Programmatic advertising would have seemed like science fiction when I started my first job in advertising. It was as an art director in a London agency, part of a traditional art director and copywriter creative team.
My copywriter and I produced visuals at the rate of about 50 per day, all hand-drawn scamps on sketch pads. Mind you, our creative director would reject 49 of those! My desk was a drawing board, I had no mobile phone, I used a type spec book to select my fonts and ordered ‘galleys’ (raw typesetting) from a typesetter, which were glued to an artwork board by a paste-up artist. When my copywriter and I commissioned photography, the photographer shot on film and the selected transparency or “tranny” and the paste-up board were sent to a reprographics house using a data transfer process called HTP, The Honda transfer protocol. It was slow!
There, they’d create film separations and a Cromalin proof.
Within a few months, the biggest revolution our industry had ever seen ripped through our world like a hurricane, transforming it beyond recognition. Desktop computers arrived, every typesetter and repro house in London went out of business, demand for the Honda Transfer Protocol fell off a cliff and I lost my drawing board.
Why is this of any relevance at all?
Thanks to data-driven programmatic buying, our industry is experiencing another unprecedented transformation that is just as dramatic. It’s worth taking a moment to compare these revolutions in order to understand how the one that is upon us will impact us.
I want to start by looking at the briefing process.
I know we all have complicated briefing templates these days, as we did back then, with fields for ‘background info’, audience profile, mandatories and sections entitled things like “what is the challenge the communication is addressing?” and “what do we want the audience to think/do as a result of the communication?”, but when you boil it all down there are really only two things you need a brief to tell you: “What am I saying?” and “Who am I saying it to?”…or even simpler: “What is the ‘Proposition’ and who is the ‘Audience’?”
Following that, there are only really three more stages in advertising: concept development, production and campaign execution.
The briefing funnel in its simplest form looks like this:
The incredibly swift introduction of desktop computers for all represented a change towards the bottom of this funnel, transforming production forever. Then there was another, more gradual, but equally dramatic change at the very bottom of the funnel, which we are all familiar with: digital. When I started in advertising, there were really only four main choices for campaign execution: TV, radio, press and outdoor. The channels we can execute through now have obviously absolutely exploded with the introduction of myriad digital channels.
However, despite multiple digital channels, programmatic buying and all this dramatic change in our industry, I would argue that the briefing funnel has not really changed in structure. We still take a brief that asks us ‘what are we trying to say?’ and ‘who are we trying to say it to?’, we still develop concepts and we still execute that creative through a number of channels… albeit very many more.
The sea-change that is coming is once again driven by major developments in technology, but it’s not about the vast number of additional channels that are available to us. This has added to the complexity of our world and to the technical expertise that we need, but it has not fundamentally changed the structure of our funnel. We wrongly continue to focus on the explosion of the number of channels we work in these days as the main driver of change in our industry.
This time the transformation is going to be at the top of the briefing funnel and it’s going to render the rest of it unrecognisable.
Let me explain.
In performance digital, the data-driven technology we are using right now is allowing us to do some incredible things. We can (almost) track users seamlessly across multiple channels and devices. We can observe user behaviour to a frightening level, we can target them based on demographics, geographics, context and behaviour, we can retarget them almost anywhere and we can automate delivery through programmatic learning algorithms.
Let’s look at what this is starting to do to the top of our briefing funnel. Instead of receiving a brief from a client that has the target audience expressed as (perhaps) ABC1 Males 25-44, as we used to, we might have analysed the client’s database and created eight audience segments. From there we may have developed a plan that targets those segments with two different personalised messages each across multiple channels and have developed a retargeting plan that utilises two different offers depending on the cookie pools we are retargeting. Suddenly we have ten different audiences and 18 propositions.
What does the process model look like now? It’s now like receiving 18 briefs!
You might look back at my simplified briefing funnel diagram and be thinking, “Is this right? Surely just because we have added some audience segmentation it doesn’t mean we have to develop a new concept for each segment?” Yes, we do. If we change the proposition or the audience, clearly we have a new brief and therefore need new creative. The fact that as an industry we have been a little lax about this to date is not something we should be proud of.
And what’s coming down the line is very much more of the above.
How are creative agencies coping with this demand? Not very well at the moment, I would argue. They need to be producing more creative executions, much faster at the same cost. And that clearly means a re-think. Part of the solution will obviously involve dynamic creative templates where elements are swapped, such as calls to action, landing page URLs, headlines, images etc. But although it is very effective, very few of us are offering this currently and as an industry we are not good enough at it yet.
And what about websites? We are not personalising the web experience to the user to the degree we should, we are not keeping designs fluid enough to appeal to the wide range of users visiting most sites. We still expect the user to adapt to our designs, not the other way round and this approach will have to change.
As our abilities to segment and target become ever more granular, so the creative we serve will need to be more granular and relevant. One execution becomes 18 in the example I gave, but what if it’s 38 or 60 or 360? How will we cope with that change? How will we bring to bear the abilities of our creative people?
Let me paint a scenario. The year is now 2020. Almost all online advertising at this stage is programmatic, dynamic, and, most likely, video based. We are monitoring all customer and prospective customer behaviour in real-time through powerful data management platforms and creating dynamic micro audience segments again, in real-time, serving ads only to those segments that show the highest propensity to convert. The creative is personalised to them and driving them to landing pages and through sales funnels that are equally personalised to them.
Irrelevant communication has all but gone. In online advertising we serve far fewer impressions but we pay a much higher rate because we’re serving ads to an entirely relevant audience and enjoy phenomenal conversion rates as a result. The viewability debate is consigned to history because there are fewer, better positioned, more relevant ads and all ads are 100% viewable.
If you’re a creative agency, what does your studio look like now?
With such a high demand for huge volumes of tailored content of different kinds, maybe it’s time to go back to art directors and copywriters producing scamps on sketch pads at the rate of 50 concepts a day but add a studio full of technicians applying those concepts to dynamic templates at a super-fast rate so that each micro segment’s expectation of personalised creative is sated.
There is always going to be a place for the big marketing concept, and as always those concepts are going to have to be clever and inventive to stay fresh, but we need to recognise the different ways that individual users and small user segments respond to those big concepts and adapt creative executions accordingly.
With the appetite for more creative variations and for ever-more diverse and personalised content about to go stratospheric, it may be time to reassess the current creative agency model of a fixed workforce with defined roles and look at something that will allow for a more fluid approach to answer this demand.
Perhaps we need to look at leaner creative agencies with a handful of genius concept people, production managers and creative content curators supported by a large network of diverse freelance talent able to execute anything in any medium.
One thing is for sure, whatever the new model needs to be. The changes that the programmatic revolution will cause at the top of the briefing funnel represent a seismic shift that will transform our industry (again). If we are to maintain the human creative spark that truly engages another human being and if we are to ensure that programmatic doesn’t mean robotic, then creative agencies are going to need to step up to the plate and re-shape themselves as this programmatic revolution gathers pace.
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Author: Tim France
Date: March 2017