With adaptive-media technology, creative agencies can get their mojo back
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit is not happy. Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms and no longer has the creative formats to hold our attention, on the very device that defines our future, the smartphone. We believe that advertisers and brands desperately need a new advertising format, optimized for smartphones, that can retain, capture and measure consumer attention.
Speaking in Campaign earlier this year, Ogilvy’s Chairman Rory Sutherland said the following:
By deluding everyone that the whole of advertising is reducible to “the efficient and inexpensive delivery of targeted messages” through the extensive use of data and algorithms, two companies have gained a multi-billion-dollar rent-seeking monopoly over the majority of advertising activity. The simple fact is that Facebook and Google cannot realistically claim to have a monopoly on creative ideas.
He makes some very good points, but to succeed we believe the counter revolution needs a superior advertising format. The really big “innovation” in the last few years has been programmatic advertising — which is where our own personal data is used to target ads we will find hopefully find relevant. Digital ads are placed using artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online display, social media advertising, mobile and video campaigns. It is estimated that well over 50% of online ads are now programmatic. When programmatic advertising came along, people said it would be great for creativity, although there is very little evidence from the creative industry and awards to support that. It could even be the death knell for creativity. Programmatic appears to be perpetuating a race to the bottom, where there is no real need for creativity as the viewer has already identified their interest the product or service, via a Google search or Facebook post.
About banner formats…
Creative people went into advertising because they wanted to create ads on big canvases, like TV screens and billboards. There’s little room to be innovative within the constraints of a little rectangular box on your screen being pushed through a programmatic machine. The banner formats that evolved from the first ever banner ad on Hotwired in 1994 provide no canvas on which to build brands. That first banner had an amazing click through of 44%, but we are now at 0.05% and decreasing for display banners. Other banner formats work slightly better, such as mobile, native, video and social, but right now the effectiveness of these is being drawn into question like never before. Yet as Millennials and GenZ are moving to video-first consumption, advertisers are still piling into conventional mobile video formats with a year on year increase of 50% spend — possibly because there is nowhere else to go. Bot fraud, where the ad is not seen by a real human is at an all-time high, with $7.2 billion in fraud last year. The problem is particularly acute for video ads. So much time, effort and budget are being wasted on optimizing something that does not appear to be working very well in the first place.
We can learn an important lesson from history, from long before the era of the Mad Men. William Caxton was an English merchant and writer and is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476. Shortly after in 1477 he created the first book advertisement in the English language. The ad was for ‘pyes’, not the ones you eat but which were religious sermons and were advertised in a bill sticker promoting Caxton’s book shop in Westminster where people could purchase the pyes ‘good chepe’. The point is that advertising quickly adapts to take place in the technology people pay attention to whether that be print newspaper, poster, TV or Internet. The challenge is, no one has created a completely new and original advertising format for the defining technology so far for the 21st Century, the smartphone… until now.
The power is in smartphones
In 2014 CEO and founder Stefano Bargagni realized our smartphones would soon have the capacity to deliver powerful experiences within their browsers, without the need for an App or plug-in. Consider that on the iPhone X in 2017, the A11 Chip was already faster than the equivalent MacBook Pro, Core i7. Now the new iPhone XS has three cameras — two 12-megapixel ones on the back and one that is 7 megapixels on the front. What potential!
Soon facial, emotional and demographic sensing through device cameras will drive media experiences and applications that are unimaginable today. We believe people will have no inhibition using cameras if they know their data is secure. MorphCast provides a completely new adaptive media canvas for creatives, that does not need any programmatic data to engage with the viewer, but just great creativity, craft and execution.
MorphCast connects media, consumers and brands through interactive video, machine learning and face recognition. The MorphCast SDK detects emotion, gender and age with unprecedented precision in a lightweight, high performance package. To learn more visit our website and get inspired with our live sample demos.
