Rob Rakowitz
Spring is in full swing, and the advertising and media communities and their leaders are in their seasonal festival hopping - going from industry association summits to deal making conferences to the festival that celebrates the work and reinforces the partnerships. That’s a very busy season!
But this year is bound to have a slightly different rhythm and tone.
Looking at the trends now - and using WPP and IPG/Magna and Omnicom media forecasts - digital is roughly 70% of a brand’s investments and of that social platforms will hoover up upwards of 90% of global digital media ad spend - more than 60% of total media investment.
Let that settle in for a while.
That’s a lot of money but more importantly - it’s a lot of data, and even more significantly, intelligence.
Privacy advocates will demure that they know too much about us - our behaviors and our opinions via their data collection practices. Civil society advocates will say that they control too much of what is deemed as permissible content via opaque and inconsistent content moderation practices. Creative data, on the other hand, may be the cleanest data yet, with its focus purely on creative decisions, audience response and performance. Creative data therefore avoids any of the contested areas of privacy and content.
Marketers have chased user and content data with pitfalls in the pursuit of effectiveness, yet right in front of us the most impactful thing in marketing - creative performance is right in front of us, and now is the time to look at it. And with every impression in more than 60% of your budget - marketers have an opportunity to learn how different creative strategies and executions perform. That is data - and learning from it is intelligence.
I’ve spoken at length before about three rooms - the boardroom where strategic decisions are made, the engine room where ad campaigns are built, and the living room - where media investment and campaign decisions are felt by consumers and society writ large.
Aside from the user and societal concerns (aka the living room), let’s go into the advertising campaign engine room.
These multibillion dollar juggernauts sit on a host of data that knows how content and ads perform. They also shape the algorithms that determine what is seen.
But what makes this year different?
Recent announcements show that these organizations are becoming even more impactful to the boardroom and engine room; they’re expanding and using the data and converting it into the data sets and intelligence to power Gen AI. And with 70%+ of marketers now using Gen AI in the campaign development process, this means that there is a race on data access and data assembly and model building.
As marketers, we often worry about disintermediation and signal loss - what will this do to mental availability, and to physical availability?
Will platforms continue to leverage consumer and brand access and intelligence? At what point does consolidation and asymmetry become both a media and advertising liability? At what point in time do retail media networks start to threaten routes to market and growth models?
The shifts and patterns in media spend, the Gen AI expansions from the platforms, and the risks to advertising and omnichannel demand should be a burning platform for marketers to take ownership of their data - and more importantly their creative data. After all, creative data will be the recipe for how to communicate effectively by platform, by format, by audience and objective. Can marketers afford to overlook this and give up ownership of it?
This is large and part of what I find compelling about Vidmob’s work - we are actively changing the dynamic by converting the power of platforms to work for advertisers and improve campaigns; we are able to understand the questions of if creative performs, how it performs and most importantly what is driving performance’. If you’re a Byron Sharp junkie - creative data and the right frameworks can help bolster existing and uncover new distinctive memory structures.
By making creative data accessible and actionable, we can turn black boxes into glass rooms.
Now let that settle in.
Going from a position of potential disintermediation to a position of intelligence and performance is pretty powerful - and that’s the transformative promise of creative data and the platforms that provide it.
Vidmob has been at the forefront of empowering marketers and agencies to build stronger brand creative and optimized digital media campaigns.
We’ve helped our partners supercharge creative - they understand how to get the most out of each asset and learn new guidelines, adjusting them over time as culture continuously evolves. What’s more is that those guidelines are now integrated into the numerous Adobe Creative tools via our suite of plug-ins - so your data, your rules, at the fingertips and accessible to your creative teams. This is an effectiveness boost.
We’re also seeing advanced users improve media - we understand how creative performs where and against whom. This allows for new intelligence to inform planning strategies and more significantly shift and optimize media format and buying strategies. That is an efficiency boost.
Finally, we’re helping to drive better attribution - we are finally seeing creative quality factored into modeling and measurement systems. For far too long we looked to marketing effectiveness models to define impact, but with a giant hole in those frameworks making it impossible for them to be accurate. Previously those methods only took into account advertising presence and weight, but not creative quality. With creative data integrated, those models are becoming more reliable, and more informative. This is an intelligence boost.
The advertising landscape continues to have new rules written - and those rules are being written by those with the data.
We’re giving marketers and agencies the opportunity and the tools to write their own rules, and we’re inviting you too. We’ve been joined by many of the most pioneering marketers in the industry, and with them we’ve analyzed over 20 million ads and have correlated more than 3 trillion creative decisions to boost campaign performance across creative, media, and measurement.
For sure, driving continued growth is going to be challenging. It always will be. But it will be less challenging for the marketers who have the creative data technology in place to break free from the generic guidelines of the pack, and write their own rules
We are looking forward to hearing from the marketers and agencies that are making strides in creative data and intelligence speak about their journeys. On May 29th in New York, we are gathering 20 speakers to share how they are using creative data to develop marketing intelligence and build better campaigns and stronger brands. We’re in awe of how leaders are responding to the challenges and opportunities - and we’re excited to be part of that journey.
You can register and be part of this journey at www.creativedatasummit.com.