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.
]]>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.”