Today, brands debate whether to prioritize broadcast or digital video channels in their advertising campaigns. But why choose? A blended, multichannel, strategy can increase ROI by as much as 35%, according to the Advertising Research Foundation.
However, according to a survey by 4C and Advertiser Perceptions, lack of full-funnel visibility and control, led half of marketers interviewed to say the inability to plan media seamlessly across platforms is a top challenge.
A typical Fortune 500 advertiser currently cobbles together solutions from dozens, or even hundreds, of media sources, technology partners and data providers. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to get a full picture of the media supply chain from ad creation to delivery.
While ads may still reach the end user, inefficiencies built into these workflows create costly redundancies and time-consuming manual processes, hindering an advertiser’s ability to take full advantage of the sophisticated targeting capabilities now available.
“To the outside world, yes, ads still get to their end user,” said Richard Nunn, VP and General Manager of Advertising at Comcast Technology Solutions. “It isn’t broken in its entirety. It works, and it has worked for 70 years. But the reality is that it doesn’t work well enough. The process should be faster, more seamless, more cost effective and free of errors.”
Create at the speed of automation
In the past it could take weeks and millions of dollars to manually create hundreds of video ad versions - matching creative with audience-level targeting. Today, advertisers can create hundreds of ad versions in under 60 seconds. Why is this necessary?
Technology is evolving to provide advertisers with ways to better understand viewers contextually and respond not just by serving up ads for more relevant products, but also to tailor the ads themselves to elicit more positive buyer behavior and support a better viewer experience.
“Being able to match targeting to creative execution on the fly is really the holy grail of marketing,” Nunn said. “It gives consumers the personalized experiences they’ve shown they want to engage with, and it reduces the complexity of execution by removing many of the manual interventions that were slowing advertisers down.”
Technologies like dynamic creative optimization (“DCO”) hold the promise to a new generation of more personalized ad service – a win-win for audiences and advertisers alike. But in order to fully realize this dream, advertisers need more than a DCO solution.
They also need to adopt more a unified approach to enable faster, more seamless management of creative, media buy and distribution. Many advertisers and their agency partners still rely on emails, spreadsheets and individual vendor platforms to communicate media and creative availability, delivery and reporting. A centralized, automated ad-management tool where media buys are identified, filled and tracked is an essential component to sophisticated ad targeting and versioning, allowing personalized spots to be delivered in minutes, not days.
“This isn’t the silver bullet, but it solves one of the big underlying problems – automation and trying to connect the dots in this world of converged channels and formats,” Nunn said.
Bringing together many of these “dots” – including distribution, creative customization and reporting – in one management tool helps restore advertiser control over an increasingly fragmented process. It empowers advertisers and brands to deliver near-real time customization to satisfy consumer expectations and drives measurable results.
Comcast Technology Solutions is reimagining the ad management and ad versioning processes by introducing automation – helping advertisers generate customized ad creative capable of driving a measurable increase in ROI.
