The future of content is flexible
Creative budgets are shrinking and at the same time, there is an expectation for content to drive increased ROAS. How can agencies and their clients solve this?
The short answer is AI.
Just like almost every other industry, the advertising industry is being disrupted for the better by advanced data applications. Today AI is allowing marketers to speed through the strategy phase of campaign development and, in turn, allowing more time and more dollars for creative. For example, AI startup Nucleal.ai currently collects and filters data through its AI-powered brand health framework and scores a brand against its competitor, providing faster and deeper insight into a brands’ perception in-market and provides a launch-pad of insights that spark a data-led campaign.
This AI-fueled insight significantly speeds up the upfront creative research and exploration, however, this only gets you halfway there. These initial insights reflect a moment in time, but a campaign can live for up to a year, and in some cases more, proving the need for flexible assets to power optimization.
When a campaign is inflight, real-time data analytics delivered through a number of Ad Tech platforms like Adobe Media Optimizer and Marketo which are providing us with more and more effective data into what is and isn’t working within a given campaign. These insights are anecdotal at best if they cannot be acted upon. So, to turn these insights into real value for brands, campaigns need to be created with flexibility in mind. This is especially necessary for direct response campaigns, where a simple change in voice-over or a tweak in logo size can actually make a material impact.
The movie industry has been doing this for decades. In the months before a film is released in theatres, several trailers are cut with specific goals in mind and, as the movie nears opening day, response to the trailer is tracked against the target audiences. If a particular trailer is not tracking well against a segment of the studio’s target audience, then changes will be made to the trailer to attack that segment /audience deficiency.
Obviously, movies have the benefit of a lot more material to choose from, making the production of trailers a fairly painless process. Agencies and brands don’t have the budget to afford this sort of luxury. That said, what can brands and agencies learn from this process?
For starters, your strategy has to identify secondary target variables that could be considered when designing the creative brief. This leads to a matrix of additional assets that can be captured during a shoot and created in post-production. Examples include additional casting or a variety of ways to describe a product offering or end card.
Beyond this, it’s vital that you support your best content with complimentary pieces like social messages, blog posts, and more to reach a larger audience and have multiple opportunities to deliver your message. The additional assets you create in production and post will help power those additional channels.
Ultimately, flexible content gives growth team the ability to powerfully optimize based on the data in real time to ensure the highest possible ROAS.
