‘Faster, cheaper, stronger’ – what creativity really needs to be today
Creative agencies are hopelessly clinging to the good old Mad Men era days, and as a result are failing to deliver true people-based marketing. AdParlor's Ben Legg believes it's time for a re-think
The traditional agency model has encouraged the separation of creative and media – different processes, different cultures, different P&Ls. And over the years, they’ve never really shown much love for each other. Creative has often looked at media as the boring afterthought of advertising, and media has usually seen creative as the spoiled child who always needs to get their own way.
Over the past decade, media agencies and their business models have been blown up by digital marketing complexity, auction pricing, technology and powerful new arrivals such as Google and Facebook. Meanwhile, creative agencies have hardly changed at all. That was Don Draper’s suicide.
$1 million per flop
Look at how creative is often still done by agencies – it all starts with a brief from the client. Then, they go off for a few weeks to develop storyboards for, say, three different 30-second TV spot ideas.
Once the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) has been used to select one – just one, mind you – the agency takes it around the country (or the world) to focus groups – to get a whole raft of conflicting opinions.
Unsurprisingly, they usually find enough evidence to validate their own proposal. Then they go into production, usually shooting in some exotic locale like the Seychelles or Fiji or Ecuador for three weeks, complete with free-flowing champagne-and-lobster dinners and a few guest celebrities.
Finally, a few months later, after a lengthy post-production process involving animators, music composers, a celebrity-du-jour voiceover, and more free-flowing champagne they present the completed 30-second TV ad. Oh, and a bill for over a million dollars. The whole process takes a gruelling six-to-eight months.
I realise I’m exaggerating slightly (except for the price), but the days of producing a single TV campaign to speak to a mass audience – as if they were all the same person – should have died years ago. These ads should have been replaced by something much faster, cheaper and more tailored.
The future is people-based marketing
Facebook – the best-run of all the big new digital companies – says that the future is all about people-based marketing, but doesn’t expand on it much.
In my mind, people-based marketing is a world in which – one day – we will be able to serve a different ad to every single person, tailored based on things like relationship with brand, relationship with competitor brands, past purchases, predicted future purchases, likelihood to purchase, media consumption (TV versus search versus social, etc…), shopping preferences, price sensitivity, likely purchase timing, gender, age, location, preferred language, family status and lifestyle.
That vision may not quite be possible today, but today it is entirely possible to identify different audiences of as small as a few thousand people and serve different ads to each of those audiences, custom-made to their unique needs.
This requires creative and media working together seamlessly, with powerful technology acting as a catalyst to enable efficient mass creation of ads, programmatic optimisation of each micro campaign, and deep insights about what is working and what isn’t.
Creative agencies are the problem
The most common barrier to implementing this people-based marketing vision is creative agencies and the creative process. As a general rule, even in 2017 most of them are way too expensive, too slow and massively out of touch with the kind of technology and processes that empower efficient production, tailoring and optimisation.
Take video ads as an example. World class 30 second video ads can – these days – be made for US$20,000-100,000 in two-to-four weeks. This is a cost reduction of 90-98 per cent versus ‘old school’ TV ad production. In addition, ‘short form’ videos, for platforms like Facebook, can be created for US$1,000-to-$5,000.
Lower cost and faster pace equals quality
But what about ad quality? Won’t that suffer? No. The beauty of these prices is that you can make multiple variations for each segment that you are targeting – if one ad doesn’t perform well, just drop it and use one of the others. Or make another. Creation potential is virtually limitless.
Think about it in simple numbers. Let’s say that Plan A was to make a US$1m TV ad to show to 60 million people. Plan B could be to make nine $50k ads to show to three different audiences of 20 million people each. That means that each segment gets a much more tailored ad, so is more likely to succeed.
In addition, you have three ad options to show to each segment – enabling you to run with the highest performer and drop the under-performers. And if none of them perform? You have only spent US$450k of your US$1m creative budget, leaving a whopping US$550,000 of ‘dry powder’ if you need to make another one.
Time to split the creative
So how do you get started if you feel stuck with a creative agency which charges you a fortune and takes forever to make pretty-but-underperforming ads for mass audiences? The first thing to do is to break what was once one ‘creative’ bucket into two:
Big creative ideas, rebranding and breakthrough ideas
Tactical campaign creative
For the first option, you may still want to use a creative agency, though likely one much more nimble and cost effective than your old one. For number two, this should be done as part of the digital campaign management team, with embedded creative people and technology to support them. You need to identify a team who has a clear picture of what world class people-based marketing looks like – for both creative and media – and a step-by-step plan to get you there.
Ben Legg is the chief executive officer of AdParlor. The original version of this article first appeared on Ben’s blog here.
Firstly, the creative process you’ve just described disappeared a long time ago. The current world is a lot less fiji and a lot more green screen. The champagne has been replaced by a cask of Stanley’s fruity lexia and the lobster by stale biscuits.
*takes sip of warm wine*
Secondly, cheap ads, at scale, are just noise. Cheap noise.
*puffs on e-cigar*
Thirdly, how about we start working together to garner insights that truly amplify campaigns vs blaming ‘creative’ or ‘media’ or ‘platforms’. If we, as an industry, don’t start providing and proving real value to our clients, then they won’t be our clients for much longer.
Find the audience, find the insight and sell them the bloody product in the most effective way possible. If anyone is holding up that process, fire them.
ReplyWTF…another case of term dropping…..”people based marketing”.
I thought all marketing was people based by definition. Unless he means the crappy surveillance based marketing that has given rise to adblockers worldwide. Been 10 days since I installed one…14000+ ads blocked, 26000+ trackers blocked.
Carry on with your template based nonsense on fb and instagram.
ReplyHave you been cryogenically frozen since 1986?
The industry has already done everything you suggest and made a complete balls up of it.
ReplyI haven’t seen any success stories or case studies, so I’d stay with Don Draper because at least I know where half my marketing dollar goes to.
ReplyBefore I discovered the ad parlour mockup generator, my ads weren’t as good as they could be.
With APMG® they are cheap as chips and suck a 1000 times more… because all I’m doing is putting a picture and writing some shit caption with no idea.
ReplyMany creative agencies definitely do need to speed up.
At the same time, digital media companies need to be careful about disappearing up their data-driven arseholes.
People love great films. They really do. And they pay attention to them. Sometimes these films do need a bit of time and money.
What people don’t pay attention to is the endless stream of cheap content which gets in the way of their life. In fact, it pisses them off.
Only get in the way of their life if you have something properly interesting, informative and entertaining.
Reply“Many creative agencies definitely do need to speed up.”
You do know who hold up the entire chain here, don’t you?
The effin planners. They waste the most time with their crap briefs…
Replypolishing and repolishing their weak turds….revealing them to the creative department 3 days before the deadline. As a result the work is usually shit and the client is fuming because they briefed the job in a month ago.
The news room analogy is a good one here. Most advertising should be like daily news: quick turnaround, reactive, topical with a basis in core positioning. Then there are the features or in depth stories, i.e. the big campaigns, that take time to develop. Needs smart, hard nosed CD/Editors to run it though. Gong chasing scam merchants won’t cut it.
ReplyStronger?
ReplyWhat about better?
More creative or effective?
Any Mac monkey can do it faster & cheaper.
There will always be demand for line caught tuna steaks.
Don’t confuse it with flaked tuna that’s canned in brine.
Punters will pay a premium for the former.
While the later trades on low price and availbility.
They are not substitutes.
Cheaper, faster, shitter
Reply5% of everything is quality, if this guy wants to push out mass-produced canteen food, let him. I Imagine he’s selling (flogging) it as an original holistic multi-platform engaged communications solution and would do well on the ‘Apprentice’.
ReplyHave your say