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, 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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