There’s a simple way to make advertising great again. It’s called emotion.
Most online advertising is targeted, which means it is efficient in media terms. A lot of
online advertising is personalized, but it’s personalized in what I refer to as “first-grade math” fashion, meaning it’s simple and pretty much anyone can do it.
We need to get more advanced -- we need to start doing some algebra and maybe some calculus. True personalization requires a more advanced level of attention, and more-complex
math. True personalization requires relevance and a little bit of context -- and if you combine these two items, emotion is not far behind.
The ads you see on the Super Bowl, the Grammy
Awards or the Oscars are typically very contextually related, tapping into the emotion of the specific show. Sports, music and movies demonstrate how effective advertising can be when you take
into account context and relevancy.
The ads you see on these programs are typically either one-and-done or they’re the launching point for a new campaign. So they’re
generally more engaging than the commercials you see across any prime-time TV landscape, which are repetitive and ubiquitous, not personalized in any way. We get tired of them and therefore disregard
them, even fast-forwarding to bypass such ads completely.
The same goes for online advertising. You see the same banners and the same video ads peppered all over the Web. Some are
following you around via retargeting and the rest are simply placed via audience targeting. They rarely are truly personalized and they are never contextually relevant anymore. The lone
exception here are native ads, which seem to be more effective but are not scalable in their current form and function.
Dynamic creative typically gets thrown around at this stage of
the conversation, with some brands creating multiple campaigns that rotate in different images, etc.
I think dynamic creative is far too simple. I don’t see the emotional
impact of showing a red car or a white car in the ad next to a family with kids or a family with a dog. Online advertising requires a higher level of personalization that relies on data
science to glean insights and transform those insights into true campaigns.
In the old model, a brand chose a single big idea and pushed that out everywhere. In the new order, a
brand can run multiple ideas to support a strategy that identifies where in the customer journey targets may be, delivering a message with significantly more emotional relevance.
In this model, you have the option to show an ad that includes a family-oriented message and a specific type of car vs. a review-oriented ad that speaks to safety and luxury features — or a
more caution-to-the-wind ad that says sports car and excitement, depending on who you are showing the ad to, and what behavior they have exhibited before this moment of exposure. The science required
includes insights that led to predictive analytics, which manifest in the type of message that will be shown.
Any advertiser worth a damn knows emotion is the root of all messaging, but
online advertising has overlooked emotion in favor of data in recent years. My solution is simple: Mine the data to create opportunity for emotion. If you accomplish this, things will get
much more effective, very quickly!
That is my platform, as I am running to make advertising great again! I hope you’ll vote for me in this coming election. :)