More definitely doesn’t equal better. As the demands of digital media have increased, says Lindsay Hong at SmartAssets, the quality of content seems to have dipped. But why?
The increased demands of digital media have not been matched by increases in ad budgets, explains Hong
Have you ever thought that digital media has become a bit... banal?
Agencies know it, brands know it, and consumers are finally starting to cotton on as well. Dan Gardner, executive chairman at Code & Theory, has often quipped that “the internet sucks.” And he makes a fair point.
Indeed, it seems that ubiquity has drained the web of intimacy, personalization, and emotional connection. Despite mass data collection, the web consistently ignores what consumers actually want or need.
Then, there’s the problem of over-optimization, which has led to homogeneous experiences, effectively removing any sense of originality while also stifling creativity.
It wasn’t always this way, and the bottom line is: it doesn’t have to be.
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What we need to do is start looking at the bigger picture. Round up the marketing, creative, and media pros, and take a big collective whiff of the morning coffee. We’ve been riding on this shuttle loop for a while now, and hatching an exit plan requires us to think about how we got here in the first place.
Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of media channels, particularly digital and social. Each one comes with its own best practices, styles, and approaches to meet eyes, get clicks, and squeeze the most from every media dollar.
Think back to the year dot, when all anybody could say was “multichannel this” and “omnichannel that.”
Arguably, this marked the dawn of the impending ‘crap media shift’ (for lack of a more technical term). And the sheer proliferation of new media channels has been notoriously taxing for multi-market brands that now have to be everything, everywhere, all at once to cut through branded noise and remain front-of-mind 24/7.
Adding more fuel to the fire is the fact that content on newer media channels has a very short shelf life compared to traditional advertising. This unsustainable need for live-fast, die-young content has never been more ubiquitous than on social media, where assets tend to live for a day before they grow stale. (If you’re lucky, you’ll have a week before that content is past its expiration date.)
This bored-in-a-blink audience demands endless ephemera, meaning brands need to constantly peddle out more content, and at full tilt. The trouble with this is that more content, faster content, and effective content inevitably lead to reaching deeper into pockets; meanwhile, advertising budgets are struggling to keep up. The end result? Consumers are ineluctably drowning in slapdash ads wherever they look.
These subpar ads, byproducts of the rapid content cycle, are generally made from repurposed content that was never intended for use in advertising or social platforms and fails to adhere to the right format or platform guidelines. This is one of the main reasons that these ads are usually remiss in their purpose to engage audiences. A notorious example of this (and admittedly one of my favorites) is the once-common blunder of calls-to-action (CTA) in YouTube videos being placed in such a way that they were then concealed by the ‘skip’ button.
Launching a paid promo with a concealed CTA is as much a waste of time as it is a waste of ad spend – but, to the misfortune of countless brands, screw-ups like this happen quite often. Once again, this is largely because brands are too busy producing more than they have ever had to before, but without blowing the budget in new-ground frontier channels and territories. It’s inevitable then that costly or avoidable mistakes will be made.
The questions obfuscating effective content production are legitimate. If we have more tools, more intelligence, and more automation at our fingertips than ever before, why does creating effective content continue to be a challenge?
The quick response is rather disappointing: If there’s an adtech solution to solve it, then you’ve still got to pay for it and, as previously mentioned, advertising budgets just haven’t followed the incremental increase in demand. But another reason, needing a little more explanation, is that a lot of available technologies have had limited capabilities until now.
Take automated versioning tools, for example. These tools are super intelligent: Taking a master asset, breaking it down into layers, and then using rule-based logic to reshuffle elements into different ad formats.
But no matter how you look at it, these solutions are still templated, and there’s a limit on the creativity that you can layer on. So, while being incredibly clever, these solutions still churn out assets with poor aesthetic or that lack sufficient space for copy. Or, in some cases, incorporate oh-so-tiny images that would make true creative teams gasp aloud.
AI isn’t just giving these outdated systems a run for their money – it’s created a whole new league. The difference is that AI has no limits and is not bound by traditional logic and rule-based systems.
Platforms such as SmartAssets provide a sandbox for creatives to upload their assets in a safeguarded environment, where AI can learn from all of your historical assets and train itself on your brand guidelines at a surprising pace. Not only that, but it can also extract creative and performance data at scale, correlating these to show you what really works in your ad campaigns. Meanwhile, providing quality assurance that prevents mistakes from occurring in the future.
Many marketers are wondering: What are the best gains I can get from AI, and should I already be using generative AI to produce campaigns? But it’s not necessary to jump in at the deep end, and there’s much more to be gained from preflight campaign analysis.
My advice? Marketers and creatives should be using the latest tools as a means to gain a better understanding of what's worked in the past, reducing monotonous tasks, speeding up the “byzantine approval process,” as Rory Sutherland likes to call it, and eliminating the risk of easily solved quality issues.
SmartAssets
SmartAssets is the creative effectiveness platform, revolutionising how brands manage and optimise ad content. Powered by AI, we tag assets at creative-component...
