But, increasingly, the demands of recognizing diversity – and the profits that can come from doing so – are compelling them to understand distinct groups of people.
It is a practice called human-centered design. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jason Gaikowski, VMLY&R’s global lead for human-centered design and executive director for CX transformation, talks about it with 4As CEO Marla Kaplowitz.
“One of the real powers of human-centred design is it is fundamentally grounded in empathy, and it is fundamentally grounded in curiosity,” says Gaikowski, whose VMLY&R is a marketing agency owned by WPP.
“It lets you see the world differently. It lets you understand that your experience is biased. Just because it’s true for you, it doesn’t make it true.
“When you’re able to view the world with that fuller and more open perspective, it gets really easy and obvious to see that there are people who, they’re in unfortunate circumstance and systematic disadvantage.”
Although human-centered design is all about understanding, well, humans, increasingly it is technology that is enabling that understanding.
Understanding consumers at this level is going to require a lot of data capture and the right kind of algorithmic detection.
“What’s next is companies understanding that empathy and humanity is actually a competitive differentiator and a competitive advantage,” Gaikowski adds.
He thinks companies will need to evolve from just considering product effectiveness to also considering the net benefit in a consumer’s life from her choice to add a brand to it.
“I think that we’re at the dawn of a complete redesign of how we think about what it means to be in a relationship with a customer,” Gaikowski says. “I don’t think that it’s so much customer relationship management, I think that we’re moving into a world of a partnership relationship with customers.”
Gaikowski’s team has used the practice, for example, to build a Ranger Support Team for Ford after realizing some of its international vehicles were prone to breakdown.
And he says it has allowed another VMLY&R client, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, to see how Miami’s majority Cuban and Latinx population has “an uncomfortable bias sometimes around trans, LGTBQ people”.
Gaikowski thinks artificial intelligence will be key to unlocking empathy and understanding.
“The kind of reconstructions that we can do with artificial intelligence, the insights that we can find via machine learning that then inspire something that was completely unimaginable even five years ago,” he says. “It’s perhaps the most creative time of my career.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>Browser cookie deprecation, plus limits on mobile identifiers imposed by Apple amongst others, are limiting traditional targeting methods used by advertisers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, one ad agency executive says technology can come riding in to help.
“Many marketers already made the choice to work with specific partners, lean on specific technologies, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.
“The burning questions we get today from marketers is more about the changes they have to make because of privacy.
“They see a massive pressure coming from all these changes related to privacy.”
“We’re going to lose lots of (audience) signals.”
The loss of those signals has emerged as the key advertiser challenge in 2020 and 2021.
One of the solutions mooted is a leaning toward first-party data, that which can be gathered from consumers with permission.
But, with some expecting the vast majority of iOS users, for example, not to opt in to tracking like location and app usage, finding users in the noise is getting more difficult.
Hernoux sees a solution in artificial intelligence.
“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.
What kind of intelligence? That depends on the use case.
“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece,” Hernoux claims.
“Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”
But what if it could recalibrate the creative works that make all that happen?
That is what is beginning to happen, as a new generation of AI-driven technology sets its sights on the creative process.
In this video interview with Anush Prabhu, MediaCom’s US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell explains the new age of “creative advertising technology”.
O’Connell and her colleagues authored a report on the sector, which includes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and similar tactics, in Q4 2020, covering companies like Adacado, Bannerflow, Celtra, Clinch, Flashtalking, Innovid, Jivox, RevJet, and SundaySky. She recently delivered this presentation on the topic.
O’Connell says it is made up of “companies that are solving for various parts through the creative process… everything from kind of ideation at the kind of beginning through to having things out in the wild”. And that creates two kinds of benefits:
Production – “Create 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 variations without paying a whole bunch of production people to do it manually. That saves money, that money can be reinvested in people or media or whatever.”
Performance – “Does it work better if I deliver a creative that’s more relevant or more timely or whatever, more resonant?”
So, how big is creative advertising technology, and where will it go from here? Forrester’s O’Connell sees the category is an “awkward teenager”:
Immature stage: “We used technology as a substitute for good thinking.”
Awkward teenage years: “Where you’ve got the really cool kids that have leaned in and are doing the cool things, but it’s still sort of fringy.”
Mature: “Technology as an enabler of creativity, rather than technology as a substitute for creativity.”
The content of advertising could be revolutionized by technology, including artificial intelligence, some think.
MediaCom’s Prabhu says that includes “equalizing” for diversity. “Tthere is a new majority coming in that is more diverse, more in-tune with what we see America as,” he says. “Data is allowing us to get to know those audiences and talk to those audiences equally and in a better way.”
O’Connell says that is an appealing theory – but complexity will continue to make the reality difficult.
“You can do that in a very basic human way, but you can also do that using technology, using artificial intelligence to look for patterns in massive data sets that would help just generally point you in a better direction in terms of something like the zeitgeist,” she says. “But I don’t want to minimize actually how hard it really is.”
Still, O’Connell predicts AI will show itself front-and-center in advertising, not just in the back-end.
“The thing about AI,” she says, “is that it is omnipresent in advertising, we just don’t know it – in everything from planning to optimization to creative (through) natural language processing and … machine learning.”
“(It will go from a) behind-the-scenes, important workhorse to something that starts to also feel like it’s front and center in terms of the consumer experience.
“And I think we’re going to see so much more there.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the MD for solutions at WPP-owned Xaxis says the two different sides of the ad industry need to re-unite.
He says the key is finding ways to put creativity back at the centrality of ad ops, and scaling personal creative to programmatic scale.
“Creative in the programmatic space has always been underutilised, always been a little bit underappreciated,” Lin says.
He blames the separation on creative’s origins in linear media like TV and magazines, which led “creative agencies tend to be separate entities and separate disciplines from the media buying or the media planning entities”.
“In the programmatic industry, that creative activation is an afterthought because most of that creative again comes from the client’s creative agency,” Lin says. “So we’re essentially a lot of times taking or re-purposing what was already created by some agency who really have no connection to the media.”
Lin wants to change that, so that clients to utilise and recognise the power of creative in the programmatic ecosystem.
But that’s going to involve combining distinct requirements from each side.
“What we really want to do as a company is make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to the consumers in this environment, and also connect that to the data and to the media that they’re running with us,” Lin says.
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) can help the journey – the practice through which individual items within the creative can be customized for different recipients, leading to thousands of different variations.
That is a big increase from what Lin says is currently only “about three to about four creatives per campaign with clients”.
So technology is nevertheless going to be required to mix personal creative at scale.
For Lin, it all adds up to the quest for “responsible media”, which he defines as: “Taking the trends that we have right now, but evolving them to the trends of the future, which means cookieless, which means more cohort-based optimizations and a huge emphasis on creative variations and creative optimization.”
Xaxis is using two tools to make that mix:
Using signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather, “it enables us to create thousands of creative variations on the fly, it introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome”.
“(It) takes cookieless cohorts of the best performing segments of inventory … like browser, creative, time of day, geo – and essentially optimises towards the best cohorts. So creative will only allow our AI and also other AIs to introduce a tonne of measurable aspects of the creative, like the click, how long someone hover on the ad, if they interacted with a video, how long they played a video.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>So why leave it to machines to find a solution?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, two executives discuss how artificial intelligence can come to the rescue of troubles in media and marketing:
GroupM’s Taylor says she is using the tools to interrogate her agencies’ creative for inclusivity.
“There’s a tonne of opportunity … using AI to curb things like hate speech, to make sure that there is more inclusivity in the platform discourse,” she says.
“Personalization at scale sometimes was not as meaningful as it could be to people who are perhaps underrepresented.
“So we’re really looking holistically across both creative and media to make sure that there’s meaning on behalf of advertisers when they’re talking to diverse audiences in a more equitable and inclusive way.”
IBM’s Stipes, who leads marketing for IBM Watson Advertising, says the industry has “only scratched the surface in terms of showcasing what AI can do”.
Clorox last year used AI and chatbots for customer service inquiries during the pandemic.
Stipes says AI can be useful in a world watching the looming deprecation of third-party cookie matching.
“AI can rapidly and continuously make sense of the privacy-friendly data inputs and then use that data to recognise patterns to make predictions without relying on cookies or other identifiers,” she says.
“DCO (dynamic creative optimization) has traditionally been all about preset, programmed rules, decision trees. With AI, though, what we’re really talking about is real-time continuous learning that allows brands to predict the creative that will actually drive consumer action.”
IBM’s Stipes also says AI can help agencies and brands pick through the growing number of influencers open to marketer partnerships.
“You’ve got to pick the right spokesperson and that’s a pretty arduous task to go back and look at a potential influencer’s content maybe from a decade ago,” she says.
“So using AI actually can enable brands to do this in a way that’s scalable and make better decisions.”
As agencies lean into advanced data usage technologies, GroupM’s Taylor says it’s important to do so responsible.
“We agree with the industry consensus that fingerprinting’s creepy,” Taylor says.
“We got to this place and this lack of trust, not the consumers, (they) were right in feeling wary of that thing that they already bought following them around the internet.
“So things like the data ethics compass help us to make sure that we are being really thoughtful about what the data is. Just because we can (do things), doesn’t mean we should.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>But, increasingly, artificial intelligence algorithms are proving they can restore the primacy of ad creative.
That is what a host of industry executives discussed when they gathered on June 23 for the Global Forum on Responsible Media,
This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the creativity/technology advertising track presented by IBM Watson Advertising.
The New Majority: MediaCom’s Prabhu Aims To Make Advertising Addressable
Dynamic creative versioning is allowing advertisers to deliver a diverse range of re-mixed ad creatives for consumers. But Anush Prabhu – US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom – says companies need to lean on software for something that is becoming too complex for humans, in two areas:
Robert Redmond thinks he has the answer – if producing a plethora of different ad creatives for a burgeoning range of audience types if complex for humans, call on the machines to help.
Specifically, machine learning like that offered by Redmon’s IBM is increasingly being called on to anticipate and remix the optimum ad creatives for different viewers.
“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer,” says Redmond, whose IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions.
“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”
‘Data Artistry’ Unlocks Context & Cohorts: Mindshare’s Clayton’s Post-Cookie Dreams
Creative-focused technology is important because there is a growing sentiment that ad creative, in the programmatic era, has been overlooked in favor of super-targeting alone.
But it also comes as ad buyers look for solutions in the era after third-party cookies and digital identifiers. And that is seeing the re-emergence of contextual targeting.
“Context has always been considered this old-school thing of the past,” says Sean Clayton, executive director, solutions officer at WPP’s Mindshare. “But, really, as you start understanding that people move in waves, they move in larger cohorts, the ability to start executing against those cohorts is actually pretty exciting, especially when you can look within the programmatic ecosystem.”
Machine learning can help advertisers in the new world, despite declining usefulness of traditional identifiers, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.
“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.
“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece. Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”
Xiao Lin of Xaxis wants to make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to consumers. But he, too, wants to lean on technology to get there.
The GroupM division uses a tool called Copilot that uses signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather “to create thousands of creative variations on the fly”, Lin says: “It introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome.”
But that is only going to come about if ad production and delivery channels are themselves wired up to support this addressability.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Anush Prabhu, US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom, describes what it’s going to take – and how it will help.
Prabhu sees a world in which consumers are increasingly happy to share private data with brands. But he thinks brands have to catch up to that.
“Right now, about 80% of our media is addressable whereas only 2% of that content is being addressed,” Prabhu says. The reason?
“Brands have found it very difficult – from a production, from an operation perspective, from an optimization perspective – to do it themselves.”
“That is the opportunity we see for marketers tomorrow – to get a lot more personally relevant with their messaging with their media.
That personal relevance could move the needle, Prabhu thinks.
“The fact is that media (inventory) in any system only accounts for 50% of the impact of any marketing, the other 50 still rests with creative.”
He says brands that do engage in a lot more personal, relevant messaging can see over 45% increase in their performance.
“We need to make a lot of strides there and bring the opportunity that we have gone into from a media perspective into the creative world as well,” he explains.
Despite years of talk about dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the art of re-mixing ad creative assets into new versions for different audiences, Prabhu’s message will come as a shot in the arm. He is saying it’s time for ad creative to get personal, to resonate with a splintering range of audience and to boost effectiveness.
And he thinks the route to that future has two lanes:
It is all so important because, if consumers as individuals weren’t already distinct enough to merit personalized advertising, cultures are.
“So far, media and the world of advertising and marketing has been very biassed towards the majority, but that majority is changing,” Prabhu says. “The new majority today is going to be those ethnic populations, diverse people with different skin colours, different choices.
“Not only in terms of the way they live their lives, the way they approach religion, the way they approach their sexual preferences. Making sure we as a media industry or an advertising industry connect and equally treat all those opportunities for every brand is key.”
But, infused by software, context is a tactic that, whilst it appeals to audience’s emotions, can also be super-charged by programmatic.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Clayton, executive director, solutions officer at WPP’s Mindshare, explains why he is so excited about moving beyond cookies.
“We can actually move toward what I consider this heart and mind alignment,” Clayton says. “The functionality is moving into more contextual-based media, contextual-based advertising.
“Context has always been considered this old-school thing of the past. But, really, as you start understanding that people move in waves, they move in larger cohorts, the ability to start executing against those cohorts is actually pretty exciting, especially when you can look within the programmatic ecosystem.
“(It) allows also for less of a chase into crazy personalization but executing meaningful creative against larger groups of people that move the needle faster.”
Google’s Chrome is joining other browser makers in deprecating third-party tracking cookies, and is planning a replacement in Sandbox.
Apple’s strong privacy stance has continued by making use of its IDFA identifier opt-in by default for consumers.
These and other measures are forcing advertisers to consider something different from their big tactics of the last decade – laser-guided, precision targeting of individuals, regardless of the content they are consuming.
For Clayton at Mindshare, that means discovering what else publishers have to offer.
“The publishers have so much information,” he says. “What we’ve kind of done historically is we’ve looked at the granularity of one-to-one data, which is going to be a bit of a loss moving forward.
“What is exciting about it is that, as brands partner with our publishers in a meaningful way, that partnership will allow us to understand the reason, the rationale, the ‘why?’ behind the content.
“The data partners that we work with are very important in how we start to contextualise against this context that we were talking about, building what we would call ‘artistic layers’ and what I call ‘data artistry’ so that we can start looking at context differently within the execution layers of the publishers.”
Clayton says the new approach will allow him to understand the way that that content is triggering a certain emotion.
Brands are starting to get a stronger understanding of publisher relationship and how audiences engage with publishers.
“There’s a clarity between the publishers, the brands, and the audience,” he says.
Even so, that doesn’t mean there is an end to programmatic.
“Once you start to triangulate those things in a meaningful way, programmatic is really doing what it was meant to do a long time ago,” he says.
“(It becomes about) taking this automation strategy that’s been put in place, using the power of the actual technology but using it in a way that starts to actually align emotion, empathy, and human behaviour.”
But, for one man, that overlooks the latent promise of data to improve the initial awareness at the point brands first meet audiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Robert Redmond, IBM Design Principal, Head of AI Ad Product Design, says machine learning now offers the ability for brands to re-focus on creative awareness-raising executions.
“Over the course of the past decade, creative has kind of fallen back a little bit,” Redmond says.
“All too often, especially in the display space, we see it just becomes kind of like a little punch of message that really has no effectiveness to it.”
Instead, Redmond says, there is an opportunity to reboot “how our relationship with the humans that we refer to as consumers is crafted”.
“What it is that makes the consumer tick, not in a post-campaign, reports-and-insights sort of way but, rather, at the moment that we greet them, at the moment we reach them?”
Remond hopes technology launched by IBM last year can help.
Launched in January 2020, IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator, Accelerator, assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions. Accelerator technology applies to digital display ads, and as of a few months ago, also video and OTT spots.
That adds up to automatic, dynamic creative assembly of ads.
AI is Building Ad Creatives On The Fly: IBM’s Olesnevich explains
“Within Accelerator, we’re trying to understand the groups of people who are interacting with the advertising and to create cohorts on the fly based on indistinguishable patterns that we might not see when creating a segment or targeting them,” Redmond explains.
“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer.
“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”
Dynamic creative was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.
Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.
IBM’s Redmond says he wants to see “gains in actually pushing people down the (marketing) funnel”.
But, if he gets his way, it is AI that will help fill that funnel.
The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 5 pm EDT on 6/23. The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic. To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia and visit beet.tv/media-future.
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