More than music: How Spotify, Apple & Amazon promote their streaming platforms with display ads

Remember the days when listening to your favorite artist meant buying a record or CD? While vinyl album sales are on a strong upward trajectory, it’s fair to say we’re living in the digital music age. Streaming overtook physical sales and downloads for the first time in 2018, and it’s hard to see that trend reversing any time soon. Which is music to the ears of the streaming industry, with 91 percent of US internet users listening via some...

Phil Norris

Markets & Brands - 6 min read

The battle of Tax Day: Analyzing TurboTax, H&R Block and TaxAct’s display ad strategies

Tax Day wouldn’t rank too highly on most people’s lists of favorite dates. But for the tax software industry, it’s like Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday all rolled into one. Per CivicScience, 39 percent of Americans in 2024 prepared (or planned to prepare) their taxes using tax software, with 23 percent using a free tool and 16 percent choosing a paid platform. Intuit TurboTax is comfortably the most popular tax tool, but there are a bunch of...

Phil Norris

Markets & Brands - 6 min read

Inside Samsung’s $150M+ display ad strategy: Can it overtake Apple?

Founded in 1938, Samsung is a South Korean conglomerate with affiliates selling everything from life insurance to engineering services to oil tankers. But, from a B2C perspective, the company is best known for appliances and other electronics products. It’s the world’s second-biggest smartphone manufacturer, with a market share of 16.3 percent as of Q4 2023… Source: Statista …and it’s also a major player in countless other consumer electronics niches, including smart TVs, refrigerators, and laptops. With global revenues north...

Phil Norris

Markets & Brands - 6 min read

Inside VISA’s $11.4M ad spend: How one of the largest finance MNCs in the world is disrupting the e-payments market..

Founded in 1958, Visa is an American multinational finance company that facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, gift cards, and debit cards. With operations across six continents, Visa processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of $6.8 trillion, according to a 2015 Nilsen report.  Let’s take a closer look at their advertising strategy: 2006: ‘Life Takes VISA’ After 20 years, VISA replaced their well-known tagline—”It’s everywhere you want to...

Surbhi Dhawan

Markets & Brands - 7 min read

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...

Surbhi Dhawan

Markets & Brands - 8 min read

Breaking down HostGator’s $919.2K ad spend: How the web-hosting provider is using strategically-crafted campaigns to stand out from their competitors.

Founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley (then a student at Florida Atlantic University), HostGator is a Texas-based provider of shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated web hosting. By 2006, HostGator had crossed 200,000 registered domains and opened their first international office in Ontario, Canada. In 2008, HostGator reached 100,000 customers and started offering unlimited space and bandwidth as part of all hosting packages. Just a year later, they doubled their customer-base and launched toll-free numbers for customers...

Surbhi Dhawan

Markets & Brands - 5 min read