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Attention seeking - Why creativity still matters in the age of attention

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How often have you found yourself being briefed ‘we want an attention-grabbing ad’? Clearly, advertisers want to catch the consumer’s attention, but surely they want to do more than just grab it? Just because an ad is seen, it doesn’t mean it’s driving positive brand perception or delivering sales. 

When you buy ads that wrap around a publisher’s content, in it and often even over it, you’re certainly grabbing the customer’s attention. But for ads to truly be successful, they have to stick in people’s minds for the right reasons and that means bringing the focus away from just volume, speed and price, and back to creativity.

Bring it all back to creativity 

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The current ad tech landscape isn’t always a friend to creativity. Instead of focusing on viewing or reading experience, it’s all budget and inventory-first. Far too often templates and page positions limit the scope of what brands can do to really engage consumers. 

Compounding the problem has been the vanity metrics marketers have relied on to prove that their low quality, high volume ad strategy has worked. 

The latest research from the DMA suggests marketing effectiveness is down 23% in a single year. In fact, what this research has found is that brand effectiveness has marginally increased, but that gain has been wiped out by response effectiveness. 

Tim Bond, Director of Insight at the DMA said of the survey: “Those campaigns focused on a combination of brand building and response, while targeting new and existing customers together, tend to drive more effects overall.”  

To engage consumers, brands need to tell a story. Brands must keep in mind that target audiences don't go to websites to look at their ads and they need to always have one eye on the consumer's experience. 

They have to move beyond product and communicate their values – especially given the recent focus on the pandemic, sustainability and the rising cost of living. Consumers want more of a personal connection with brands and this all goes back to creativity. 

Context is everything

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Creativity is even more important in the impending cookie-less online environment. Brands will be leaning much more on brand and contextual information to help their messaging land. 

The idea of building a brand in an online environment does somehow seem to have fallen by the wayside. The granular focus on speed and volume of delivery, ad spend, impressions and even a willingness to accept a mere couple of seconds’ viewability as effective ad engagement means that investing time and effort into creative brand building has suffered.

Numbers and brand needn’t be mutually exclusive, but the work has to be done upfront to understand how to work creatively with the medium at hand, before falling headlong into a relentless cycle of buying, tweaking, measuring and redeploying.

It also means it’s more important than ever that ads are shown in the right place, on the right site, and in the right context when it comes to the publisher content they’re appearing against. That involves constant vigilance. While a creative investment in brand is a long-term play, how ads perform against certain content and in front of some audiences must be under constant review. 

There is no single answer to what makes a creative ad – there are endless award ceremonies dedicated to this pursuit and a simple scan of the winners will show just how varied the approach can be. But there are some constants. 

Creativity based on insight, for example, is vital. Not just what we understand of our customers past, present and future, but what we understand about the brand. All too often there can be a disconnect between how the brand presents itself offline and online. 

For example, beautifully curated Out of Home (OOO) or print environments are reduced to product shot and price. 

Don’t just repurpose

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Even worse is the unwillingness to create specifically for the online medium. Simply repurposing or resizing a print or YouTube ad often ends up with vital elements missing, cut by rigid templating, or just not right for the context. 

Mobile is a prime example of this, where repurposed creative drains data and slows loading times to a crawl. Remember Google’s often quoted ‘3 seconds and they’re gone’ when it comes to website loading times? 

Well, the consumer’s patience isn’t getting any better. Yet, it is a platform with ample opportunity. Ads shown in high quality mobile web environments are 74% more appreciated than those in low quality spaces. 

Investing in creativity is, in a way, back to pre-digital advertising basics but it’s no worse off for it. There is no reason why a digital environment shouldn’t contribute to brand building in the same way traditional media has been doing for decades. 

While the programmatic ecosystem rarely has interest in the long-term consumer experience, we haven’t fully lost the art of marketing through digital. We have perhaps only slightly lost our way; it’s time to return to the creatively beaten path and build longer term impact.

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By Beckie Underwood, Senior Director, Azerion Ad Studio at Azerion

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