Campaign Imminent: DuckDuckGo taps creative agency partner amid rising spend

Arnold recently became the creative agency partner for privacy-oriented browser DuckDuckGo, concluding a competitive review. A new advertising campaign will reportedly launch soon.

This hire comes not long after DuckDuckGo secured a secondary market funding round, which raised $100m in December 2020 and, according to Crunchbase, raised the company's total valuation to $113m.

Per iSpot, DuckDuckGo started using national TV in May 2021 for the first time since 2019. So far this year, around $34.8k has gone toward commercials targeting a female-skewed audience of millennials and Gen-X watching programs such as The Haves and the Have Nots, Iyanla, Fix My Life, My 600-Lb. Life, Grow Hair Fast! and Seeking Sister Wife. DuckDuckGo spent around $114k on this channel in 2019.

So far this year, Pathmatics reports this company has spent roughly $6m on digital ads, up 40% from the roughly $4.3m it spent within the same 2020 timeframe. DuckDuckGo's estimated full-year 2020 spend reached $10.9k, exponentially more than that of $1.6m in 2019. It has earned ~881.5m digital impressions YTD via Facebook (54%), desktop display (19%), Twitter (10%), desktop video (7%), mobile display (7%) and mobile video (2%) ads. 94% of this year's desktop display ads have been placed site direct onto wordpress.com; 97% of this year's desktop video ads have been YouTube videos.

Additionally, Magellan reveals DuckDuckGo has aired 49 podcast ads within the past 12 months.

As you can tell by this sharp increase in digital spend and return to TV advertising, the company currently has a very wide target demographic, which makes sense considering the fact that everyone uses Internet browsers. The increase in spend also makes sense consider how much demand for DuckDuckGo's platfom rose during the pandemic; people browsed the Internet more than ever and likely had more time than ever to compare options. DuckDuckGo offers a level of safety that competitors such as Google and Firefox don't center around nearly as much. In fact, you can tell in the video above that DuckDuckGo has directly addressed the way Google and Facebook track users. The company's increases in spend will likely continue with the upcoming campaign, especially considering that its new funding provides a larger budget.

Agency & martech readers - As you know, reviews often follow one another. This doesn't seem to be an AOR assignment, so you may benefit more from offering project-based services. Since creative is covered, you'll have the best luck securing media, PR and/or digital analytics work.