A step ahead for creativity in Programmatic Media Buying

Since the beginning of the advertisement industry, creativity has always been the keystone that determines the success of an ad campaign. The biggest enterprises positioned their brands decades ago by serving the right message, at the right time alongside a great impact.

However, as programmatic media buying grows in popularity, it seems that this fact has been blurred.

When programmatic technology begins to take its share into the workflow of digital advertising, media and data take the main role in the industry. Nowadays, a good media plan with the correct data targeting is the key for a successful digital campaign. However, what happens with creativity? Have we left it behind the drawing board and change it for an excel file?

We, as technology enthusiasts, have managed to automate almost all the advertising process from planning to impression. We use DSPs for media buying, DMPs for data leverage and AdServers for tracking, but we are still having a gap in the creative generation and implementation.

Agencies and designers are struggling with campaign creatives as users demand better experiences, but operative costs and short deadlines result in the simplification of the process, resulting, in most cases, in using the same creative message across all different audiences.

Most marketing professionals in North America believe that the biggest barriers to tailoring content and digital Ad creatives are due to time and cost of creation. (source)

Fortunately, new technology has started to approach this issue. The rise of CMPs (Creative Management Platforms) seems to be taking part in the programmatic workflow filling the gap by automating the creative generation process using artificial intelligence.

Only two in five marketers surveyed in May 2018 by Econsultancy and MediaMath said they were using artificial intelligence (AI) to power their dynamic creative. (source)

Basically, a CMP platform generates automatically thousands of different creative variations from a single template, and let us target each different message to a unique contextuality. A contextuality, for instance, could be a data cluster from our DMP, an audience from our DSP or an external event such as weather change.

In a few words, take DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization) technology and level it up to a higher instance of branding in order to achieve a context based communication with the consumer without creeping them out with retargeting strategies or DCOs.

Thanks to these creative technologies, we are finally able to automate and control every aspect of a campaign, from media buying (DSP) to data targeting (DMP) to creativity (CMP). Resulting in a fully 360° automated campaign that can be easily optimized in every part from planning to impression.

Autor: Esteban Rodríguez, Sales Manager Colombia at Herolens.com