Participants:
- Kaleeta McDade, global chief experience design officer, VML
- Terry Taouss, president, The Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC)
- Jan Wittek, Chief Revenue Officer, Eyeo
- Moderator: Alison Weissbrott, editor-in-chief, Campaign US
Even when formats are limiting, especially online, savvy marketers are finding ways to play and be creative.
In this discussion, “Bridging the gap between great creative and user-friendly ad formats,” sponsored by Eyeo, a trio of experts exchanged views on how brands can foster consumer friendly ad experiences.
People are consuming media differently than in the past and interruptions online don't work the way they did in linear environments.
Jan Wittek of Eyeo reported that even though users consider autoplay video with and without sound to be the most annoying format (according to Statista Consumer Insights research), it is still beloved and frequently booked by advertisers.
“A billion consumers install some kind of ad blocker because they are so fed up with the experience,” he noted. “Brands need to find more respectful ways they can interact and communicate with consumers, take user preferences into account and not be annoying.”
That’s the goal of The Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC), which is governing and establishing standards that publishers and advertisers can use as guidelines for creating engaging messaging in an ad-filtering setting.
“Content doesn't pay for itself,” explained AAC president Terry Taouss. “We want to allow publishers and advertisers to reach users and create the revenue required to generate content, but we expect that they do it in an acceptable way.”
“Our research shows that if you give users what they want, you'll get better performance,” he continued. “Better engagement means better recall. Respect from the user comes through, not just in performance, but in brand equity. It takes a long time to build that brand equity and you can lose it very quickly with constant annoying ads.”
Turning ads into adds
VML’s Kaleeta McDade believes advertisers need to shift from storytelling to story-living.
“We used to seek more temporal creatives, which is the idea of emotion moving through time — storytelling,” she suggested. “Now we're needing more spatial creatives — people who are system-focused and are thinking more technically — and then putting those two things together for a new way of creating. We used to be more brand out. Now we’re trying to be more human-on.”
That means finding ways into the communities you want to reach. For Coca-Cola’s “I See Coke” campaign, VML created a built-in Alexa skill that rewarded viewers every time a Coke pops on screen.
“It’s not an ad, but an ‘add’ to your life,” she offered. “It’s a different way of looking at media and intersecting ourselves in the conversation.”
Panelists discussed other ways brands are bringing more creativity to the process to create engaging and user-friendly experiences online. “Permission-based” ads that let viewers interact with a brand on their terms are becoming more prevalent.
“One thing that often gets overlooked with social ads is that they are actually user-friendly because they put users in control,” said Wittek. “There's a lot that creatives and advertisers can learn from that environment.”
“We are leveraging static creatives that have a user-initiated video element that clearly respects the user choice,” he added. “There are also advantages from a brand perspective since it’s clear that when a person clicks, they want to engage with the message they are seeing and interact with my brand.”
Taking the proper measure
As advertisers shift the way they are speaking to consumers, they will also need to reexamine the KPIs the industry is using that reinforce ineffective ads.
“There are many ways campaign success can be measured,” said Wittek. “We need to move away from a last-click approach to a multi-touch attribution model that contains elements of attention and purposeful interaction — such as in the click-to-play video example — that get valued much differently than simply the last click.”
In the low-clutter environment, he added, aided brand recall for an ad gets uplifted by 82% (according to research by Eyeo and MAGNA’s Media Trials unit).
“That's an upper-funnel metric that brands care about,” advised Wittek. “It’s something they might want to look into.”
McDade uses a measurement called “time well spent and time well saved.” Pure commerce exchanges, she explained, should be fast and frictionless so the less time spent, the better, or “time well saved.”
More engaging content, meanwhile, should be measured in a “time well spent” way.
“The metric you’re using depends on what you’re creating,” she pointed out. “Not everything needs to be about converting. The goal of some content is awareness and engagement.”
Working on a campaign for Marvel in partnership with Disney and Coca-Cola, McDade’s team capitalized on the fact that Marvel fans are big collectors.
“We had 32 Marvel characters on cans,” she recalled, “and if you found the correct two characters, they would interact in AR and show you something that you had never seen before.”
The activation allowed users to have three levels of engagement —what McDade called “taste, sip and drink.”
“Understanding the levels of engagement and creating for that was probably one of the most fun things we did,” she shared. “I enjoyed seeing the response because when you actually create with people in mind, you get that response.”
Too much data?
Viewing campaign success through different lenses is useful for brands since campaigns can serve a variety of purposes. In fact, Taouss believes the industry has become a bit too data-driven at the expense of creativity.
He’d like to see more brands “move back to making the kind of commercials that people talk about.” Rather than creative ads that people love, he added that too often advertisers make “10 different versions and have the computer figure out which one works.”
However, behavioral data can help marketers be more intentional.
Data helped McDade zero in on which consumer behaviors to target for one client.
When customers continued to leave a car dealership without buying, data revealed those consumers weren’t sure the car would fit in their garage. Once they knew which lever to pull, the team adjusted its ad messaging accordingly.
McDade highlighted the success of Mars’ search campaign that tied to Snickers’ ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ initiative. Each time someone entered a commonly misspelled word, they were given a tailored message to "grab yourself a Snikkers" as "Yu cant spel properlie wen hungrie.”
“Mars took a creative multi-channel approach and created unique user equity from something unexpected,” he underscored.
When it comes to data, McDade is most excited about probabilistic AI.
“The idea of next-best actions and look-like models makes our targeting less of a scattershot,” she concluded. “We've been one too many, one too few. That ability to do one-to-one at scale is exciting.”
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