Creativity Starts With Technology

If, at any point in my early career, you’d have asked me if I’d see myself as the poster boy for automation, I’d have said no way!

But here I am today, committed to delivering 50% of North American media buys through automation by the end of 2015.

Streamlining the buying process is the right and obvious thing to do. That said, what’s obvious to do isn’t always easy to implement. It requires change.

Our industry has a lot of bad habits to break, and a lot to learn about how to bring the best quality and efficiency to our clients.

Like any major industry shift, accelerating automation takes great partners such as the MAGNA Consortium (AOL, A&E Networks, Cablevision, Clear Channel, ESPN, and Tribune) and innovative clients who are willing to blaze the trail with us.

We are well on our way.

We’ve led both clients and partners to strive for performance and savings through fully automated transactions. In Year 1, we actually exceeded our automation target of 5%, and we're making significant progress to achieving our 2014 target of 28%.

Just like we did at IPG Mediabrands, AOL is reorganizing to automate its pipeline. We share the same vision of centralizing tools and resources to eliminate chaos. That’s why we have signed on as the charter partner of ONE by AOL, the first cross-screen programmatic advertising platform.

Automation is only half of the vision. If all we were attempting to do was automate pipelines, we would keep the conversation to the tech crowd.

We are re-engineering the creative machine.

By stripping out the inefficiencies our industry has built up over the decades, we are able to free up time, space and resources to do more impactful work in the content space.

By the way, have we overused the word “content” to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore?!

For us, content is managed in two ways: it either neatly fits into a preexisting media space (for example, a :30 second ad break) and can be automated, or it doesn’t fit so neatly and requires custom work.

Our drive to automation is in large part so we can use the efficiencies we achieve to re-invest resources in custom content. We know that custom, creative solutions work much harder than traditional media investments. How much harder? Five to eight times more! That means we can experiment more and create magnified consumer experiences. This is the ultimate goal.

The solution is right under our noses. It’s up to us to embrace technology to unlock huge opportunities for creativity.

Photo: alphaspirit / Shutterstock