• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

“What time works for you?”

“Can you believe that?   I’m having a hard time.”

“Are you still up for a quick chat?”

These are just a few of the random text messages I receive on my phone every day.  Not occasionally; they arrive multiple times a day, all from unknown senders, and I always find myself asking, who in the world actually responds to these notes?  The facts are, people do respond, but it still boggles my mind.

In my eyes, these are clearly phishing (or smishing) texts.  I have saved numerous numbers in my phone over the last 30 years, so the likelihood of someone texting me and me not knowing who they are is slim. For someone to break through with a personal-sounding note would be a one-in-a-million shot. 

That’s where I diverge from the traditional article that talks about the dangers of phishing.  These messages are dangerous and I would never suggest you respond to or click on any of them.  I know people who have lost money, and the average that gets lost is $1,000 when you engage -- sometimes significantly more. 

All that being said, you have to acknowledge phisers’ use of multivariant testing is impressive.  These spammers and phishers do what most marketers have forgotten to do, which is test, test, test.  Search advertisers still do it quite well, and I’m sure display ads are tested thoroughly, but I don’t know how much testing and optimization is going on in video.  Video ads get skipped a lot, so testing to find what are the best performers before you load them up with impressions makes the most sense.  You want to ensure those dollars are spent well, and testing in video is logical.

With the advent of AI tools for video generation that speed up the process of creation, it’s even easier to test video than ever before.  You can use focus groups and research to test concepts, or you can build segments for virtual testing, or you can always go old-school and simply run a small test in specific settings to see what works.  You can also create a lot more creative to run against targeted audiences. 

The more creative you have, the less wearout you’ll get, and the higher level of performance you can generate across the entire campaign.  Most creative agencies still don’t believe in quantity of creative; they focus on lower volume and higher quality, but in today’s world, these don't have to be mutually exclusive.  You can have high quality AND high quantity of video creative and all for a fraction of what it used to cost.  It is so easy to create b-roll, extended cuts and alternative cuts of commercial content using AI, so why should a brand put all its eggs in a single basket and hope for the best?

Making the analogy between phishing and video advertising may be the least likely column you expected to see today, but sometimes the fun lies in connecting the dots that other people don’t see.  It proves the point that, as the late, great Yogi Berra once said. “You can observe a lot just by watchin’.”