Not a week goes by at the ad agency when I don’t take a pitch from a tech company. That’s part of staying well-informed, ahead of the game, and understanding the landscape as it relates to the impact of technology on all we do in advertising.
These presentations I am getting generally fall into two buckets: How to maximize platform technology for perfect 1:1 targeting and the juice that AI (supposedly) provides to ad campaigns. It is positively stunning to me that rarely if ever does the word “creative” get floated as a variable, let alone a core element. This grave mistake is pervasive, a pandemic in the ad space. To understand how we got to a place where creative is often summarily ignored, especially in the SMB (small to medium-sized business) space, let’s travel back a few years to when the discussion had a decidedly different vocabulary.
When I first got into advertising, it was on what is called the “client side”. Being on the client side meant that I was the client of an ad agency, which taught me a ton about the core tenets of advertising, at least as they existed in 2002. I was working in sales and marketing for Mazda North America at the time, purveyors of fine import cars and the innovators that brought us the Wenkel rotary engine. Working on a national level, advertising gets somewhat easier with respect to targeting. In 2002 and for the most part, even now, cars are a necessity in the vast majority of the country. That makes every man, woman, and teen of driving age a potential target customer. Having a huge target pool makes advertising much easier, with concerns centering around the two elder statesmen of advertising: REACH AND FREQUENCY. Reach is most simply defined as how many people were touched by the ad, and frequency would indicate how many times a person would likely see that ad.
If one wants REACH, one advertises on the Super Bowl. What better way to touch 100M people than a spot during the big game? If one wants frequency, one advertises in a way to intercept a habit loop, meaning if I am on Monday Night Football every week, I likely touch the same eyeballs/audience multiple times per month. Enough reach (people) and enough frequency (repetition) and most ad campaigns have a chance to succeed. The missing element? The creative.
Does creative matter, if you have enough reach and frequency? According to Nielsen, nearly 50% of the ROI (return on investment) from a successful ad campaign can be attributed to the creative, with reach and brand bringing up the next 2 spots.
If I want to nitpick, I’d add the 47% attributed to creative to the 15% attached to brand, as brand is just the long-term creative positioning of a company. Brand is creative. With that math in place, a full 62% of ad effectiveness is levered to WHAT was seen, not by any other metrics. Reach still matters at 22% of the pie, but far less than targeting or recency (which I will translate to a frequency-look-alike).
So why I am getting all these pitches for technologies that tout perfect targeting? It makes sense to all of us that hitting the right person at the right time is, well, awesome. That’s targeting: Identifying those that are hungry in the moment and serving them ads for pizza. Or identifying those that are in need of a new truck, and serving them ads for same.
And because technology is the shiny object, we worship at that altar. There are very few barriers to adopting targeting tech, anyone can do it. And they have. So we live in a world where we’ve really dialed in our target audiences, via platforms and now AI/stacked learning.
And still…ROAS (return on ad spend) isn’t rocketing higher. Most advertisers lament that they are spending more and more dollars to acquire a customer. How is this possible? Because we ignore creative. In the last 52 weeks I have taken 52+ pitches for improving targeting and I’ll paraphrase a few quotes that have stuck with me (but I beg do not stick with you)
“If you get the targeting right, the creative almost doesn’t matter.”
“Simple creative will work if the targeting is right.”
“Get fancy if you want with the creative, up to you.”
And the hots just keep on coming. Have you ever walked out of a movie because it was awful? Creative matters. Have you watched a commercial, and forgotten the message instantly? Creative matters. Have you gotten pulled into a commercial because of the music, the actress holding the product, or the way it made you FEEL? Creative matters.
Targeting appeals to our logic centers. Targeting is good, right? Alas, we don’t make decisions based on logic. Decision-making happens when we are moved to feel stronger about the product than we do about the money in our pocket. If we are searching like a rabid animal on Google for a new truck, we’re an easy target for ALL TRUCK SELLERS. Again, everybody has the same technology. So the rabid animal (you) is going to get 1000 car ads in the process of your journey, so what will make the difference? Creative and brand. Being top of mind with the consumer isn’t about targeting but the power and staying power of great creative and an authentic brand. Check a mirror, and get honest with yourself. If you have been overly focused on the 9% that is targeting versus the 62% that is creative/brand, I’d invite you to visit with a creative agency that knows what matters most. And yes, that could very well be us. Creative matters, more than anything else. Don’t let it be an afterthought to targeting and AI.