LOS ANGELES – Reaching the right audience with advertising is only part of the bigger puzzle called engagement. It starts with figuring out the role of media in driving creative decisions.
“I think the opportunity around creativity is to divorce it from the visual design standpoint,” says Doug Rozen, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at global media agency OMD. Rozen and his teams spend a fair amount of time thinking through the role of media in driving creativity and creative decisions, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
In this manner they constantly seek to push contextual understanding to reach people better. “I think the most important thing is to find ways to think beyond a box, think beyond a screen, beyond an ad and create content that a consumer really wants,” says Rozen.
Part of the job is reaching audiences and then engaging them and breaking through to make a meaningful connection. “I think at times we get lost about either just making a connection and failing to reach, or reaching them without that connection. A lot of what we’re trying to do is how to bring those two things together,” says Rozen.
Asked about OMD’s experience to date with artificial intelligence technology, Rozen says it ranges not only from conversation assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to Google Assistant but to insights that can be gleaned from AI to inform media knowledge of things like audience segments. He likens AI in human terms to a toddler in a hurry.
“What’s exciting is that it’s growing up fast. It will not take years for it to be a teenager and adult,” Rozen says.
Transformation in advertising and media means different things to different people. People usually talk about how creative or media agencies have changed to keep pace with consumers and clients, but not Rozen.
“What transformation means to me is evolution. We cannot stand still. If we stand still we are dead,” he says.
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
