The majority of marketers say creative agencies are struggling to keep up with data-driven advertising.
I disagreed with these statements until my most recent campaign, where I took an interest in our agency programmatic build process. I was new to the topic (and am still learning) but the barriers quickly became all too real. Do these examples ring true to you?
Pre-production: Markets were insisting we delivered each creative execution in a cookie-cutter list of 10+ formats. The creative process was draining, and with no oversight of the media plan, our global creatives were certainly making work just to make it.
Approvals: My AE’s had to manage an excel doc of the ads, and work with our junior clients via video call to review the ads one-by-one. It was painful.
Production: Our design team and video editors had to prep and package up all .ai files to handoff to the ad building agency (Sizmek). The animation timings were never right the first time and without any ability to get into the software to explore interactive and innovation possibilities themselves (e.g. gamification, scratch, dynamic scrolls, etc.) the process felt quite limiting and clinical.
Localisation: Sizmek did not have a local presence in many of our markets, so it created significant time and monetary-efficiencies to translation/transcreation with local vendors, often at the cost of following global CI.
Post-analysis: Our media agency (Dentsu) couldn’t provide any clear data. What creative was resonating? Why? With who?
My wider agency team knew the impact of great digital creative, but the process they had in place to generate these ads was soul-sucking. There had to be a better way to make the process more efficient and carve out space for creative thinking and storytelling again. We needed to secure a new ad building technology partner, quickly. The dream checklist looked something like this:
Software that could easily mirror and adapt one ad into different specs (e.g. Billboards, MPU’s, Mobile, etc.)
Software with high-quality localisation capabilties ( e.g. When translating from English to Russian, the Russian layout may need to be tweaked as the language is simply longer)
Software that allowed clients to give creative feedback directly within the system
Most importantly, software that our agency creatives and design teams could use to create the ad within the system themselves. Where they could control the creative.
Transparent data on what creative was cutting through, so we could replicate the good work and optimise where needed.
Effective data-driven marketing needs to be supported by impactful creative - not come at the expense of it. The right technology can help agencies streamline their production process and get back to what they do best. There are many players out there to choose from, but Scoota is the current horse I’m backing.
Study by Sizmek 2018