What Will The Advertising Campaign of the Future Look Like?

Recently, a close friend on the brand side of the online advertising industry asked for my thoughts on the following question: What does the advertising campaign of the future look like?

It’s an intriguing question, and one that occupied much of my mind for the next day or two. The truth is, nobody knows what the campaign of the future will look like. We can only imagine the technologies and capabilities that will be available and accessible for agencies, brands, and publishers in targeting viewers/readers/consumers.

For the purposes of this post, I want to address tactical, realistic predictions for what the “campaign of the future” will look like — not crazy, pie-in-the-sky stuff like holograms or VR goggles. First — the table stakes: there is no “one size fits all” solution or approach to advertising campaigns, as each is uniquely different depending on any number of factors, including the brand itself, the objectives & goals, KPI targets, audience, flighting, etc., which means it’s difficult to talk about “the campaign” as something monolithic that will apply to every brand.

That said, in the immediate future, here’s what I think needs to happen:

We need to kill the “silo approach” to advertising & marketing.

If I’ve seen this once, I’ve seen this a thousand times: The brand marketer (where it all starts) will brief the lead creative agency (most often than not linear creative, i.e. TV). Then, said agency will then go through the usual protocol of jumping through hoops in order to win/retain the business and in general will come up with the “winning” concept. That idea is then packaged and repurposed to brief all the other agencies involved in the business (media buying & planning, including non-linear, digital and social; event & experiential; PR, product placement, etc.).

Those agencies are then individually tasked with coming up with their own strategies and tactics that build off of the larger concept — regardless of whether or not the lead idea actually makes sense for the specific medium in a manner that ladders up to the umbrella objectives & goals — and presenting them (again, separately) to the brand manager.

This is not only inefficient, but it’s also an outdated model for executing any campaign in today’s cross-channel, on-demand and interactive world.

I’m a former agency guy, and the most successful campaigns I’ve been a part of all started with a clear vision by the brand marketer to get the key business stakeholders together from across all the agencies, all working in concert across mediums — brainstorming, ideating, and building a uniform, multi-platform plan. Creative, media buyers & planners, strategists, PR, event, experiential — both linear and non-linear, across all platforms — must work together, with analytics serving as the connective tissue that keeps everyone “honest” in achieving the target goals, while also helping to measure and optimize along the way.

We’ll need to actually focus on engagement rather than just talking about it.

Consumers have changed the model, and as a result the model itself needs to change. Usage across media continues to shift from traditional outlets to new, more targeted channels, and as a result brands have to start thinking about how their campaigns engage viewers not only emotionally, but also through action, interaction and ultimately intent. This is a no-brainer.

But tracking and accurately measuring consumer behaviors across multiple platforms is difficult enough to accomplish in the fractured media landscape that we currently live in, which gives rise to any number of complexities and challenges our industry will have to face moving forward. There needs to be a fundamental industry shift in how we define and capture ad value — and it starts with acknowledging that not all “impressions” or more importantly, views, are created equally. Once this is universally embraced, the entire ad ecosystem needs to band together to enable an evolution of advertising pricing models to reflect the current state of content creation, delivery and consumption.

The industry will have to accept quality over quantity.

The advertising industry has to accept and act upon the idea of lowering the amount of frequency with which ads are served, and focusing on the reality of a better user experience by monetizing against quality, not tonnage. The existing frequency model is an outdated and legacy business model that simply does not fit in today’s digital world — a world in which people have the tools and the capability to actively avoid ads they feel are a nuisance and disruptive. More importantly, we don’t have ignorance as an excuse anymore. The industry is armed with the capability to measure whether an ad was seen, interacted with, and for how long. This also means that we have to rethink how we define advertising, and challenge the status quo for we measure, track, target and charge for the ads, and ultimately increasing the CPM rate as a result of a more quantified and qualified ad experience.

We’re going to have to crack the code of what to do about user profile data.

Who will own it, and will it be shared across sites and platforms in order to streamline and customize the user experience? This is another million-dollar question whose answer — though I can’t quite read the tea leaves on it — will be one of the most critical in helping to shape the future of the ad industry for the next 20+ years.

We need to focus on storytelling with a purpose.

The publishing industry faces issues of both quality and quantity. CTRs for display ads are at an all-time low, and meanwhile, more content is created than we actually need. Why we’re so stubbornly clinging to an antiquated metric (CTR) remains a mystery. We know that CTR can be easily manipulated, that clicks say nothing about engagement, attention or intention, and that on mobile, CTR may be “completely unrelated or even negatively correlated” to other measures capturing metrics like calls, directions and store visits.

Due to this, many publishers now generate less revenue per visitor than they used to — and they’re desperate. We as an industry need to get out of the “race to the bottom” dynamic of bad content, bad advertisers, and bad ads.

So what will the advertising campaign of the future look like? I honestly do believe that the industry will be fueled by interactive, on-demand experiences that, for the most part, consumers will be able to choose when, where and how to engage. The real question is, how long will it take before we get there?