By Trish Heatley, Director of Product, Adludio
We’re nearly at the end of the first quarter, and it’s clear the digital advertising industry is facing the prospect of an extremely challenging, tumultuous 2023, and businesses have a lot to consider in the coming year. Successful companies will be those that employ a combination of the right elements in the best possible way.
Creative, analytics, and purpose were last year highlighted by McKinsey as being key to unlocking growth opportunities. Businesses leveraging the ‘growth triple play’ averaged growth rates at least two times greater than those failing to unify the three elements. And, as we move through a difficult period, this effective combination is perhaps more important than ever before.
Creating engagement
Creativity has always been advertising’s greatest weapon, but an overreliance on being able to track and identify users meant that digital advertising suffered. However, with a decreasing number of opportunities to track and identify people, and wider privacy concerns, the industry is being forced to re-evaluate and re-balance the relationship between creativity and data to the benefit of campaign effectiveness.
Having the right creative for the right audience is paramount to campaign success. It’s this creative that encourages the user to interact with the ad, and understand the messaging. To truly resonate with the message in an ad, something has to have piqued the user’s interest, and diverted their attention away from the content they may have been looking at.
Attention is the buzzword at the moment but, in itself, is a little misleading. True attention can only be expressed through engagement. Actions are what speak volumes, and what lead to the user retaining the intended message. So, delivering creativity that people can interact with, and is engaging, will produce the best performing campaigns.
Powered by data
While creativity is highly important, the ultimate success can only be achieved with the addition of the right data points to ensure this creative is being served to the right people.
Data around audience types, geographics, and different verticals can be used to identify what successful campaigns look like. This data can be used to make informed decisions about the creative.
If something has worked particularly well, then any betting person would feel relatively safe to hedge their bets on that working well again.
These insights can also be continually drawn from campaigns as they run, so they can be optimized further and tweaked to heighten performance in relation to the campaign’s objectives and KPIs. Being able to extract all that data is incredibly important. It’s all about providing the best possible experience for all stakeholders – from consumers through to the brand itself.
The creative is what will pique people’s interest, but the data is the science behind it. Informed creative resonates the most with audiences, and means a more efficient creative process. The combination of data and creativity makes for a much more powerful offering.
Backed by automation
Thankfully, using data to inform creative is a lot easier than it may have been in the past. Technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are able to support the creation of targeted, engaging ads by quickly analyzing large swathes of data to determine when, where, and how ads are going to be most effective.
By embracing automation, the resource-heavy and complex task of manually translating large datasets into successful campaigns is alleviated. And a true focus can be placed on delivering ads with a purpose on top of that creativity and data.
Maximizing creativity, with the power of data and purpose, is where brands can differentiate themselves from their competitors in what’s set to be a difficult period. Advertisers are going to have to be more selective about how they spend their budgets, and there’s going to be far more scrutiny on what’s being delivered.
Those who come out strongest are going to be those who put a focus on quality over quantity. And this quality will come from creative, data-led, purposeful advertising.
