Making brands more distinctive

What is the future for advertising creativity in a retail world that is more and more being driven by data?

John Wanamaker was a US merchant in the 19^th to the early party of the 20^th century. His most famous maxim still holds true today:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” 

His underlying insight is that you have to do more than just the minimum to get a return. However, efficiency in advertising is complex because we’re are dealing, fundamentally, with human behaviour. When you’re dealing with humans its messy, emotional, irrational. Efficiency doesn’t get a look in.

The tech giants would have you believe that you can beat this human monster at the click of a button. I’m not so sure.

Google recently trumpeted the success of travel metasearch engine Skyscanner through the use of its programmatic advertising tools.  They delivered six times revenue yield over standard display advertising. All good stuff. Sounds too good to be true and maybe it is.

And yes, the figures show that by changing how you do things you could get a better result. 

So, change up to the latest technology and reap the results. Simple? No. Because now everyone is on the same level playing field again. What next? Become a slave to the next technological platform delivered by the media owner? And the next one, and the next one. Tech giant’s business model is volume. They want everyone to be using the platform and their latest tech, There’s no competitive advantage in being first to market if the media owner is ensuring everyone else is too.

So, yes, make the most of technology, ensure that your competing on a level playing field. But truly successful organisations do more. That little bit more that gives them the competitive edge.

And guess what? John Wanamaker from over 150 years ago is still hitting the nail on the head. Don’t just try and make your advertising more efficient, make it more effective.

Great and therefore effective advertising is based on bringing together behavioural truths, insights, common sense, disparate ideas, words and imagery that excite people with ideas that humans put together to communicate with other humans. It never comes from subbing your creative out to an algorithm. 

If all this sounds a bit technophobe I can assure you it’s not. Hand in hand technology AND creativity can be a truly competitive edge.

Making sure that your programmatic advertising is based on a powerful, consistent creative concept will be the winning combination. 

Each idea, image, copy line, call to action and how they are visually combined must be based on a powerful creative platform. Technology can deliver your ads but cannot replace the great idea, the visually stimulating layout, the well-crafted image and the compelling copy line. 

So, the future of creativity in a data world? Well it could easily be crushed under the wheels of progress but the truly savvy brands will continue to embrace advertising creativity as the one true differentiator that really does deliver results.