Tackling the growing threat of ad-blocking

Digital advertising needs to bridge its creative chasm to counter the ad-blocking threat, argues VisualDNA’s Jim Hodgkins.

It used to be the case that getting anyone outside of the adtech business to engage with programmatic was a struggle; it was barely understood, many people conflated RTB and programmatic, and it was considered merely a way to sell remnant inventory.

But in the last 12 months I’ve seen a real change. Awareness, knowledge and use of programmatic in the industry has grown, an assertion borne out in the rather impressive numbers in the IPA’s last Bellwether report.

While advertisers were once almost entirely focused on how to make programmatic campaigns cheaper, we’re getting more questions on how to increase the value and relevance of the campaigns instead.

With ad-blocking moving from the trade pages into the national agenda, it’s an issue that isn’t going to go away and it’s clear we have a collective responsibility to make digital advertising better.

Some of the debate has been around the technology. Ad blockers will get better and publishers will get smarter. Technologies will improve – particularly in mobile – to create formats that make digital advertising less data heavy and interruptive.

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The technological arms race will no doubt hot up, but there’s also an onus on us to make advertising better – and the two key issues discussed during our Mediatel Breakfast Briefing at the Haymarket Hotel last week were the need for better creative and better data.

Part of the challenge is getting the creative community to engage with data – and to bridge a creative chasm in digital media to unlock one of the best opportunities advertisers have to improve ROI.

Creative agencies still seem largely uninterested in new opportunities unlocked by programmatic and data, and as a result creative programmatic campaigns are few and far between.

It’s hardly surprising if you view programmatic as soulless, retargeted ‘buy me now’ display ads that follow you round the internet, that’s hardly an attractive creative playground or user experience, but as more advertisers use programmatic for brand building we need to put more time and imagination into the creative.

It’s like a classic oil and water, church and state, art and science debate. But we need to engage advertising’s creative talent to move forward.

Media agencies are further along the curve. If creative is the art, media is the science and media agencies are now are well aware of the proven tried-and-tested methods of customer engagement, the nitty-gritty business of user experience, timing, channels, data.

Creative and media agencies are coming closer together, but to make programmatic appeal to brands we need both technical creatives and creative technologists for programmatic to benefit from the media agencies’ data-driven intelligence and the creatives’ inherent understanding of how to communicate a brand’s values on an emotional level.

The second major problem across the industry is the continued reliance on demographics. Brands are built on an emotional level, but sold in age brackets as if people of a certain age all think and feel the same.

We encode a brand’s values, decode them into media channels and age groups, in the hope that we hit the right audience.

We have much to learn about how to make the best use of customer data, and the response to this has been to cling to demographics.

While this approach is effective to a point we are using a very blunt profiling instrument and are missing out on the opportunities that a more nuanced approach might yield. We have huge potential in digital one to one or segment targeting that was never available in above the line media targeting such as TV so why would we adopt their segmentation rather than better target techniques of direct marketers

For example, using emotive data allows different iterations of a particular campaign to be geared towards introverts and extroverts, who have very different patterns of purchasing behaviours and thus respond to different messaging.

We recently ran a test for a well-known e-commerce brand, using psychographic targeting based on different personality variables (Extroverts vs Introverts, and High Openness vs Low Openness). We saw a 56% uplift in clicks on emotively-targeted adverts, compared to a control group shown the standard creative.

It’s not rocket science: we know emotive targeting works, it’s just that we haven’t been able to do it effectively in digital before.

Two people of the same age might both be in the market for the same Spanish holiday, but the reasons behind them arriving at that decision may be totally different.

The adverts served, therefore, have the best chance of getting a favorable response if they speak to an individual’s drivers and motivations.

So by bringing together better, emotive-led creative, and emotive data, the theory of truly relevant and engaging digital advertising and the practice.

Jim Hodgkins is managing director, marketing services at VisualDNA