Scaling Big Brand Ideas Across Millions of Tiny Digital Channels

As marketers continue to find more and more channels through which they can communicate with consumers, a creative challenge increasingly presents itself: How do you translate a big brand idea into dozens of tiny digital channels?

In the “olden days,”  you might have engaged with your creative and media agencies to come up with a big advertising idea and then purchased a few premium placements — say TV and a newspaper or magazine ad — to reach a wide target audience.  The creative output from your agencies was a few static assets that may have included a TV spot and a fit for purpose design of the campaign. Nowadays, marketers are tasked with taking these static assets and translating them across a variety of digital formats, sizes, and devices.  They have to reimagine what that big advertising idea looks like in a meaningful, contextualized way across all platforms, at scale.

Scaling creative should be simple.  But the perception that intelligent, personalized creative is not scalable has persisted, often compounded by the tedious requirements that today’s media plans can bring.  Activities like adding media partners and channels across various types of inventory typically require so much creative adaptation that brands rely on a “one creative fits all” approach that leads to ineffective, static, one-dimensional creative in every placement across platforms.  

Today’s consumers expect to be able to engage with brands on the channels and devices they’re already using every day.  Whether it’s mobile or tablet, Facebook or Twitter, marketers need to ensure that they are compelling action with relevant creative using tactics like precision marketing, without losing the brand’s big idea.   

As the most adopted creative management platform (CMP) across the enterprise, Celtra has helped hundreds of brands and media partners scale their big ideas without compromising the quality of creative.  Over the years we’ve learned that the first step forward is to incorporate the following 3 priorities into your digital marketing plan. 

1. Strategy​​

Bring your media and creative teams closer together, earlier. Gone are the days when creative and media strategy can be accomplished in silos. Whether your embarking on new in-housing initiatives or leveraging external agencies, to achieve meaningful scale, it’s imperative that we unify the big creative idea, media plan, and data, during initial strategy planning.

2. Process​​

Streamline the end-to-end creative process for digital advertising. This starts by clearly defining the creative process as an efficient workflow with clear roles, responsibilities, and timelines. Defining the process will ensure that everyone can work together to deliver on the strategy, while realizing operational and cost efficiencies.

3. Execution​​

Select a technology partner that supports the execution of both your strategy and process with creative management capabilities. A CMP enables brands and media partners to manage the entire creative lifecycle of digital advertising — improving advertising effectiveness while reducing operational costs.

The right CMP will support:

• The entire lifecycle of your digital creative; not just the building. From strategy to reporting your CMP should empower you to build, manage, and measure the success of your digital advertising from one central platform.
• Enterprise creative management workflows. Your CMP should help you break down silos, enabling all contributors of the creative life cycle to collaborate with purpose built tools and flexible workflows that align with your creative process.
• Your future personalization initiatives. While your focus today may be around building the foundation required to scale the big idea across channels, tomorrow it will likely be dynamic creative optimization (DCO). It’s important to select a partner that understand ​why precision marketing matters​ and is investing in the future including automated versioning and creative adaptation (to the extent that it is possible without ​Don Draper’s involvement​).