James is the founder and CEO of Scoota. Prior to this, he was co-founder and CEO of Tangozebra, the leading provider of creative-first digital marketing solutions in Europe. Tangozebra was sold to DoubleClick/Google in 2007. In 2003 James was nominated as the most influential person in new media, by New Media Age (NMA) magazine; two years later Campaign Magazine placed him fourth in a survey of the greatest Internet pioneers. In 2006 he was nominated at the NMA awards for the greatest individual contribution to new media. Today, Scoota is a leading provider of creative-first, omni-channel programmatic solutions.
What would you think of if I said ‘white horses’? Perhaps Flat Eric means something to some of you; or Nick Kamen and his stone-washed Levis?
According to Wikipedia, the Guinness surfer still holds the number one spot for the greatest television ad of all time. For so many reasons it worked. I can imagine the brainstorming sessions as the team listed out ideas of when the ‘wait’ is worth it. They landed on surfing and brought the energy to life with white horses. Brand engagement done correctly.
Digital advertising almost found its own equivalent creative mojo, before programmatic arrived and things started to go a little sour in the that department. Being digital, technology sits at the heart of all progress, and it’s technology that has hindered as much as helped.
The first online ‘banner’ appeared in October 1994. Back then, accessing the Internet was a gentle process. Dial-up modems delivered barely enough bandwidth for the host site to load, let alone carry advertising. Banner ads were small, and they were light; there was little room for ambitious creativity. The job of the banner was to elicit a click; many tactics were tested.
By the mid-late ‘90s, very basic interactivity was being trialled within banner ads. For this to be possible required the coding language, Java; installed by default in the popular browsers of the time. While these advances made sense for an interactive medium, the lack of available bandwidth prevented anything ambitious being deployed; equally, the build required hand coding, which immediately introduced barriers.
There are moments that mark the key stages of Internet advertising, and without question, the arrival of broadband is one. For the UK, that moment was the year 2000, when NTL launched its ADSL, ‘always on’ connection. The first step in resolving the bandwidth issue had been taken; suddenly the door was open for true creativity.
What the advertising industry now needed was a creative canvas; a tool that would allow designers to experiment and build without the need to hand-write code. That tool was Macromedia Flash.
Flash was a system that allowed designers to create imagery out of vector-based instruction. Crudely, the language told the computer which colour to display at an individual pixel level. It had been designed to allow greater control of visual elements over restricted bandwidth, such as adding animation and more visually interesting levels of interactivity. While vector images were fun to play with, they were far from ideal. Flash-based websites tended to look ‘cartoony’, and for a while, only certain browsers carried a Flash player; so a separate, downloadable plugin was needed in some cases.
But Macromedia kept up with the advances in bandwidth and what those could mean to their system. By 2002, video had been added; that together with photographic imagery changed the dynamic. The creative industry had its authoring suite; there was bandwidth to play with, and awards to win.
With creative agencies experimenting heavily with video-based Flash executions within websites, the scene as set for much more creative adverts. But to convert these new Flash executions into working adverts, control all the delivery aspects, and reveal the user engagement data, additional technology was needed. Enter Tangozebra and Eyeblaster.
Original ideas that blended video and interactivity, flowed. Boundaries were pushed; over-intrusive format types were killed, and the display side of digital advertising enjoyed a period where creativity counted; where wonderful ideas entertained and engaged users. This was a time when targeting was limited to user behaviour within those destination sites on a media plan; when the context of the pages targeted were equally a consideration. Exciting times.
And then in 2011, Apple launched the iPad, without support for Flash.
With Flash falling away from mobile devices in favour of a new mark-up language, HTML5, creative agencies faced a challenge: HTML5 required hand coding; that didn’t work for them – they weren’t coders.
What also didn’t work, was how HTML5 behaved in its early guise. Browser support was shaky to start with, as was being able to deliver the JavaScript code needed to manage the downloading and execution of an interactive multimedia creative built in HTML5.
JavaScript has a habit of breaking web pages. It can interfere with the code (CSS) that organises how a page is laid out. Historically, adverts requiring JavaScript were systematically pretested on each site listed within the campaign media plan, in advance of the campaign going live; any anomalies would then be fixed by technical teams, such that the delivery was a successful experience for all the stakeholders.
But programmatic trading means real-time bidding on a single media space that in the moment aligns to the advertiser’s target metrics. Delivering single files such as a JPEG, PNG, or even video, isn’t an issue, but to respond to a bid in real time with untested JavaScript into a website that happens to be where the ideal target audience is, isn’t an option, for fear of what that script might do to the site.
To solve this issue, and as is still very much the case today, the market shifted towards buying rich creative activity through networks of pretested websites, transacted as a marketplace. The buy side can access the marketplace vendors and buy into their inventory via a deal ID within their demand-side platform.
Sounds good, but maintaining a marketplace of pre-tested websites sufficiently large to be interesting enough to support major activity, is time-consuming. Websites evolve; code needs to be up to date. As such, the marketplace model usually results in considerable margin on the media spend being eroded as vendor revenue, and due to the nature of the delivery, levels of transparency and/or fraud management enjoyed through the more traditional approaches to programmatic trading, can be restricted.
And so, for lack of an alternative, the market has largely relied on expensive delivery into restricted reach, for non-video-based high-impact creative. Until more recently, this hasn’t necessarily been a big issue; after all, programmatic has pretty much evolved to be predominantly about retargeting, and in that capacity, creativity has been very much an afterthought.
Sitting centrally in the mix has been the application of ever-increasing layers of data, exploited for the purpose of enriching programmatic bids. As an industry we’ve adopted an approach that isn’t about entertaining and rewarding users, but much more about persistent and repeated presentations of retargeted creative. I have a small dog who is obsessed with a green ball; he drops it at my feet constantly. It makes me think of the less effective types of programmatic advertising.
Confidence in the third-party cookie is waning. This means contextual targeting is back in vogue for those who aren’t trying to achieve retargeting nirvana via first-party data. To drive strong performance from contextual targeting, great creative is needed. Get the blend of creativity and context right and performance follows.
I used to live near a road in London where every now and then, a French market would appear. I’d pop out on a Saturday morning to buy a pint of milk and newspaper; I’d return with a basket full of goodies. The creative experience had won me over. In that capacity it was an organic experience.
For purposes of online advertising, organic audiences will be lured in by an attractive and relevant creative execution placed in the right environment, at the right time. This is where interactive, rich creative can work wonders – engaging and retaining a user, building positive sentiments towards the advertiser along the way, and delivering tremendous levels of insightful data.
The technologies that allow true creativity to flow to wherever the relevant audiences and contextual fits are, now exist. Seek to bring true creativity and contextual relevance into your campaigns, regardless of the channel, you may be surprised at the impact.