Episode 229 / Amy Wright (Global Head of Creative Strategy) & Dan Moseley (MD, North America) / Automated Creative
An Urgent Q4 Wake-up Call to Marketers
How are marketers geared up to tackle the busiest commercial quarter of the year? With Q4 fast approaching, over one third of marketers still don't optimise their creative in-flight. It's the equivalent of playing football and never changing your team during the match, even when they're doing poorly, warn Automated Creative's Amy Wright and Dan Moseley.
On this special episode of the Shiny New Object Podcast, Amy and Dan share their research into how brands can optimise creative effectiveness in Q4 and beyond. It's an urgent wake-up call with actionable tips and learnings from working with the likes of Brown-Forman and Mars, among others.
“There’s a disconnect between media and creative agencies… A creative agency wants to bring a brilliant brand idea to life… once that’s delivered, how it’s put into media isn’t always a priority. Media agencies are optimised to get the best placements… the right audience, the right platform, the right time. But they’re not always best set up to tell you what’s working and why it’s working.” (Dan Moseley")
“Part of [success] is about getting everyone on the same page with an infrastructure that plays to all of [their] different strengths. What we're not saying is that the media side or the creative side is better than the other. It's about being able to translate those two worlds and making sure that they work together… Ultimately, automation and technology is the only solve.” (Amy Wright)
Listen to their stats and advice and sign up for the webinar on 28th September to get all the insights:
https://live.remo.co/e/compounding-creative-effectivene/register
Are you ready to meet and beat your Q4 advertising goals?
Most marketers are feeling an increase in pressure to deliver marketing efficiency by the end of the year. Your budgets for 2024 depend on it, and so does this and next year’s success. At Automated Creative, we’ve got solutions to help you take control of your end-of-year campaigns. That’s why we’re hosting an urgent wake-up call event on Thursday 28th September, 11-12 pm EST // 4-5 pm BST.
Sign up now to start compounding challenges into success after success.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Amy Wright 0:00
Over 1/3 of marketers still aren't making any optimizations to their ad creative in flight at all. So that's no media optimization. There's no creative optimization. So really this urgent Wake Up Call is around. You're leaving huge amounts of money and media spend on the table without the ability to optimize in flight.
Tom Ollerton 0:24
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton and the founder of automated creative where the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And every week I get to interview influential and exciting and intelligent people about the future of our industry and discussing their shiny new object. And this week is absolutely no different. I'm going to introduce Dan and Amy, who are my much loved colleagues, at automated creative. So Amy, over to you.
Amy Wright 0:52
Hi, my name is Amy Wright. I am the Global Head of strategy at automated creative. And I'm a hybrid marketing and business strategist with a strong digital and tech focus. And I've been at Adline for over a decade working at some of the world's biggest creative agency and have now landed at AC with Tom and Dan
Dan Moseley 1:11
Hello, I'm Dan Moseley. Similarly, I used to work in Creative Agency background, but I had a slightly different path. So I kind of went through the early days of social media into sport and a lot of sport production, and then moved over to Toronto, where I kind of set up a new agency office over here. Yeah, I recently joined AC as the managing director for North America.
Tom Ollerton 1:35
Last question, what do you both want for Christmas?
Amy Wright 1:39
Ah, obviously everyone to come to the webinar. But my answer last year was rewiring my house. So I think maybe this year will be going for plumbing.
Dan Moseley 1:48
Yeah, I'm organizing a wedding in Brazil. So for that to be as easy as possible and no stress over the Christmas period.
Tom Ollerton 1:54
So what we're going to talk about is a white paper that Dan and Amy have written called "Compounding Creative: An urgent q4 Wake up call." So as it stands, it's a 20th of September, the biggest commercial quarter of the year is coming up. And brands are poised to put their money behind some creative. But is it in fact, the right creative? And are brands able to change that creative in flight, if it turns out to be not doing very well. So big bets, big complications, big worries for some very big brands. But Dan and Amy have done some brilliant research. And we're going to share some of those highlights with you today. So Dan, Amy, what are the key headlines that people listening to this podcast should be very, very aware of?
Dan Moseley 2:39
The majority of senior marketers we surveyed, said that they're feeling more pressure to deliver efficiency versus last year. About 64% of respondents. So massive, massive crowd of people who are feeling pressure, but not necessarily knowing how to address that. The really interesting bit that comes out of that is that 44% of people expected their budget to reduce if q4 fails to meet targets. So it's not just a feeling they're really starting to realize that this is kind of a budgetary issue, over quarter of that felt it would be cut by at least 20%. That's quite sizable 1/5 Drop in your budget next year. If you don't hit targets this year.
Amy Wright 3:17
Over 1/3 of marketers still aren't making any optimizations to their ad creative in flight at all. So that's no media optimization. That's no creative optimization. So really, this urgent Wake Up Call is around, you're leaving huge amounts of money and media spent on the table without the ability to optimize in flight.
Tom Ollerton 3:36
What was the process? How did you get to that insight?
Amy Wright 3:39
We as an ad tech platform have optimized over 6 billion impressions worth of creative data. So we've gone back through our different campaigns to look at key findings and insights that are true and common to all of those. And we're also super lucky through the podcast, through Awa, to have the ability to connect to hundreds of senior marketers worldwide. And so we had a survey and we asked them key questions around their attitudes to q4 how they were finding it versus last year. And key barriers that were stopping them from driving efficiency, and kind of more questions around how they found the working relationships between their teams. And then finally, we've done a massive drill down and I think have read every single paper on efficiency, effectiveness, and agile spending that's been published in the last five years. And we've also got a really great wealth of data from other surveys that has been carried out or other papers from partners like the W FA, who are really contributing in this space around effectiveness as well.
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Tom Ollerton 5:02
Where did you guys get the idea to do this? Like, why have automated creative decided to do this? What value is it bring into the industry?
Dan Moseley 5:11
There was a huge swell around the idea of media wastage. So billions of dollars are being spent in the wrong place. And the industry is really starting to wake up to how do we fix this? How do we solve for it and media to be so free and creative, and really, core chat we've had recently is with the World Federation of Advertisers, as Amy just mentioned, we're partnering with them on this paper, we've been talking to them a lot recently, they've just released a study that senior marketers worldwide, one of the things they feel the least confident about is having the right information to hand make a decision. So in there, you know, they've got a process, they've got a long journey of how do we improve effectiveness in our organization. And a really, really clear need is to have information time, so they made the right decision the right time.
Tom Ollerton 6:02
So big thing for me, when I saw early draft of the report was the figure about how many people aren't optimizing media or creatively at all, logically, you would want your creative and your media to optimize that all of your production and media spend. So why are people choosing not to optimize live, do you think?
Amy Wright 6:24
So I think ultimately, it's not a choice. It's something they're forced into by circumstance. And so the stat again, is that a third of marketers are not optimizing digital campaigns in flight at all. And the analogy I kind of like to use to compare this to is, it's the equivalent to front loading all of your spend all of your creative development and energy into building a rocket ship, but it's the most perfect rocket ship, you've got the smartest brains working on it. And it's kind of the equivalent to then try to fly it to the moon without any mission control. So the idea that once something is delivered, you can just set and forget it, I think is really prevalent. But ultimately, the block was, we found to people optimizing in flight, kind of come into two camps. So the first is time to decision. So that really touches on that WFA stat. Within our own stats, we actually found that only 2.6% of marketers felt fully confident that they had enough information mid campaign to take a decision around creative effectiveness. But the other one is then time to action. So it's the ability to then once you've got that insight, actually do something about it. And that's how we found that breakdown playing out across all of the survey data.
Tom Ollerton 7:36
And one of the things that you guys keep coming back to is this disconnect between creative and media. So why is that come about? And why is that an issue specifically in the Q4 Christmas holiday season?
Dan Moseley 7:51
A big thing for me is like scoping. So your creative agency are not scoped in the same way that the media agency are. And the creative agency, you know, want to bring a brilliant brand idea to life, you've got a brilliant brand expression, once that's delivered, how it's put into media isn't always the priority. So there aren't necessarily always incentivized to be tweaking digital toolkits, or, you know, using agency hours to deliver 50 different variants of an idea like that's not, that's not necessarily how they're scoped or even how the expertise is spent best. So we've actually found in the report that, you know, using automation, using some kind of service that can help make those digital toolkits go into media more effectively means that your agency creatives who love their campaign, they've kind of they've delivered the work they need to do, they don't have to do that part. It can be done with automation, etc. So there's partly that creative handover that, you know, the final bit of squeezing all the juice out of it and making sure the media is effective isn't necessarily their responsibility. Same thing on media is that you know, media are optimized to get the right placements, the right audience, the right platform, right time. What's actually going on in the creative isn't necessarily their skill. So they're not always, you know, best set up to tell you what's working, why is it working? You know, what themes are coming through here? Like, what are people responding to, they're really good at telling you, which ad worked but not necessarily why.
Amy Wright 9:24
So, unsurprisingly, as I work for a creative effectiveness platform. And there are kind of textiles and infrastructure that can help with this. And obviously, our platform was one of them. But part of it is about getting everyone on the same page with an infrastructure that plays to all of those different strengths that Dan was talking about. What we're not saying is that the media side or the creative side is better than the other. It's about being able to translate those two worlds and making sure that they work together. Equally. There's a bit of a empathy thing I think, from clients to understand that actually, the speed and pace at which partners are asked to deliver out now, in combination with just the breadth and depth, so we're looking at more digital platforms than ever. And through the funnel campaigns a lot more complex audience structures generally as well, it's giving them the tools that they need to do the job that they can do best. So it's that collaboration piece that helps us cut down the timing. But ultimately, when you're dealing with the sorts of scale and speed that we need to work with now, automation and technology is really the only solve because the size and scale of it, you just cannot keep scaling that effort across each of the new platforms, you have to find a way to kind of cut out that scale challenge. And automation really is the only way to do that
Tom Ollerton 10:51
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MADFest whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect the distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content startup innovation pitches and unconventional entertainment from MADfest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing, check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
Dan Moseley 11:27
There's also another thing that there's something in like training creative teams to, like, demand the information back on what's gone live quicker. So I used to work in social I, you know, I had brilliant creatives who really, really interested every single time post went live of what's happening, what can we do more of what can we do less of how can we make it better every time. And I think that mentality when you're looking at q4, and you've got these huge, huge campaigns that might take two, three months to land properly, or you've got, you know, we found Christmas ads are going live, and probably in the next 30 days, you're gonna start seeing a wave of them from that launching to get into the end of year, that's quite a long period. And if you're not seeing the immediate return of that, you know, until end of campaign reports, so you're not really learning from that. Sometimes it's sort of demotivates teams. Whereas I think what we want to do is there's no live dashboards or there's quicker turnaround insight. And if you can give that to teams and make them feel energized and excited by it, rather than feeling like oh my god, that's another thing I need to action, it should be a really exciting prod of, okay, I can see what's coming live, I can see what works and the things that I've put out how might I do more of it.
Amy Wright 12:37
I think we've all probably sat in presentations, where we're just seeing Excel spreadsheets and charts of percentage numbers and click through rates. But if you're not contextualizing that data if you're not telling the story that comes out of it, it does become slightly meaningless and a bit much of a muchness I think when you find those little nuggets of wisdom, the why of an ad working, it's something that teams get incredibly excited by because it gives them that start point to find something else, or go something new, or do a little bit more of something, really finding that story. And that insight and using that as a hook to do something bigger, better, and more evolved, but still within that kind of bigger campaign framework.
Tom Ollerton 13:19
So make it really simple for me, you've got two similar brands with two similar products, you've got one brand, there's going to do the traditional approach, and you've got one brand that's going to compound creative effectiveness. What Why will those two marketers' lives be different?
Dan Moseley 13:36
I actually got a perfect stat for this in the white paper. The difference between those two teams is 17%. And that is 17%. Here's what we see the average added media value or methodology returns on where you optimize versus not optimized. So we can see it in platform, we can see it in our results. If you want to improve the value of your media, by 17% optimization can deliver that not doing it, you're just leaving money on the table. So...
Amy Wright 14:06
The most exciting thing to me about inflight data, particularly when you're looking at creative and the triggers that are driving performance. So whether that's messaging themes, or language or tone, or specific copy or the visuals you're using, there's a real tendency in this industry to default to kind of industry best practice. And that is something that every single brand in that category can access. When you're looking at your own creative data. You're really giving it the context of your own brand and your own audience and how they are responding in the moment. So it becomes a lot more relevant. It's your own data. It's kind of special and bespoke to you. And it's something that I think is just firstly, much more valuable and much more useful. But it's like this treasure trove of things that unless you start digging into that data. You don't actually know what you're going to find. Don't go into a campaign assuming that you only thing that is going to perform best, give it a little bit of leeway. Either side, try some different types of messages that if you were only running one ad, you might not try and explore. Because it's often those extra things at the peripheries that do really, really well and actually outperform kind of safer, sort of more core brand lines,
Dan Moseley 15:18
A funny way of looking at it is, And I don't know why Tom, your description of two people standing side by side, it's got me sort of in like football brain, I used to work in sport a lot. So that's kind of where my head's at. But I would say, at the end of the season, if you had or let's call it match, if you had two, two brands, very similar teams doing similar things, if one of them looks at what's happening in front of them, and makes no changes, and they accept it, you know, kind of going, okay, but they're not really changing, they're not really making any effort to push it forward. I would contrast that with a team that are actively managing what's happening on the field, they're moving things around, they're trying different things to, you know, perform better. And I think that in my head, it's just, we have the tools, technology teams, information to hand do these things. I think more and more like the people we work with, want to be seen, as you know, active on the front foot making those changes. And I think, you know, the more I think about it is, we need to just give people permission or, you know, make them excited about fiddling with campaigns and you know, pushing things forward, rather than accepting, you know, maybe older ways of working, which is just set, forget, you know, see what happens and report at the end, I think, I think a lot of management is going to start demanding that their teams optimize. And some of the best people we work with do that.
Amy Wright 16:45
Thinking of your sporting metaphors, there was the marginal gains kind of chat from London 2012 Olympics was always something talked about. This is like marginal gains, except at the margins are not marginal, we get really significant uplifts and double figures percentage points most of the time across campaigns through the funnel. So looking at those two different teams, I think, as more people start live optimizing, people are going to get left behind and their competitors are going to start outstripping them. Because it's almost like a lever that if you're not pulling, you're leaving so much on the table.
Tom Ollerton 17:19
So what can the audience expect from the webinar?
Dan Moseley 17:23
So first off, we've got some great guests, we've got joining us, our World Federation of Advertisers, who hopefully you're going to do a foreword in our white paper and join us for the chat. We've got partners from Brown Forman, we've got partners from Mars, joining us to give a bit of you know how they did it. And I think some of that might just be really nice to know. Now, organizationally, how do they do it? How do they sell an optimization, how they get teams on board with what they're doing? And then what we're trying to do on the webinar is give you a set of things that easily can go into action in q4. Really quick tactics that aren't going to change the fundamentals of your campaign. They can bolt in easily. And yeah, just being as least disruptive as we can be, but for the maximum amount of impact.
Tom Ollerton 18:09
If you would like to attend the compounding creative an urgent, q4, wake up call virtual event. You can see the link in the show notes or if you listen to this somewhere somewhere below us when in your app, we will share a link so we'll be excited to see you then.
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