VIEQUES, PR – The prospect of dynamically tailoring individual scenes within video ads for targeted viewers is mind-blowing – and headache-inducing.
Last year, a poll of senior global marketers said personalized ads made for higher response and engagement rates. But, for marketers and the agencies who make the ads, getting there is not easy, a panel convened by Beet.TV heard:
Carat’s Ray identified two main challenges standing in the way of the opportunity:
- Producing for the right platforms: “Roughly 80% of digital video is consumed on mobile devices. In a digital video environment, how do I create compelling content that’s not about repurposing TV content?”
- Getting enough material to customize: “We’re having very clear conversations with creative agencies – prior to preproduction, what are you going to capture in B-roll footage at your TV shoot that can then be leveraged in a dynamic creative standpoint?”
Imagine making a TV ad for every individual consumer. That’s going to require a lot of individual footage assets, plus the ability to thread them together in to something resembling a standard 30- or 15-second commercial.
Tech vendors like Eyeview and Flite are emerging to support the latter. But even Flite’s Goodwin, whose company enables ad creative management, cautions against too ambitious a goal for now.
“If we’re talking about addressable TV, we can do five versions, seven versions,” he said. “We would love to do 100,000 versions – but the technology is not ready.
“The set-top box is not built to hold 100,000 versions, there is limited hard drive space. Once the set-top box is digitised, you’ll be able to get the ad on a real-time basis, then we’ll be able to do 100,000 versions on TV.”
For now, Flite is supporting a plethora of personalization of supported devices, however: “On connected TV, we are doing 100,000 versions. In a Facebook environment, we are limited to 10,000, 20,000 versions.”
For agencies used to making one or two ads for a brand campaign, the coming age may sound challenging.
But Eyeview’s Cohen, whose company supports programmatic media management, advised: “We don’t change (the entire) 30 seconds, we change (only) five seconds.”
At the end of the day, Carat’s Ray offered a useful framework for marketers embarking on a dynamic ad creative future, one that is dependent on present-day data-based ad targeting principles:
- “Crawl“: “The first step is starting to think in a more granular way about targeting.”
- “Walk“: “Once we can do that, then we understand which audiences are working better.”
- “Run“: “The next layer is, ‘how do we improve the performance even further?’ That’s when we get in to thinking about dynamic creative and stating to introduce certain tech partners.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
