emotional i would say no even as daria mentioned earlier like if you try to use ai use some prompts you will understand that sometimes it doesn't work, you know, like they will get it wrong. They will provide you sometimes incorrect result and so on. So maybe I would say 30% or 40% we can automate while the rest is still manual. 

Neha: Rifki, coming back to your point about emotional intelligence and all these different factors, I was playing around with one of the largest AI models that is literally a household name right now. And I was just, you know, kind of playing around investment portfolio and kind of trying to get information out of it. And one of the things that kind of came up was that I said, okay, you know, if I want to take out a mortgage, these are the different banks that are offering me XYZ, like bank A offers me this, bank B offers me this. And I said, which one would possibly be the best option, right? Now it's not taking into consideration like lifestyle factors. I mean,

it's mathematical for them. And then I kind of have to prompt the AI model saying, oh, I want something that still makes sure it maintains my quality of life while also enables

me to be able to pay off the mortgage. And then it kind of pushed out a different answer. And then I actually went back and I started doing the math manually on Excel. I was just like, this is not working for me. So I had to go back and I started doing the math on Excel and like, okay, putting in all these different formulas and stuff and driving myself crazy. So when you say lack of emotional intelligence, I understand exactly what you mean, because it was just very mathematical kind of answers that were coming out to me. But I also kind of have to take in like, we're human beings, we have, you know, emotions and life and everything. And that's just like a model of things that they use. 

Daria: But you know what, I just can't help but think that it's a very old saying in marketing that,

 you know, like the quality of creatives depends on the brief. And I think that it's exactly right with the eyes so we can go into AI with like similar tasks but depending on the prompt depending on how well you brief it the results are going to be so different like vastly different and I hear from some of my peers that they try doing some basic stuff they're like I don't know coming up with a landing page structure doing some copy and it's just horrible results even though like if you search for some prompts and understand how to structure them, the results can be vastly different. So again, we're back at very fundamentals of marketing, brief well, and the results will depend on it. 

Neha: Actually, even if you brief well, sometimes it doesn't work.

Daria: I agree with that. Yeah. No, no, no. 

Neha: So you got to be careful. 

Daria: There's some stuff it can do even like you can write a hundred pages of brief and it still can't do this. Yeah. 

Neha: Yeah. So briefs are not always the real answer. 

So we're talking about trends and you know we work in a really really fast-changing industry right like you wake up one morning and then you hear this and then you wake up the next morning and there's something else that's out there. so let's talk about ad formats a little bit. what kind of ad formats are actually getting more and more popular? 

Daria: So first thing that comes to mind I just want to talk about video. I know that we've been talking about video for like 10 years now, but it feels like it's just evolving from like video banners to, you know, YouTube in-stream to social e-commerce to native advertising and streaming and gaming. So I feel like we still kind of are really into this format, the video format, the picture, the sound and the action but it kind of evolves with the platforms and like the overall digital marketing so I would go with that that's my go-to format and the format I hear the most about from like advertisers.

Rifki: I actually agree with Daria if you guys take a look closely right now you can check

all platforms that are on your phone right now probably there is like a menu for short video everywhere short video are trending right now because back in the day we

want like a professional shoot like you will take a professional camera and then you will shoot professionally but nowadays everyone wants authenticity.

Neha:  yeah that's really true a lot of the content that we consume now is video right whatever it is like reels Etc they're all just like, okay, we're going to get the point across. I'm a bit of a traditional kind of person. I prefer to read stuff. I am not representing a majority of the people. Please do not take to heart what I say, but I am one of those that if you give me the option of watching a video about a piece of news that's trending around the world versus reading the article versus watching the video. That's nothing to do with sort of how trends are changing.

It's just a personal kind of preference for me. But I know and I do like after, you know, conversations with friends and different clients and you know, at all these networking events, you do say that everyone's kind of moving towards video because that's how you kind of really fully capture a user's attention, right? 

Daria: No, for sure. So advertisers want to go where the people are. So if like the majority of people are now like consuming short form videos, that's where the budgets go as well. 

Rifki: Exactly. 

Neha: Let's talk about the must have advertising tools in 2025. What platforms or tools should advertisers absolutely be using? And which ones, in your opinion, are not worth it anymore? 

Rifki: I think my tool set would include, of course, AI tools. It is actually good to use AI to summarize it for you, to polish it for you, to actually give some insights. Summarization, for example. And second one is actually social listening platforms. It's actually really important. This is how you track the trend, how you understand if everything is changing, how is your share of voice, for example, and definitely need some human touch. So not only tools like you must have some in-house team who understands about these trends. They have to watch the video. They have to understand it. It doesn't mean that the brands always have to keep up with it, but just to understand what's going on. So to keep your brand relevant. Last but not least, let's say you don't have an account manager, you have no choice but to look at the data externally. So you have to kind of, you know, like to get unbiased result, not only what's on your mind, but also what other people think. You must use like a third party audience research tool. So you have to stay ahead of that. 

Daria: Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to mention AI tools for sure as well, even though we kind of did mention that they're not all powerful today. But I really already can't imagine my work without them like for some small tasks when I need something quickly translated or need to understand something or summarize like I think this is like the best one for me if I have a huge like report or like multiple articles that I need to quickly digest summarizing with AI works perfectly and one more thing like going back to the beginning of the episode I would say internal bi systems like data platforms that can connect multiple data sources together especially with your product data to have that full funnel analytics so again because we don't have any platform that can track other marketing platforms having those internal bi and via analytics to help you build that data reports and understand what exactly is going on on the whole CGM of your product, I think is essential now.

Neha:  You know, everybody kind of talks about AI. And I remember when ChatGPT came out and it was just like everybody was talking about it and I was just like, maybe it's something that, you know, it's being hyped up right now. And I was just like, I'm just going to wait for a while to see how it kind of goes, right? Because sometimes these things kind of die down on its own.

It doesn't stick around. It's kind of very normal for all these trends to come and go. So I was like, okay. And then I think a while went by and I was just like, okay, now I'm getting like serious FOMO. And I started like researching everything possible about it. And I was like, I don't want to miss out. Like everybody's talking about it. I need to know what's going on. And then I just got so overwhelmed with information. They're like, oh, this is happening, and this is happening, and this is happening. And I was just like, I cannot do this anymore. And then I shut it down. I was just like, I cannot do this. My brain is just not processing this anymore. So I was going through a really tough time, you could say.

Rifki: Yeah. I think it's actually just a matter of time, you know, like I have the same opinion as yours back in the day until I know how to write a very good prompt, until I know which LMM I need to use, and until I know, you know, like what it can do and it cannot do. After that, I’m really just like Daria. I cannot imagine my work without it right now. Even today, I will be very honest with you guys. I use multiple AI tools, you know, just to compare what this model said and what the other model said. t's mostly similar, but they handle it differently. So it's actually very interesting as well. To answer your concerns, Neha, maybe we can arrange a call together after the podcast and I'll show you how to do it.

Neha:  Hahaha. So actually, very recently, I've been obsessing over Korean skincare for some reason. And what I started doing is if a product I like, I'm like, okay, I like this product.

Can you give me similar product recommendations? 

Daria:  Oh, that's smart. That's smart. I'm going to do that. 

Neha:   These AI models are just throwing out full routines saying you should use this, you should use that. And I was just like, so I'm not the only one that's doing this? 

Daria: Okay, that's interesting. It makes you think about advertising in them, right? So I'm throwing in like my skincare routine, right? Or my skincare concerns. And of course there are like thousands of products that can address that. How does it choose like which one to show me? Makes you think if there's like an advertising somewhere behind it. 

Neha: Let's talk a little bit about geo advertising, right? So geo advertising has become quite a big thing, especially since we're, you we're constantly on the move, we're traveling. So let's talk a little bit about it. What are the kind of best practices for using geo ads? Any kind of tools and recommendations that you can give to our users?

Daria: So I work with different geo advertising formats in Yango ads. And the thing that we recommend mostly to the advertisers is understanding customer journey maps and when and where exactly the users may need your product or store. Because what sets advertising in Jio apps apart from just regular performance advertising is it's very heavily linked to offline and the ability of people to get the product or service. So showing your campaign at the very right time and place for the users is critical. Otherwise, they just won't react to it. Or worst case scenario, it's just going to irritate them, right? Like showing an ad for a spa salon in the morning when everybody's going to work. That's just not the best user experience. One more thing is that, you know, there are quite a lot of different geo apps, especially local geo apps, and they all have different formats formats so if you know like that you are hyper targeting some

region or city you need to research what kind of geo apps there are and understand what kind of formats they have because believe me they all have very unique and different formats and you need to understand which one of them align with your goals and that's going to be key for a successful campaign 

Neha: daria i don't know about you but in thailand if you show an ad to someone about the salon before going to work, it's very normal here. Like I sometimes go to the salon to get my hair done before I go out for, go to work. 

Daria: So I don't even know how to comment that. Like, you know, there are several words that are in my mind right now, but I will say afterwards.

Neha: You know what? That's why you have to understand your audience. Yeah. You gotta understand the culture too. 

Rifki: exactly. my take is like first you have to be trustworthy your account needs to have a strong reviews like a tons of reviews matters it has to have visual testimonials so if someone take pictures take videos on your business that's really important it has to have clear information and also professional presence. Second is like the most outlook point is actually

optimization on the keyword. So I don't know Neha, have you heard about Thai restaurant near me? It's a real restaurant by the way. 

Neha: Yeah, it's a restaurant name, like a restaurant name called Thai restaurant near me. You can't get better than that. 

Rifki: Right. That's search optimization final boss. You know, that's how they did it. They even, they use it on their business name. So make sure your profile has a strong optimization. Make sure you know what service you offer, what are the keywords, make sure it's all there. And last but not least, always run the ads. Why? I know a lot of people might disagree with me, like, yeah, we just run organic, it's enough, but trust me, it is not. How do you stand out among all of your competitors? How to make sure you're showing on top? So third point is run ads, run it frequently, do trial and error. For example, run it for two months and then see if it is actually giving you a positive result or not. That's how I'm seeing how we can utilize geo ads. 

Neha: So I wanted to see whether you have any sort of go-to recommendations for our listeners? Like one kind of final piece of advice if they're currently struggling with their products and services? I know I'm going to be telling salons near me to change their name to Spa Salon Near Me or whatever it is.

Daria: You know, I've been thinking about what I want to say in the end as my final words. And the best thing that came to mind is please test things. So testing a lot, trying trying new things learning is crucial it was like 10 years ago and i think it still is now get some ai create some banners and try new campaigns try things out and then you know like double down on data so basically it's something that we all know we need o do but i'm sure like we're not doing it because we are like in the trenches or i need more budgets or i need more people i can't do this but in reality after all we discussed today I can definitely say that you know having at least a couple of new things tried out in a month is very doable for any marketer out there so yeah please do. 

Neha: Rifki any wise words? 

Rifki: I would say my biggest advice is partner closely with your ad platform for example For example, like us, Yango Ads, so in case you want to advertise, you should partner

with us. Why? First, we're gonna share a lot of insights to you if you partner with us, and we have an incredible analyst team, we have an incredible audience research team. As long as you partner with us, we will give you a lot of insights. That is like a cheat sheet. To get the same amount of data externally, you probably have to pay a lot of money. But if let's say you partner with us, like consider half of your problems solved. So, that’s my biggest advice, like, you don’t have to worry about anything. Partner with the ad platform, binder and combinate every hour. That’s my advice.

Neha:Daria, Rifki, thank you very much for this deep dive into advertising tools. It was quite an episode I must say, I’ve learned a lot. Advertisers face a lot of challenges today and look for new opportunities for good. We at Yango Ads know that and have a lot of powerful tools to help elevate your advertising game. Tap the link in the episode’s description and discover Yango Ads Campaigns are all of the platform you want to create, monitor, and adjust your ads — all well reaching your audience and boosting your revenue. Be sure to follow and don’t miss our upcoming episodes, we have a lot to share with you guys. Next episode we will be devoting to app monetization and that’s going to be quite a ride. Thank you for being with us, take care!