As Cannes approaches, we in the TV advertising industry expect to hear a lot about the rise of streaming, the battle over new currencies, and the race to bring better ad products to CTV. But this year and especially at Cannes, I think it’s important to talk about creative. After all, isn’t that what the festival is supposed to be all about?
To be clear, I’m not here to debate which TV spots should or shouldn’t win Lions this year, or which agency I expect to clean up. Rather, I want to use this moment to talk about finally unlocking the true creative power of TV advertising by earnestly embracing data and optimization. Yes, the TV industry has made huge strides in adopting principles of programmatic over the past few years – but mostly this has been driven through targeting and buying – i.e. the media side of the business. The ads themselves? Well, they’ve gotten the short shrift in the race to become more data-driven.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In fact, I contend there is a huge opportunity in front of us to finally do what we’ve been saying for years – to allow real-time data to inform which ads get produced, when and for how long they run, and which consumers they get shown to. Data can, and should be empowering creative agencies and brands to make much more effective ads – and in fact, a lot more of them.
It’s time for real creative optimization on TV
Over the past few years, we’ve seen some early experimentation on this front. For example, a leading insurance brand we work with carefully tracks its weekly Engagement from TV ads relative to its competitive set.
When our data showed a massive disparity in performance between specific ads and their benchmarks, the brand was able to more quickly adjust their creative rotation in their media plan until the brand was back on top. This doesn’t happen over months and quarters, but weeks and sometimes days. The secret isn’t just a nimble, integrated creative and media process, but having the immediate, real-time performance data to power decision-making
We commonly see 20-50% differences in engagement rates between a brand’s creatives. By adjusting the allocation of each TV creative to overweight it in those audience segments and media buys where it is predisposed to perform better, brands have been able to boost weekly campaign engagement by up to 15%, which can accelerate and accumulate to 30% overall campaign performance. This is the stuff careers are made of.
The business case for more creativity
In our view, there are four things that need to happen for the TV business to fully realize the power of TV creative optimization.
1. We need to question – and sometimes break – conventional research thinking.
Even as the ad industry goes through near-constant change, the process behind the making of TV commercials has remained remarkably static over the years. For example, many creative directors (and their marketing clients) have clung to focus groups as the baseline for making decisions about messaging direction.
At the same time, marketers have hung onto old truisms regarding the need to run ads at certain ‘benchmark’ levels in order to drill messaging home with consumers, with metrics such as brand recall trumping overall effectiveness.
This is a classic trap of letting the limits of measurement drive or even dictate, a company’s goals. In the old days, a survey of brand recall was the only measurement option you had. But the more modern approach to TV allows for actual behavioral data to tell you what’s working. It won’t be easy, but this new ad paradigm will require a rewiring of how we think about TV and the creative process. On that note…
2. We need to bring a digital metabolism to TV ad production.
Simply put, brands need to make more TV ads and become much more agile when it comes to iterating and tweaking plans. The most successful data-centric campaigns require running multiple creatives out in the real world, where feedback from real consumers can be gathered and used to make decisions on refinement, selection, and targeting.
As part of this, brands and creative execs will have to become ok with putting ads out that don’t last. And I get it, some might roll their eyes as they see ballooning creative costs – but this is about working smarter, not working harder. Learn and gain inspiration from the past and your competitors. Re-architect your briefs, storyboards, and production process – and empower and reward your partners who can help you get there. We’ve already proven with research and data that marketers who manage a bigger ad library have a major advantage over competitors. This advantage will only accelerate for those who embrace this mentality.
3. We need to empower creative agencies to invest in data and analytics.
Too often we see data science relegated to a specific department, or left to the media or programmatic agency teams, who sit at a very different table from the creative agency.
Too many creative shops have abdicated the responsibility for data to their media comrades. Even though CMOs often rely on their creative agency leads for critical strategic insight, the lack of data puts creative agencies at a disadvantage. They need to shift gears quickly if they want to compete for the future. In fact…
4. We need to help creative teams recognize that AI is good for business.
This may be unexpected, given all the recent talk about AI killing creative jobs. On the contrary, we think that these tools will become essential for great creatives to be able to ramp up their output cost-effectively to the levels necessary to compete. Not only will this lead to more opportunity, but it could also yield some of the smartest work creatives have ever done.
There is so much that can be learned from machine learning which can be used not only to hone existing work but inspire new ideas. EDO’s measurement methodology has long taken advantage of AI-based machine learning models to isolate the impact of creative choices from the intensely complex confounding effects of audience and media. Other innovators like Dumbstruck and VidMob are applying AI-based techniques to measure the human emotional impact of different ad creatives and dynamically optimizing creatives respectively.
At the risk of overstating an increasingly prescient cliche – folks won’t be losing their jobs to AI, they’ll be losing their jobs to folks who know how to use AI. The best talent will learn to wield AI – and AI-powered solutions – to their advantage while shepherding in a future where dozens of ads can be created and evaluated via the world’s largest focus group. Maybe they’ll even have to present new AI award categories at the Le Palais next year.