Brands looking to connect with online audiences are often faced with the challenge of striking a delicate balance between efficiency and creativity when it comes to their advertising efforts. To succeed there is a need to maintain creative edge amidst efficiency and ensure that ads not only resonate with their audience but also deliver tangible business results.
To delve deeper into this topic, MARKETECH APAC sat down with Thomas Haugan, head of APAC at Bannerflow, a Creative Management Platform (CMP) enabling in-house marketing teams to take control of their digital and social advertising.
In this exclusive interview, Haugan shares his expertise and insights on leveraging technology and automation to drive efficiency without compromising creativity in digital advertising.
The vital role of creativity in digital ads
“Beyond ensuring that the ads do justice to the brand itself, which might be more of a subjective matter of opinion, it is equally important from a business perspective”, Haugan said.
Google says that 70% of performance is determined by creative and according to Nielsen creativity drives 56% of a campaign’s sales ROI, while Kantar and WARC gathered evidence showing that the most creative and effective ads can generate more than four times as much profit. Similarly, a study by Yahoo and Magna Media Trials found that “quality creative is an effective KPI driver for brands compared to ad media placement, driving top-of-mind ad recall (79%), brand favorability (77%), and purchase intent (76%).”
Conversely, under-optimised creative can result in wasted media spend, representing a substantial loss in marketing investments. Some reports claim this wastage is as high as 55%.
Looking at this data, Haugan commented, “Think about how crazy that is—wasting up to 50%+ of the media budgets, according to industry reports, and, as an additional consequence, also wasting much of the effort and budgets used to create those ads in the first place. It is needless to say that this is less than an optimal return on marketing investments, to put it nicely.”
He further emphasised that brands must optimise creative content tailored to specific channels, audiences, and contexts. Automation and direct integrations with ad networks can facilitate this optimisation, ensuring that ads deliver maximum impact and ROI.
Streamlining creative production with technology and automation
Haugan emphasises that technology and automation play pivotal roles in enabling brands to streamline their creative processes while maintaining a high level of creativity.
By leveraging automation, brands can eliminate repetitive and manual tasks involved in the design and production of ads, allowing creatives more time to focus on ideation and design. Utilising technology and automation streamlines the process of scaling an initial master design into all the various sizes and versions needed for a campaign, across all the different channels and languages. This efficiency drives up to 80% of time savings compared to traditional manual methods.
“It is, however, important to automate without limiting the flexibility a brand needs to create the ads exactly how they want them to be. Or, said differently, don’t sacrifice creativity just for efficiency alone, that’s not going to deliver the results you want either. This is why we don’t believe in having rigid, templated solutions, but rather enabling a brand full flexibility to apply changes at scale or in individual ads at any point during the creative process, even after a campaign has gone live,” Haugan stressed.
Technology is also a significant aspect of driving efficiency, as it fosters better collaboration between internal and external teams. It optimises workflow by eliminating inefficiencies such as sharing files back and forth and receiving feedback through multiple channels, thus saving more time for the campaign preparation process.
Another aspect of driving efficiency is dynamic creative, which utilises automation to enhance efficiency and performance by automatically updating elements such as pricing and availability without manual intervention.
Through Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), brands can tailor multiple versions to different target audiences, utilising a base template to display relevant combinations of creative, messaging, and offers. This streamlined approach generates numerous ad variants effortlessly, maximising effectiveness across various ad sizes and digital ad channels.
Key challenges and solutions for balancing efficiency with creativity for brands in APAC
Across numerous meetings with hundreds of brands in APAC that connected with Bannerflow, Haugan was able to pinpoint a recurring challenge where many brands struggle to create rich content at scale within tight timelines and budgetary restrictions. Consequently, many resort to suboptimal content or less content than desired to meet campaign deadlines and be able to work within these budget constraints.
Automation solutions offer a viable path to overcome these challenges by enabling the rapid creation of premium content at a fraction of the time and cost associated with manual methods.
According to Haugan, brands need the right tool that can help them create premium, rich content at scale, at a fraction of the time and costs it would take to do it manually and/or via external partners.
In Bannerflow’s case, the platform enables designers to create rich, interactive HTML5s without needing to write a single line of code or having to do it one by one.
Automating repetitive tasks, especially adapting ads to various sizes and languages, significantly saves time. This allows designers and marketers to focus more of their time on creativity, leading to more effective ads that offer better value for their media spend.
Secondly, by enabling flexibility throughout the entire process, technology can help brands not be locked into one creative design at the beginning of the process, but rather continue to adapt and optimise throughout the entire campaign lifecycle, even after the campaign has gone live.
Lastly, DCO, a longstanding industry buzzword, presents both a priority and a challenge for many brands. While some effectively utilise dynamic creative, a significant portion falls into two categories: those disappointed by previous DCO platform experiences and those lacking the capacity to implement it. Generating enough creatives remains a common issue, where automation offers valuable assistance.
Leveraging automation for continuous improvement
Haugan believed in the transformative impact of automation on campaign management, particularly in terms of measurement, optimisation, and personalisation.
Direct publishing revolutionises campaign management, offering innovative optimisation methods. In contrast to the traditional approach, where changes entail a lengthy process of design, asset exporting and sharing with a media team or agency for manual uploading; direct publishing enables swift adjustments based on real-time performance data, cutting down on turnaround time from days to minutes or hours.
Haugan shared, “One of our regional airline clients shared how this process [the traditional approach] prevented them from capitalising on certain tactical sales opportunities because, by the time they would have refreshed creatives in the market, it would be too late. Or, in other words, losing out on revenue-generating opportunities because of manual workflows.”
With automation, this all changes dramatically. Firstly, it eliminates the manual publishing process, allowing for direct submission of creatives to the preferred advertising platform.
Secondly, as soon as a campaign goes live, close to real-time creative performance insights become available, providing a valuable understanding of campaign performance and audience engagement with the creative content.
Thirdly, should a change be required, one can promptly access the platform, implement modifications, and swiftly update live ads in near real-time across multiple channels, drastically reducing the time required for such tasks from days to minutes.
Haugan shared that one of their clients at Bannerflow, CMC Markets, saw a 23% increase in post-click conversions by being able to update their campaigns in real-time and be more topical in their messaging.
“This completely changes how you think about the management of campaigns, where you can go live with an initial design and then continuously optimise for as long as the campaign is live and as you get feedback from the audience,” Haugan remarked.
Additionally, automation further extends its capabilities by enabling dynamic design elements sourced from a feed, facilitating the rapid creation of thousands of ads tailored to each viewer. This Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) ensures that the most pertinent combination of creative, messaging, and offers is delivered automatically. Moreover, updates to the feed source automatically reflect changes in information such as price or availability, streamlining production, enhancing content relevance, and minimising media spend wastage.
“With the right technology and automation platform at your fingertips, brands have an opportunity to drive real efficiency and relevance, but importantly, without having to sacrifice creativity,” he concluded.
