Reprinted from the Harvard Business Review Blog
Alan Schulman is Vice President, Chief Creative Officer of SapientNitro, NY.
As a 30-year advertising practitioner, and a Chief Creative Officer
of North America's now largest digital agency, I'm truly amazed at the
sophistication of the technologies and platforms for delivering ads to
virtually every device, from the smallest hand held screen to Walgreen's
massive canvas in Times Square.
Vast amounts of Silicon Valley capital have accelerated our ability to deliver behaviorally targeted messages and videos that follow you from destination to destination and device to device. Publishers have even begun offering "in app" custom ad units specifically designed to match consumers' touchscreen desires. As an industry, we have an amazing set of providers and tools at our disposal that connects the consumer with the brand.
But as any smart advertising person will tell you, the creative message itself plays at least half the role in determining the effectiveness of any advertising component. It's the creative that will always tell an intriguing story, involve and hopefully, leave you inspired to act. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.
We are still very much in the ideas business. Despite how much more sophisticated the algorithms get at search, contextual and behavioral ad serving, advertising still has to move you. And that comes down to the kind of creative that makes you feel an emotion... not just "think" or push you into "lower funnel" activation as many marketers are so anxious to do.
This means drawing you in, getting you involved, and making you react emotionally, which is just as important on a hand-held device as it is in a 30-second TV spot. Creatively, this has been the challenge for the web banner, the video pre-roll, and even the next in-app-native touch-screen rich-media ad. These units may drive our impression-based ad-supported model, but they've yet to adequately prove the ability to make the consumer feel.
This emotional requisite often referred to as the "The Big Ideal" or "Higher Order Benefit" was once the holy grail of real advertising currency. These days, it seems emotional ideas have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms that can deliver near-real-time metrics and drive dynamic optimization of creative ad messages. These algorithms allow us to churn out countless versions of copy and banner executions for one campaign — changing layouts on the fly and cramming the call to action into an ad from beginning to end — in many cases before we've even gotten the consumer's attention.
Is this the future of advertising we are destined to produce? Turning the craft of brand storytelling into algorithm-driven copy factories?
The task we face as advertising practitioners is how to combine our efforts with media brethren to create seamless brand experiences and cascade them through new technologies and media platforms. In doing so, we serve a more involved, emotional system of messages on behalf of brands to the right people over time.
We have the technology. We have the talent. We have the ability to redefine the story to make one feel. We just need to remember that the medium isn't the message and no matter how seduced we are by the science of advertising, we must remember that algorithms don't feel, people do.
Vast amounts of Silicon Valley capital have accelerated our ability to deliver behaviorally targeted messages and videos that follow you from destination to destination and device to device. Publishers have even begun offering "in app" custom ad units specifically designed to match consumers' touchscreen desires. As an industry, we have an amazing set of providers and tools at our disposal that connects the consumer with the brand.
But as any smart advertising person will tell you, the creative message itself plays at least half the role in determining the effectiveness of any advertising component. It's the creative that will always tell an intriguing story, involve and hopefully, leave you inspired to act. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.
We are still very much in the ideas business. Despite how much more sophisticated the algorithms get at search, contextual and behavioral ad serving, advertising still has to move you. And that comes down to the kind of creative that makes you feel an emotion... not just "think" or push you into "lower funnel" activation as many marketers are so anxious to do.
This means drawing you in, getting you involved, and making you react emotionally, which is just as important on a hand-held device as it is in a 30-second TV spot. Creatively, this has been the challenge for the web banner, the video pre-roll, and even the next in-app-native touch-screen rich-media ad. These units may drive our impression-based ad-supported model, but they've yet to adequately prove the ability to make the consumer feel.
This emotional requisite often referred to as the "The Big Ideal" or "Higher Order Benefit" was once the holy grail of real advertising currency. These days, it seems emotional ideas have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms that can deliver near-real-time metrics and drive dynamic optimization of creative ad messages. These algorithms allow us to churn out countless versions of copy and banner executions for one campaign — changing layouts on the fly and cramming the call to action into an ad from beginning to end — in many cases before we've even gotten the consumer's attention.
Is this the future of advertising we are destined to produce? Turning the craft of brand storytelling into algorithm-driven copy factories?
The task we face as advertising practitioners is how to combine our efforts with media brethren to create seamless brand experiences and cascade them through new technologies and media platforms. In doing so, we serve a more involved, emotional system of messages on behalf of brands to the right people over time.
We have the technology. We have the talent. We have the ability to redefine the story to make one feel. We just need to remember that the medium isn't the message and no matter how seduced we are by the science of advertising, we must remember that algorithms don't feel, people do.
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