Lets get creative

John Gillan, managing director, Northern Europe at Criteo, considers how to maximise digital advertising budgets using creative services

Digital advertising in the UK continues to grow at a lightening pace with Barclay’s latest report released a couple of weeks ago suggesting the industry will be worth a staggering £15bn in 2019.

This comes with diversification of ad spend as the report also highlights that out-of-home (OOH) advertising like digital billboards and bus shelters surpassed traditional outdoor advertising for the first time in 2018. Excitingly for the industry, we’re seeing more innovation as a result.

McDonald’s collaboration with the Met Office, for example, paired live weather updates with fast food-themed creative featuring fries, burgers and chicken nuggets is a prime example. Gordon’s Gin also added a contextualised element to ad installations strategically placed close to recreational spaces that would display a different message based on the current weather.

These innovative campaigns are bridging the gap between digital marketing and powerful creatives. A combination that bucks a perception held by many people that functionary, digital marketing is incompatible with big creative campaigns. Performance-based programmatic advertising is tarred with the same brush.

Today though, nothing could be further from the truth. Across a range of digital channels, programmatic is being used to create dynamic and impactful ad creatives, helping to increase performance by improving awareness, engagement and conversion.

To maximise advertising spend and the use of programmatic there are three elements companies need to factor into their digital campaigns.

Personalised creative
In today’s hyper-personalised world, delivering impactful advertising not only at lightening speeds but in a bespoke way has never been more important. Simply delivering a generic advert is no longer enough and this approach will not deliver the results required.

Modern consumers expect their every engagement with a brand to be personalised, considered and genuinely helpful to their shopping journey. Today, programmatic teams are able to blend the speed of retargeting with the relevance and beauty of high quality creative. More than that, it is becoming the difference between a conversion and an ad blending into the background.

In order to drive this performance, advertisers are able to make subtle changes to every ad they serve. These changes can incite huge upturns in conversions and ensure the full power of the brand is being delivered, whatever the channel.

The art of programmatic creativity lies in its ability to deliver exactly the right shot to exactly the right person. After all, what sells a product to one person won’t have the same impact on another.

Personalisation powered by data
Driving the performance of creative delivered programmatically is data. The industry is quickly realising that data shouldn’t only be informing when and where an ad is served, it should be dictating what it looks like as well.

Programmatic creative has the ability to harness data and create more personalised experiences for individuals. Rather than displaying a generic creative, new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, mean the ad creative can be tailored to the viewer in real-time, across multiple devices, – massively improving the relevance of that ad and user’s overall brand experience. Practically, this means true-to-brand creative that adapts to variables such as stage on the customer journey and shopper history.

For example, some shoppers may respond better to images of a product, while displaying product details and specifications may convince others to convert. What’s certain is that the time for a one-size-fits-all approach to creative is over. Instead, there should be an expectation from brands, advertisers and consumers alike for hyper-relevant ads that continue to reach huge programmatically-defined audiences.

Brand performance
There is no reason for creativity and programmatic to be mutually exclusive – it’s this combination that resonates with consumers and produces measurable impact for marketers. For brands, it represents an opportunity to be reactive and relevant storytellers. For publishers, an injection of creativity ensures audiences receive a better user experience and enhances the performance of their platform allowing them to increase CPMs.

But despite the technology existing and an expectant audience, some within the industry still remain sceptical about the idea of delivering true creative at scale, even with proven increases in consumer spending and campaign results. However, brands and marketers can no long afford to think this way. When it comes to user experience, programmatic should never be a barrier or an excuse to generic or impersonal advertising.

If the industry is really set to spend £15b in 2019, delivering measurable ROI on this figure will be a real challenge. To do this, brands will need to think differently about the channels it uses and how it uses them. Nothing should be off the table.