Bridging the Gap Between Creative and Programmatic Advertising

As programmatic advertising continues to develop in the fast lane, ad creative is often struggling to keep up. Who’s to blame? The primary oversight usually comes down to a lack of communication between departments.  

Steven Wolfe Pereira, VP of Brand Strategy & Marketing Solutions at Oracle Data Cloud, said it best at comScore’s Industry Summit late last year stating: “There are no true creatives in this room - and that’s a major silo. Creative people are not talking to data people and technologists.”  

This is a big issue, as every other aspect of the advertising process is being optimized through huge amounts of data and technology platforms.

Programmatic advertising offers a long list of advantages and many marketers have already jumped on the bandwagon due to the significant performance programmatic is delivering. The idea of using data to find that perfect moment to hit an exact target at a precise time in their buying journey makes advertising exciting. So why hasn’t there been more alignment of creative with new programmatic methodologies?  

The answer is, it’s been hard to merge data with creative messaging. Creative assets need to evoke emotion and action, and data can be a complicated place to look for those feelings. But the beauty of technology is that when used right (and when it’s sufficiently advanced), can make complicated things simpler, and that doesn’t exclude the creative process.  

Successfully utilizing programmatic technology to optimize creative starts with campaign strategy and set up. Like any great creative, the ads should be eye-catching, relevant, and include some sort of call to action.  

Recently, we helped a client use programmatic to help reach a list of target accounts. We took the HTML5 banner ad for the campaign and used an ad tech platform to automatically create individual messaging based on information about the target account. The rich media was significantly enhanced by the personal messaging and yielded much higher engagements in comparison to the generic static version of the ad running on other exchanges.  

This idea of new data-powered, software-assisted methods for creative execution is often referred to as “programmatic creative.” According to PaperG, a programmatic creative company, optimized creative can boost performance by 30-50%.  

Rather than creating one generic ad to be pushed out for an entire campaign flight, new technologies are allowing us to customize creative to the viewer and produce an incredible amount of variations of one ad. To give you an idea of just how many variations can now be produced, look at Australian supermarket chain Coles. Working with their programmatic creative partner Spongecell, Coles launched a campaign that could deliver 80 quintillion different programmatic ads a week.  

Executing that many variations of an ad can only happen with technology and advanced algorithms. In the end, the hope is that with more dynamic creative, campaigns can deliver customized hyper-relevant messages down to the individual, to capture attention and increase campaign results.  

Programmatic creative is not here to replace the creative process, but instead enhance the messaging and allow personalization at a scale that has never been able to be achieved before now. There’s still a ways to go to truly bridge the gap between programmatic media and creative, but this is certainly what media and creative teams should be talking about today.

- Originally posted on DWA Media Blog on December 7th, 2015 -