An evolving media landscape calls for a renewed approach to creativity. Any brand or agency has to embrace creativity to improve upon its marketing effectiveness.
Marketing agencies exist to help clients solve their continuously evolving challenges. Consumers are driving this change but it's technology that enables it. The industry is fixated on making the pipeline strong and the technology that goes in the pipe. However, the focus should be on the top of the funnel that has a huge gap as to how to engage data and technology along with creative team. Developments in automation and outsourcing should help lessen these gaps over time.
Data-driven creativity is not manifested in making different creatives but also in the creative use of data in solving business problems.
Role of technology in enhancing creatives
Technology has completely changed the ballgame with ad tech vendors serving different responsibilities of an ever-expanding marketplace. New channels for mobile, native, programmatic, and video are emerging frequently. These technologies offer specific, single-point solutions, and publishers want to take advantage of them all. Tech advances in mobile, data collection and ad serving give you the ability to collect consumer information, accurately target audiences and analyze and optimise your creative output. Creativity in an online space has immense potential, for example, developing websites like Google, which adapt their structure according to user’s search history and preferences.
Challenging the traditional creative mindset
Today's consumers are not as inclined to the brands as they used to be. They are better-informed, smarter and are willing to try new products more than ever. They know exactly what they seek and their buying decisions are increasingly based on personal research. So, marketers need to cater for 'the distracted consumer'. With users demanding more personalized and meaningful experiences that inspire and excite them, marketers have to work harder to cut through the noise and earn consumer’s attention to make a deep, lasting impact.
Creative representations are stuck in a traditional mindset. To do this, agencies must harness the very technology that is disrupting the media environment. But how? The latest answer: data-driven creative. Companies like McDonalds have processes in data-driven marketing space. For example, McDelivery in Singapore uses real-time data to deliver to certain areas using technology and conventional ad-stack or customized solution using Google eco-system. But the real impediment in the mixing of tech or data with creativity is that technology experts and creatives generally belong to different departments in the organization and tackling a brief requires different skillsets in the game.
Hence it is suggested, rather than building teams around certain skill sets such as the SEM team or the Creative team or the Data and Analytics team, it will be helpful to build units around certain projects. This ensures proper communication across all relevant skill sets, right from brief to execution.
Technology enhances creativity
Certainly, we are expected to be more creative in our working lives than a generation ago. The truth is that by expanding possibilities and automating part of the creative process, we can all be more creative and productive.
Technological advances produce a wealth of data that should be used to inform the creative process, and it's the agency's job to bind the two together. All media and creative should be developed organically and leverage each other successfully with collaboration and integration.
When the process of internal cooperation is implemented, not only increases visibility and gives the teams a higher degree of connection to a campaign, but it also encourages diversity of thought.
Creativity alone is no longer enough
All communications must have a purpose and must deliver on that purpose. By using data insights and technology, marketers can inform creative teams and bring it to life.
With an emphasis on these insights, the development of DSPs (demand side platforms) and DMPs (data management platforms), along with other innovative technologies, enable marketers to predict and create audience profiles and behaviors. Agencies must use these insights to leverage creative and build meaningful and empowering experiences that deliver results and at the same time add value and enrich their lives.
Hence, marketers must seek an agency with imagination. Using insight and innovation to inform every stage of the creative process, marketers can develop more powerful and meaningful experiences.
