Boosting creatives with Spreadsheets

Writing these two words, "creative" and "spreadsheet" in the same sentence, may seem like an automatic? self-contradiction to those working in our profession. Let me explain though.

Once I heard a dubious statement in G?d?r Klub which seemed contradictory at first too. One night a pretty fly redheaded boy dropped this during a party conversation, "I'm? like a liberal-conservative myself." How is that possible?” snapped the suspicious table party immediately. He said "I tap them girls and then I feel ashamed". That’s how. I think a similar resolution can be constructed for pairing the creative process with spreadsheets. I do believe that engineering and creative thinking fit together in the advertising industry too, and they can actually complement each other.

I have been dealing with mass personalization of brand messages for more than five years. Before that, I think I mostly produced banners. It became apparent that the majority of advertising messages - no matter who I worked for - are structurally the same, even if they differ in appearance and imagery, and they can be well classified in their implementation.

I thought that if I could find all the rules of this structure, I could produce all the banners in the world with a machine. Of course, this automaton could have not been realized, not then at least. However, the experience gained while playing with that concept came in very handy when a new challenge formed. It was to build a systematic approach for addressing the various customers of one brand with personalized messaging. The output of the system should be creative and imaginative for all target groups. Errors arising from complexity should be minimized as much as possible. The effectiveness of the messaging produced in the system should be greater than the effectiveness of the one size fits all type of messaging.

We build this system with the help of a few tables and keep it alive, i.e. in constant change.

The advantages of a structured table like representation can definitely be classified too. Advantages arising from a creative point of view, and related to a technical solution.

In a grid, it will quickly show, for example:

• if we lack true diversity of things to say or show, if there is too much repetition,
• if we want to say too many things at once or too many different things to a single audience
• when a topic and audience can be paired with a natural ease, or when it is painfully difficult
• if a certain topic or audience becomes overweight, overrepresented
• if we struggle to compress copy, then probably we do not focus enough, or we do not understand enough why the given personalization should exists (except for the legal creeping)
• if we track off the brief

From a technical point of view a coherent clean tabular form provides an easy segway towards automation. Huh, it even enables a quick script that automates the prompting of all the generative AI models based on any size of audience topic matrix. We need automation to produce large quantities of messaging, so we can test and learn more,? which teaches more lessons per year. And then when our messaging and content is structured it is easier to measure and determine which of our creatives, visuals and copy lines contribute more to a successful communication. Which is good for everyone, for the clients, creatives, media professionals, and technical specialists.

Where good things happen, the engineering and creative approaches are in balance, they work together for a more valuable outcome. (eg: cars, clothes, furniture design and then their production). An important feature of the "advertising agency of the future" may be that the creative and engineering approaches complement each other in a conscious, supported balance.? Good examples are the Precision and Addressable disciplines at Wavemaker. In these frameworks, by structuring creative ideas into a spreadsheet like system and introducing a few simple automation, we build abundant and effective creatives for our clients, which complement traditional large campaigns and fit well with the practices of performance and biddable media.