Advertising Innovations of 2017

Jeff Meyerson
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Consider the following trends:

  • digital and television are converging
  • video consumption is displacing photo consumption
  • highly personalized ads are effective

Personalization of video ad content will completely change advertising.

The current state of personalization is targeting.

Amazon knows I looked at a certain pair of shoes and I see display ads throughout the internet with pictures of those shoes.

Personalization of content is the big opportunity.

Amazon will generate video of a model wearing those shoes and serve it to me. Or maybe Amazon will generate a video of me wearing the shoes if I have somehow given Amazon enough video data to recreate how I look.

Another example is product placement. If I am watching Friends on terrestrial TV and see a paid product placement for a beverage, I’m always going to see Phoebe drinking a Coca-Cola even though it will have zero impact on my purchasing decisions. I don’t drink Coke.

If I was watching a Facebook TV show I would see Phoebe drinking a bottle of Soylent because digital content is dynamic. I have purchased Soylent in the past and still drink it when I get the craving.

But this is still scratching the surface.

These types of ads are pretty boring. Computer generated dynamic video content is effective, but the best they can do is nudge you into a purchase you were thinking about already.

Content Personalization

The internet can serve every reader with great, personalized content because there is lots of content volume.

The ad creative is a piece of content. Right now we are all consuming from the same small pool of ad creatives.

In the Amazon example above, Amazon repurposes its catalog for automated ad content personalization. There’s not a way to automate video ad creation.

Video ad content personalization requires high volume of creatives. Crowdsourcing provides volume.

Example: Today, Ford comes out with a new truck and wants to advertise. Ford shoots 5 different generic commercials for $1.2m each, then splices those commercials up into short video ads for internet distribution. Ford blasts those short video ads around the internet.

A more effective strategy would be for Ford to spend that $6 million crowdsourcing thousands of ad creatives, and pair those creatives up with consumers.

Cheaper, Better Ads

Makeup commercials have A-list models. Car commercials have Michael Bay style action scenes. Mutual fund commercials hire legions of extras to act out weird faux reality.

Ad production is too expensive.

Give a hungry teenager $1000 and an iPhone and you will get back a more engaging ad in a weekend than what a $3 million agency production can get you in a month.

Take your $3 million budget and spread it across 3,000 hungry teenagers and you will get a ton of interesting ads.

Once you have your 3,000 cheap ad creatives, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are waiting for you to experiment. Distribution technology is great for A/B testing all those creatives across your wide audience.

With that many creatives one of them might even go viral.


Originally published at www.quora.com.

Jeff Meyerson

Written by

Software Engineering Daily host www.softwareengineeringdaily.com

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