Why Creative will Dominate Digital Advertising in 2019

The pressure is high for advertisers looking to boost brand performance in 2019–especially if you’ve been handed a smaller operating budget. So you’ve gone through the checklist, optimized the media buying process. Yet, the question remains: How can you achieve more with less?

Let’s start from the beginning

When planning for the future, it’s useful to go back to the basics. Creative has been at the core of advertising since its inception. Yet, appreciation has gradually fallen off. There have simply been too many distractions.

For the last 10-to-15 years, advertising has emphasized the delivery of ads. Newly available tech tools, namely those which can collect a whole lot of data, have bred a hyper-focus on a commodifiable bottom line. Consequently, advertising began resembling a distribution business that prioritizes programmatic swiftness. Sub-industries also emerged, optimizing each element of the ecosystem (server, ssp, dsp, etc). Now, as most aspects are maxed out in terms of investment and scalability, we now we find ourselves overdue for the next stage.

Enhanced hyper-relevant experiences

Creative not only offers a tremendous amount of untapped potential, it’s actually the most impactful as well. Nielsen Catalina quantifies a finding: Creative accounts for 47% of brand lift, making it the single most important factor.

A refocus on creative aligns with larger priorities emerging in the industry as well. Oracle found that 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience. Likewise, Precision Marketing, a marketing technique that prioritizes existing over new customers, is becoming the norm. To ensure this standard of service, more creative must be generated to suit each individual need.

Tools to satisfy new standards

Targeting an audience has become more sophisticated than simply using broad categories such as demographics, age, gender, etc. While these factors remain significant, this data alone cannot suffice. Pieces of behavioral data and customer profiling must be considered collectively to ensure relevancy. Audiences need to be treated in a more dynamic and humanistic way.

A Creative Management Platform (CMP) is a cloud-based tool that produces, distributes, and measures digital creatives. Arguably the biggest advantage of a CMP is the amount of legwork it can accomplish. Consider it the equivalent of adding more horsepower to your engine, while simultaneously increasing its fuel efficiency.

By linking the process of content creation to the influx of data from your Data Management Platform (DMP), CMPs allow you do more work, more quickly, and more intelligently–all with fewer resources. Each business has a different set of needs. Still, using a platform that can combine the power of both technologies will give marketers the best experience, data, and outcomes when launching a creative campaign.