Data-Driven Creativity: The Next Big Evolution of Online Marketing Is Here

There’s a paradigm shift happening in the online marketing industry. Again. And yes, this isn’t exactly a surprise. It is, after all, an industry in which best practices can barely reach the status of a paradigm before being dethroned and thrown aside.

But this current shift? It’s already big to warrant everyone’s attention. What we’re talking about is the outsize importance creative assets are going to have on the ability of an advertiser to compete and achieve positive ROI.

There are underlying reasons for it, such as the battle Apple wages against user-level tracking (the announced changes to IDFA are only one part of this), and government regulation. In the end, it’s safe to assume that user-level targeting will be transformed, and might be eliminated altogether. 

Waves this shift is generating will be felt throughout the industry for years to come, you can bet on this. We have. And by “betting,” we mean that we have invested considerable resources in aligning the Bidalgo platform with what is going to happen. 

Where the Industry Is Today

Traditional user acquisition relies on three pillars: finding the best audiences, bidding well enough to approach them, and showing them the best possible ads. The first two are the bread and butter of a UA manager’s work; the third one is usually conducted by a separate team. 

For the longest time, making creative-related processes more efficient just wasn’t at the top of most people’s minds. There were enough optimization opportunities around bidding and audiences. 

Moreover, fitting the round peg that is creative production into the square-shaped hole of KPIs and performance insights was never going to be easy, as creativity was difficult to quantify and analyze. 

Put an asset into the pipeline, and you’ll end up seeing how well it performs, but you’re unlikely to understand why it performs the way it does and whether this is the optimal investment of your dollars. For that, you need a robust creative analysis and testing infrastructure, which itself is dependent on the ability to generate assets at scale. All of this can’t be accomplished efficiently without advanced tools, as the technological challenges are far from trivial.

So for years, the industry gave lip service to the importance of creative while investing heavily in everything but that. And it worked. 

But soon, it’ll all change. 

Why a Change Is Coming

If you’re an advertising channel with a limited amount of inventory, it’s in your interest to let as many people as possible bid on it. This much as obvious, but it’s also easier said than done. It took the channels years to streamline their advertising platforms, and they’re not done yet.

This transformation is driven not only by better interfaces but also in large part by automation. There are fewer fields to fill in because advertisers have fewer options at their disposal. And while this level of accessibility is a blessing for many newly-minted advertisers, UA managers who make a living from pushing the right levers are being left with fewer and fewer levers to pull. 

Meanwhile, the field is getting more and more crowded with each passing day. Already, the standard online advertising experience is below the “scare threshold” for many SMBs and even individuals, who just a year ago would not have dared to set up a new campaign. 

And as we’ve mentioned previously, the visibility into the funnel is changing as well. Right now Apple is at the forefront of this, with their “permission to track” guidelines, but chances are that the industry will follow. Collection of user-level data for advertising optimization is already frowned upon by legislators in several countries. Optimization 

Where We Must Go Next

With audiences and bidding rapidly becoming streamlined and automated, and user-level tracking in danger, we have to turn our attention to ad creative. These assets are the one optimization resource that’s still fully controlled by the advertiser. They are also, let’s not forget, the face of the campaign—the piece of the marketing puzzle that’s ultimately responsible for whether users click through or not. 

So with everything else being equal—or at least in the state of constant equalization—for all advertisers, who will see the best return on their marketing investment? We believe it’s the advertisers who have the best ads.

This isn’t to say that other parts of the equation can be neglected. Creative-centric approach does not imply focusing exclusively on creative. The end goal should be to have brilliant ads, distributed efficiently to the right audiences. Dropping the ball anywhere on this route will hurt the return on your marketing investment. It’s just that the proverbial ball is rolled only by the advertiser at the creative stage, whereas everywhere else there are others helping it along.

And now we’re back at the challenge of measuring creativity. “The best ad” isn’t necessarily the most objectively pretty one or an ad with exactly 41 textual characters on top of a cerulean background. Different customers react differently to the same creative. As a matter of fact, even the same customers will react to the same ad differently over time. Sooner or later, creative fatigue comes even for the best ad creative. 

To truly optimize ad creative, every part of its lifecycle has to be measured and analyzed, across channels. From production to refresh, no action should be taken without actionable insights tied to the KPIs the creative was built to drive.

You can also look at this from another direction, with ad creative itself as a targeting mechanism. When you know what your desirable audiences know and like, broad targeting with the right creative can increase the chance of the right person clicking on the ad. 

This is why we have invested in the Creative Center, and why we’re working with our clients to make sure that whatever happens, they have a competitive creative advantage. Features such as auto-production which iterates on successful concepts at a click of a button, and predictive ranking which helps you test creative efficiently are just a few of the tools we’ve developed. And since the creative transformation is just getting started, so are we.