We celebrate our first anniversary, and we couldn’t be more grateful to the community and our partners (clients, media partners and others) for their great reception in 2022!

What started as a little idea on how to make communications more colourful morphed into a network of individuals and businesses that make marketing and brands better.

The team at Purple Media wanted to take this occasion to say “Thank You” to everyone involved, and discuss a few of the highlights of this year and trends for 2023.

Advertising: the power of digital ads coupled with traditional media

We have offered a wide range of solutions for our clients, covering a wide range of marketing channels. Yet, some of the best performing ones, such as the Holland & Barrett Black Friday campaign, or for FxChange, we had a mix of digital ads – Programmatic, Social Media, Direct Buys – coupled with traditional channels: Press, TV, Radio, OOH (out-of-home).

This media mix performs well as it allows businesses to have different touchpoints to the user. It is key to always be on top of mind, so that the target customer will think of the brand first when they will actually need the service, promo or product.

For such a small country, Gibraltar offers a wealth of opportunities for advertisers, with distinct magazines and websites for reaching different audiences.

OOH is improving, and the Border Screen remain amongst the few short-term solutions for advertisers but we are hoping to see a change, at the airport, bus stops or street panels.

Social media: difficulties at Meta and chaos at Twitter

It’s been a heck of a year for social media platforms. TikTok continues its growth – though advertising campaigns are still in their infancy and need to be fine-tuned – but most of all, we have experienced this year absolute chaos at Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk. The most worrying was the lack of moderation; indeed, we have advised our clients looking to advertise on Twitter towards the end of 2022 to pause and see what would happen. It would not be very good for a brand reputation to be displayed next to heinous, racist, sexist etc. We are now however confident that those issues will be taken care of in the early part of 2023.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has also had its share of difficulties this year. It had invested billions of dollars into the Metaverse but so far, only a very small number of users actually use the Metaverse. In order to pay for those large investments, the cost of ads (per impression, clicks etc) has increased significantly, and with reduced targeting capabilities due to the Apple update. At Purple Media, we still believe that Facebook is a good channel for local communications and for mass market but should often be there as support rather than the prime channel.

Programmatic digital banners: Upward and onward

This year, we have really seen very good results for most of the programmatic campaigns, locally and internationally. Targeting capacities have been improved, and geo-localisation furthered. The majority of our campaigns now have digital banners at their core. We expect this to continue in 2023, with Google constantly enhancing the capabilities of their campaigns. Look out for the new Performance Max, which enables advertisers to advertise across all platforms – from Search to YouTube to banners in 1 single campaign.

Audio: Podcasts are ideal to reach local audiences!

We are big fans of podcast advertising, especially when done correctly and with a good match between the brand, the message and the content of the podcast. The GFSB Business Podcast has had its best year yet, and we are hoping that they will return in 2023!

For international markets, Spotify now enables advertisers to advertise programmatically by genre, including podcast.

Our belief in fair and transparent planning with clients.

One of the core values at the heart of Purple Media is total business transparency for our clients. No backroom deals, not charging for services that clients do not use. Honest and fair business.

We have been very proud to work with partners that share the same values.

Creative agency thinking: dare to have strong messages!

We couldn’t be more thankful to our team of dedicated designers, who have constantly amazed our client base with their wonderful talent, and multichannel approach. Some of the highlights include the Gibro Group ads, Global Satellite, and VUDU! Here are a few examples of ads:

Overall, a big thank you to all involved this year and see you on the other side!