The future is about messaging by audience, argues Digital Media Service’s Rami Saad
If you are reading this, you’re in trouble. Not the kind where you missed a deadline or used an old logo on a client presentation but rather the sort where we have collectively and for a long time upset the most important stakeholder in our entire business: the consumer. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a client, an agency, a publisher or even a production house. You are guilty. So it may be best to read on.
David Edelman, lead on digital marketing globally for McKinsey, imagines a world in 2020 without any more spam. He says: “Email in-boxes clogged with irrelevant offers or TV ads about something you don’t care about will be history. To consumers, marketing will no longer be an intrusion but rather will offer personal, on-demand services. Wherever customers are in the physical or virtual world, at whatever stage of their decision journey they will expect to find, choose and interact with relevant content and experiences.”
Now snap out of it and think about the last three campaigns you worked on. How are you contributing to a world where the marketing message is polite, relevant and timely? Big news broke out in September 2015, when a slew of apps popped up in the App Store on the back of iOS 9. They promised users a far more pleasant mobile browsing experience – namely one without annoying ads. Since then, colleagues and industry peers have asked me whether I considered ad blockers to be a threat. My answer: “Is a runny nose dangerous?” My point is that ad blockers tell us something is wrong. They are a symptom and not the root cause. The mass adoption of advertising suppression is a reaction to broken user experience. Here’s my account of what is broken.
The future is about messaging by audience. Creative agencies must find ways to get closer to the trail of data their ad is delivering. The immediate priority is to understand who is reacting to your communication and why. Copywriters should be able to sense the impact of the call-to-action in real-time against a specific audience. The other observation I find important is the way agencies are structured disproportionately to reward the ‘big idea’. Who doesn’t want to work on intellectually challenging large-scale million dollar television commercials? But this leaves little financial interest in strategy and design for $20 cost per impression digital campaigns. This is why, and let’s be honest here, a lot of the ads you and I experience online today are mediocre at best.
By the time the media agency gets involved, they’re left with the noble task of placing as much as possible of the mediocre ads with recommendations to bombard the consumer with ‘always-on’. How can we wonder why they’re so upset? Programmatic brings addressable media to a new level. It is not a tool for buying inventory for cheap. Media planners are doing a great job at looking for more positive interactions with consumers. But how about a strategy where irrelevant ads are eventually eliminated? This requires that we retire the fixed commercial model we currently buy ad space with. Which takes me to publishers.
For publishers, it takes courage to propose a commercial model that yields 5x revenue for an ad space that delivered 5x impact, along with the same treatment when it delivers half the impact. But 70 per cent of the impact of an ad is attributed to creative. The biggest issue with publishers today is their lack of interest in what is filling the ad space. In fact, publishers are willing to invest in super smart optimisation algorithms that will pressure test the creative against thousands of media placement possibilities (language, format, context, day part and so on) before they would go back to a client to say ‘your creative sucks’. There are publishers taking the blame, as you read this, for a campaign that under-performed because of creative. The other challenge is content distribution. In a world where sales teams are incentivised by commissions on sales, why should content writers be granted fixed pay? Picture a world where both teams are incentivised by the value they create: reward the best writers for creating the best inventory and the best sales people for generating the most revenue. Because at the moment, from top to bottom, no one in the entire food chain will in any way be incentivised to zoom out and attempt to think about the consumer. We’re all in it for short term gains.
Now to clients. Have you had much sleep lately, with viewability on your mind? Here’s a good question: “Out of the thousand times my message was displayed, how many times was it viewed?” But here’s a great question: “Out of the thousand times my message was displayed, how many times was it relevant?”
How can I measure that? How can I as a client incentivise my agency against that? It sounds like this: our objective this year is to increase ad relevance scores by 20 per cent. It can be quantified and measured at the most granular level. This places accountability on the media agency pairing the right audiences with the right message and environment, immediately restricting the spray and pray approach (and saving the consumer from billions of irrelevant ads). It gives creative-land the licence to access performance data around their creative messaging. It rewards the publishing machine fairly against who is creating the most value for the consumer. And most of all, it forces clients to look themselves in the mirror and focus on creating experiences that either feed or create a need.
In the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of great work happening in the region. But we need to come out of ‘defence mode’ where we’re all fighting to prove our campaigns are viewable, legitimate and actually being seen by humans. This is all hygiene, just like making sure you have the right logo on your presentation. You want offence? Let’s think about the consumer.
Rami Saad is deputy chief operating officer at DMS
