“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Paul Longo, managing director at Accordant Media.
Every brand has a checklist when it comes to its programmatic media strategy.
Right time – check. Right place – check. Right message – not so much.
Today, marketer reticence to embrace new technology and processes for delivering creative is the glaring weak point in the supply chain from concept to delivery. Until creative becomes more nimble with real-time flexibility, the true promise of “scaled personalization” will not be fully realized.
Picture this: You’ve worked hard to develop a full-funnel media strategy to accelerate individuals through the customer journey. You create a sophisticated audience targeting approach that leverages first-party purchase data, site activity and various behavioral, demographic and geographic attributes. You now have a host of segments and microsegments, designed to target consumers at precisely the right moment in their journeys only to come to the troubling realization that you don’t have enough creative executions to fulfill the entire range needed in a scalable personalized manner.
Considering that this static creative model has already been rendered obsolete in favor of dynamic creative insertions in more text-based digital advertising tactics, such as search and social, there is no reasonable excuse to delay further in adopting the same method for display. In search and social, literally thousands of custom ads are created using various creative elements and dynamic ad copy insertion. It can be argued that this has been the driving force for their success. And even now, native ads are using dynamic creative in-feed, in-ad or within recommendation widgets to try to scale native programmatic.
That same dynamic creative approach needs to be extended to display and video now. Here is where advertisers should start.
Integrated Solution
An advertiser’s dynamic creative solution could be right under their nose. Now is the time for advertisers to revisit the dynamic creative options that are already pre-integrated into their programmatic activation platform. Aligning creative messaging with all available audience segments in their DMP is the first step. They’ll want to use this DMP connection point to create a decision tree that dictates the most logical audience-creative pairings.
Explore Standalone Solutions
There are a host of standalone dynamic creative solution providers available. In selecting a partner, advertisers should create a scorecard that is tailored specifically to their needs to find the best fit. Integration into their current tech stack is of supreme importance but other key partner scorecard criteria could include product feed capability, message sequencing, ad serving, social capabilities, auto optimization, dashboard and usability offering and work-flow automation, including the ability to organize multiple images, text and sizes. If using a dynamic creative provider’s auto-optimization capabilities, advertisers will need to ensure that this feature complements and does not interfere with the algorithms used by their current programmatic media buyer.
System Management
Many advertisers struggle with the decision of whether dynamic creative optimization should live with either the media or creative team. The answer could be either, but lock-step coordination between both teams is a must in each scenario. Seamless coordination will lead to smarter creative execution, better insights and more buyer operational efficiency. On the flip side, a lack of coordination will lead to friction between the creative tools and buying tools, analytic uncertainty and inefficient processes.
Still not convinced that dynamic creative is a programmatic must? Let me frame it like this: No proprietor of a brick-and-mortar retail space would speak to a store visitor at the cash register in the same way that they’d speak to someone who’s searching in an aisle for a particular item. They also wouldn’t approach a customer looking at $3,000 HDTVs in the same manner as someone looking for socks.
So then why would anyone use the same message online while speaking to different people with specific, personal needs? Brands should apply online the same individualized treatment that is a bedrock of their in-store environments.
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