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Marketers are increasingly up against significant challenges. Our budgets are tight and resources are lean yet the expectations of our clients and consumers are higher than ever. So it’s become a master balancing act of doing more with less. Pile on the fact that new ad trends are forcing production teams to meet the relentless demand for distinct video creative — one of the most intricate media assets in terms of production.
The morale of the story? Brands have to rethink their approach to creative development to be successful in 2024. Let’s talk through it.
The Challenge: A Channel You Can’t Ignore
As the fastest growing trend in marketing across demographics, it’s no surprise that CTV is the must-have ad channel of late. We know video has always dominated the ad game with impressive stats that continue to trump text and images — such as consumers retain 95% of an ad’s message when it’s watched versus just 10% retained when it’s read. And now, CTV is taking that consumption to the next level by creating platforms that initiate conversations and create viral moments that boost conversions and engagement in a way that feels more natural.
But being present and effective on this channel is anything but easy. The need to have a plethora of video content that requires yet another set of unique specs and considerations than the short-form video ads you’re likely running across your social channels requires a ton of time, effort, and money. But with teams and resources leaner than ever, this isn’t something most marketers have to give.
For starters, embracing this newer realm of video advertising means lacking the performance metrics to understand how to scale. And even with that knowledge, many marketing teams lack the agility to adjust in what’s essentially real-time to that data, optimize for a variety of audiences, and redistribute in the most effective ways.
So what happens? They’re either limited in their output, getting lost in the competitors that are able to keep the production pipeline full and becoming easily forgettable. Or they continue to show the same ads over and over across multiple platforms, giving viewers an extreme case of ad fatigue — which ultimately leads to less engagement, fewer visits, and dwindling impressions. It’s a choice between ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ or just plain annoying.
Today, every ad is a creative story that has to be unique and purposeful. That’s no secret. But understanding how to optimize those unique assets in volume for multiple target audiences isn’t as obvious.
The Proposal: Reimagine Your Creative Development Approach
Keys to success in CTV advertising: it’s data-driven, A/B tested, optimized, and quickly modified at scale.
Breaking down the silos between media buying and a high-performing creative process can dramatically boost your campaign power by allowing you to create significantly more assets to launch. And that’s where an ad partner comes in.
With a partnership between performance metrics and media buys, marketers can make subtle, yet meaningful modifications to their ads that can dramatically impact the tone and message to match your objectives and target each unique audience your targeting.
What’s the impact? Advertisers who deploy more than three creative variations of an ad spend 31% less on costs per visit and see 63% higher return on ad spend. In fact, Harvard Business Review has reported that minimizing media spend while investing more in creative production drives more sales in the long run.
The Game Plan: Bundling Your Creative Production & Media Buying
The obvious way to deliver unique content to your diverse audiences constantly and consistently is to have a full creative pipeline at all times. With an on-going supply of ads at your disposal, you can test, analyze, learn, and adjust to drive better performance without harmful lags between deployments. (Again, easier said than done for most marketers.)
So instead of doing what you usually do and going to an agency to develop one creative campaign that gets blasted in fragments across multiple platforms, creating a disconnect between your media buying intel and optimization, let’s try something new. Take the money you were already planning to spend on both a media buy and creative production individually, and bundle them together.
New approaches exist that allow you to do just that. Marketers can now couple the custom, results-driven creative with your media so they can actually work together harmoniously, not only learning from previous performance to better optimize your campaigns, but also enabling the development of a lot more creative in less time to keep your presence fresh and effective.
The Conclusion: How Assemble is Staying Ahead of the Game
While Connected TV advertising, as well as AI-powered technologies and platforms, continue to emerge and evolve, there are a lot of advantages for marketers to capitalize on. The traditional barriers to TV creative aren’t as permanent as they used to be, and with the right strategy, launching and measuring your performance-driven campaigns and scaling in capacities you never considered before can be affordable and simple.
What’s even better is that you’ve already found the perfect ad partner for the job (👋). At Assemble, we know that the only way to push the boundaries creatively is to work smarter by optimizing as many aspects of the production process as possible. So that’s exactly what we do; we research, we test, we learn, and we build our own tools that aim to make each step simpler, faster, and more automated. So when you’re relying on the quick delivery of tens or hundreds of asset variations, we have the best solution for your goals, assets, and placements.
Like our new BannerForge platform, which employs an entire library of reusable templates and analyzes all the best parts of each framework to automate the banner development process. Or our BAM tool, designed with a smart text editor tailored for coding, so developers can instantly generate code for any email component you can think of, without the need for testing.
We’re in the constant pursuit of dissolving the challenges today’s marketers are facing in the creative production process. If you want to learn more, contact us today.