The Creative Challenge

Abstract

Building brands in the digital age is somewhat different to the “old school” Marketing approach. Nowadays, we already have a diverse and ever-increasing amount of information available about consumers. At the same time, we are constantly expanding the possibilities for targeted, programmatic ad space management. These developments not only have an impact on advertising and brand building, but also change the way the entire industry interacts.

Marketeers, media agencies and media owners need to work with each other closely to intelligently take advantage of the opportunities for branding created by Programmatic Advertising. This means interdisciplinary concepts need to be developed as link for the different disciplines. A modern advertising strategy will not plan ads as disposable products for flights (An ad flight is a fixed period of advertising activity during an overall annual campaign. With a limited budget, it makes no sense to spend away advertising money in dribs and drabs over the course of a year; you are better off going all out and investing in shorter time intervals. http://www.axelspringermediapilot.de/medialexikon/index.html?action=suche&s_text=flight), but will make optimum use of the constantly expanding information available about consumer behaviour and the tracking of ad impressions. Programmatic Advertising is not only a tool for media buying efficiency – it also leads to creative solutions by applying it to brand messaging.

The upshot of all of this is that a new and exciting challenge has presented itself to the advertising industry – and those who fail to embrace it will quickly be left behind. That challenge is simple: to combine marketing automation and programmatic technologies with creative execution and creating strong brand messages.

This, in turn, will lead to the following four areas of transformation:

• 1. Structure: Increased interaction between marketeers, agencies, ad development and media owners, which will also lead to structural changes at agencies and marketing departments. The distinction between media agencies and creative agencies will fade away.

• 2. Creative development: Implementation capable of stimulating a targeted reaction to consumer behaviour in real time while keeping content, ethics and technological opportunities in balance.

• 3. Technology: Technologies capable of implementing data and insights in ad creation and marketing, such as rule-based dynamisation of advertising content.

• 4. Performance: Business intelligence solutions that can efficiently and reliably optimise programmatic campaigns as well as brand messaging.

Not even the new possibilities of Programmatic Advertising remove the challenge companies face to maintain and successfully develop their brands. The extent to which we move away from traditional campaign models towards intelligent brand management programs still depends on the brand and the industry. In e-commerce companies, for example, the focus today is more on ROI than on data-driven flighting campaigns - which resonate in an increased orientation towards control via directly measurable KPIs.

What we can say for certain, though, is that today, more than ever, the communication industry is being called on to respond to technological possibilities and to translate data-based insights on consumer behaviour into ambitious and expressive creative concepts. The use of data for the dynamic, creative design of ad contents opens a whole new chapter in digital communication – a real-time brand communication.