While brands are expending considerable resources to reach the right consumer at the right time with advertising messages, once they reach those people “they’re still saying the same thing,” according to Victor Wong, the CEO of Thunder, a creative management platform.
A software-as-a-service provider, Thunder did a survey with a major digital advertising exchange showing just how widespread this phenomenon is.
“The problem for brands is that over 90% of campaigns didn’t actually have a specific creative to deliver to a specific audience,” Wong says in an interview with Beet.TV. “That’s the part that gets missed.”
Thunder does not have its own in-house studio, preferring that advertisers and agencies take the lead on tailoring messaging to consumer targets.
“Nobody knows the brand better than they do,” Wong says. “We think it’s important to give the people who are doing the targeting the capability to change the messaging.”
Thunder’s platform facilitates the design of a library of reusable templates and assets so that creatives can build and edit multiple ad sizes at the same time. The end result: custom ad variations that are created in seconds
“We’re trying to make it easy and scalable to design messaging for your audiences, especially as they are going across more and more channels, like mobile, social and display,” Wong says.
Thunder’s open architecture reflects the reality of walled gardens like Facebook, which doesn’t let anyone directly access its data to build ads. “Instead, what they would prefer is you design creative specific to audiences, you give it to Facebook and Facebook will target it and optimize based on what their findings were,” says Wong.
He cites figures showing that about 33% of ad inventory cannot run dynamically assembled creative by a third party.
“And probably by 2020, we’ve seen stats as high as 60% of all inventory will not allow a third party to dynamically assemble the creative,” says Wong.
