In defence of creativity
Looking past on the badlands of digital and the future of the metaverse
We all made a deal with the devil when the internet was created. The internet would be ‘free’ to access, but that access would be made possible thanks to advertising. Much has been written about the evils that rose from the online exchange of content for personal data, but a surprising downside I want to focus on is how this exchange has negatively affected the creative practice of advertising.
It's well established news that digital advertising has taken over traditional spends.
It's no surprise that digital advertising has risen to dizzying heights. There are a myriad of benefits, opportunities and techniques to leverage, but to boil it down: Digital advertising means you are able to reach more people, reach specific groups of people, and measure how those people react to you reaching them. On the surface it can deliver the best of both worlds; mass reach when you need it, specificity when you don’t and solves that age old problem of knowing which half of your advertising works and which doesn’t.
A key draw of digital advertising is the ability to target specific groups of people. Targeting became a rave for marketing revellers and data was the drug that kept them partying all night. Advertisers became obsessed with data in the early 2000s, it led to a split between large traditional 'creative' agencies who didn't have the tech hires to keep up, and a new crop of digital agencies who favoured blasting ads in tricky ways to select groups in place of mastering a single compelling creative message for all. Then came social media, with unprecedented levels of insight into user data and increasingly intrusive methods of targeting. The obsession, and reliance, on data-led advertising grew digital advertising from an experimental spend in a marketing budget to a $130 billion industry.
Which leads us to the current day. New privacy restrictions brought on by the likes of Apple and Google have started a war between Silicon Valley and Madison avenue as access to the data that advertisers rely on is restricted.
On one side of the battle we have tech giants such as Google and Apple. Google announced it will disable a lifeblood of targeted digital advertising, cookies. Cookies are a tracking tech tactic that allows advertisers to build up a data profile on users based on their activity. Apple introduced anti-tracking via a pop-up window on their new OS which asks users direct permission for apps to track individual activity. Both these measures massively affected the ability to advertise on Fb which relies on external data for their ad targeting abilities.
On the other side of the battle are the advertisers reliant on tracking info to deliver data for highly targeted ads. Below is a window into the frustrations of advertisers as their abilities to target are all but strangled...
Here's what makes this battle really interesting: Those highly targeted marketing techniques that advertisers are desperate to hang on to are simply not an efficient or effective spend of a marketing budget in the first place.
Get with the programmatic
The most prevalent form of digital advertising is known as programmatic advertising, and it makes up 89% of a $130 billion industry. The basic difference between programmatic advertising and other forms is you don't directly choose where your ads are placed. An advertiser will create the ad and define a target audience, send that to a middle-man, who along with a few other middle men, programmatically distribute thousands of versions of the ad to wherever the audience the advertiser seeks exists online. This means the ad can end up anywhere from the NYTimes to Facebook or Breitbart.
It's this attitude of reaching people without knowing where we are reaching them that has led to fundamental weaknesses in performance media. Programmatic advertising has become fraudulent, increasingly expensive, often placed in undesirable contexts and ultimately ineffective.
Fraudulent
Ad fraud occurs when an ad is reported to the advertiser as being seen or engaged with by an audience when it hasn't. It comes in many forms but some common ones are:
Fake clicks and views: Where bots will impersonate human clicks and views
Click farms: Where factories of people are paid to endlessly click on ads from multiple monitors
Pixel stuffing: Multiple ads are crammed into a tiny single pixel space and charged as if they covered the whole unit
Ad stacking: Ads are stacked on top of each other and measured as if they all had their own space
Ad fraud isn't something that happens if you're unlucky, it's incredibly widespread. A report by PwC and an advertising industry group found that only 12% of programmatic ads can be matched and confirmed as delivered.
More expensive
Programmatic is becoming more expensive for a few reasons. To start with, due to ad fraud being so prevalent an advertiser will have to overspend knowing that a significant proportion of the money is wasted on fake clicks and views. There's also been a squeeze on inventory from the post-pandemic marketing rush. This has caused Facebook ad impressions to soar 33% from pre-pandemic and Google costs per click on it's ads were up 23%
Undesirable contexts
A crucial part of brand building is building brand by association. This is why you'll see an ad for Rolex in a luxury publication, to be perceived as a luxury product they want to appear next to expensive boats, cars and real estate. A fundamental problem with programmatic advertising is that it distributes ads to specific audiences, wherever they appear on the internet. This means a brand can find themselves in undesirable contexts. They can appear on far-right websites filled with miss-information, next to a racist YouTube video or surrounded by hate speech on a platform with fundamental ethical challenges.
It comes to a point where the negative brand association isn't worth the targeted scale you can achieve with programmatic. This is a realisation Patagonia came to last year:
Even if a website has quality and ethical content, bad ad design can make it impossible for your brand to make a quality impression, just look at the convoluted ad placement from Complex:
Ultimately the biggest proof of the ineffectiveness of programmatic media are the 'turn off' experiments made by major brands in the last 5 years. P&G, Chase, Uber and Airbnb all experimented with shutting off large amounts of digital advertising, and all found no impact on their growth. It's astounding evidence of dysfunction.
So what do we do?
What makes the digital advertising dilemma more complex is that we can't simply go back to tried and tested traditional methods of marketing.
It is a myth that 'TV is dead', cable TV is still the dominant format in US households, but it is definitely true that TV is dying and will soon not deliver the reach that large advertisers need.
Print on the other hand is dead, replaced by online subscription options which often don't allow for significant advertising opportunities.
The subscription internet is slowly replacing the ad supported internet. And it's getting harder and harder to advertise to people in engaging and emotive ways with traditional media. So, what tools do brands have at their disposal?
Creativity, the oldest and strongest tool marketers have
Let's go back to a fundamental truth that should act as a guiding filter for marketing decisions: creativity.
Creativity is core to successful advertising, but recently we've swapped it for tech-enabled efficiency. This is not only making our jobs less fun, it's also making our work less effective. The IPA, an advertising industry group, studied all the creatively awarded campaigns from 2008-2018 and found that campaigns awarded for their creativity work better than those that aren't…
Creativity is more effective
It drives market share
and it drives key business affects in the long term
Using creativity as a filter for decisions gives us some clear opportunities in the short and long term.
In the short term, advertisers should double down on creativity that is so unexpected it gets naturally shared by digital media ecosystems at scale. The fundamental shift in thinking is not seeing digital media as a place to buy spaces to host campaigns, but as an ecosystem to be manipulated for amplification of creative campaigns.
The digital creative collective MSCHF are masters at coming up with highly conceptual, creative ideas made for internet fame. The most recent example is their Andy Warhol experiment, a quick search shows how impactful the idea was.
In the long term the focus has to be on the concept of the week, possibly the year - metaverse.
I just listened to Matthew Ball, a VC that has defined and driven the metaverse concept, interview Mark Zuckerberg on his vision for advertising in the metaverse. Zuckerberg mentioned digital billboards, and other 'limited spaces that can be bought by brands' as the future of advertising in the metaverse. This is an incredibly narrow vision that doesn’t leverage the possibilities brands can have to participate in, and advance, metaverse platforms. The metaverse presents advertisers with an opportunity to move beyond programmatic targeting and to start connecting with consumers in impactful ways with compelling experiences. Compelling brand experiences aren’t new, in fact an experience as compelling as the Tour de France was started by a small French sports magazine in 1918 to increase attention for the publication.
There are a few key roles for brands to build, not pollute, the metaverse
1) Create experiences not ads. Just as we're happy to go to Barclays stadium to watch a basketball game, brands can build metaverse properties that draw in audiences. Vans has already done this by building a skate park in Roblox. Brands can use NFTs as tickets to metaverse experiences, ensuring that they can build communities of fans in the long term.
2) Decentralize advocacy. Currently brands will pay influencers with large followings to advocate for their brand. In the metaverse you could offer currency to anyone willing to participate, advocate or sell for the brand. It's a similar concept to play to earn gaming that I call 'engage to earn'.
3) Mint and distribute NFTs and other ownable brand assets. Brands can create and release limited digital products for people to wear and use in the metaverse. Dolce and Gabbana and other fashion brands have created and sold fashion NFTs, Nike just filed a patent for digital versions of their products. These items deliver publicity on launch, spread the brand in the metaverse and also act as a healthy revenue stream for desirable brands.
4) Help people advance on the metaverse. Better services, tech and assets. As the metaverse expands, the needs users will have will expand with it. Can't speak to your new metaverse friend from Belgium? Use your Duolingo NFT to translate their speech.
I am going to delve further into metaverse opportunities for brands in a dedicated future post. I truly believe the metaverse offers an opportunity for a cultural reset in the marketing world.
Red pill or blue pill….or purple pill
There seems to be a binary choice presented in advertising: do you want to leverage tech, or leverage creativity. This choice is completely false - technology should strengthen and amplify creative opportunities, not squash them. With metaverse and Web3 structures ushering new and exciting technologies there’s an unmissable opportunity to use technology to drive new creative possibilities, not stifle them.
P.S: If you know someone in the metaverse space feel free to share this with them!