Digital creative as the final frontier

According to Google’s latest insights presented at the Google Live Marketing event held in May, two thirds of campaign performance comes down to creative: so why don’t advertisers invest more in this crucial part of their campaigns?

Getting Creative

You can see it all over digital marketing news: traditional media investment is declining while digital media investment is rapidly increasing, especially on mobile. The rapid growth of digital advertising has lead to an evolution of many technologies, yet one area of development has typically lagged behind. I believe we are approaching the final wave of the digital advertising evolution; this final frontier is creative.

In 1994 the first banner appeared online, while the first paid search ads appeared in the year 2000; ever since, the online advertising industry has exploded with development of ad-serving and data management software, among other tools. But it’s only in recent years that advertisers have realised that investing in targeting, data and ad-serving simply isn’t enough. Potential customers sadly don’t see the beautiful targeting spreadsheets and media plans that marketeers put together, they see the creative.

It’s been proven time and time again that when users see relevant high quality creative across social, display and video, they will engage with ads and the conversion rate will increase. Nielsen undertook a study into is the most important part of advertising in order to make it effective. Creative was found to be the most important aspect of campaigning by a whopping 47% (Nielsen Catalina Solutions 2017).

Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between the media strategy, the development of technology and the creative idea, and it’s no secret that this has been a struggle for the industry for years.

Planning by customer

In recent times, we are seeing advertisers take note and learn from past mistakes in order to overcome the struggle. The evolvement of agencies in that combine digital creative vision with media execution and technology to produce innovative campaigns that perform based on an ultimately positive consumer experience.

‘Precision Planning + Effective Targeting + Relevant Creative = greater success!’

Now not all agencies are going to evolve in the same way: advertisers still work with a media agency and a creative agency structure, so I believe it’s important that these parties start talking to each other more to develop brilliant creative ideas that link clearly to technical possibilities. You can have the best campaign strategy and targeting in the world, but if you show an ultimately boring or non relevant creative, then campaigns won’t perform.

Let’s start investing in creative as the cornerstone of digital campaigning. It’s time to plan by customer, not by channel. Creative is after all the final frontier in effective digital advertising.