LOS ANGELES – Some brand marketers are tired of hearing about things like ad tech stacks, data integrations, measuring click rates and figuring out last-touch attribution. But there is a growing focus on things like dynamic ad insertion to tailor messaging to the right audience at the most appropriate time.
“What they want to know is did you drive sales,” says Matt Sweeney, President of Xaxis North America, the programmatic specialty unit of WPP Group.
He thinks the pendulum has swung “so far to the right” in terms of having very timely data and being able to identify people who are most likely to buy in market.
In response, Xaxis continues to staff up Xaxis Ad Labs, which currently consists of a team of about a dozen people. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s twice that if it’s twice that size by the end of the year,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
It’s within XAL that designers, producers and developers stay ahead of the curve of dynamic creative optimization. “They very often are working with the strategists who are creating the audiences and working within our DMP and, more importantly, finding partners who can help us with data activation,” Sweeney explains.
Decisioning factors that inform may include not only male/female differences but rural versus city locations and what the weather happens to be doing during a particular time of day. Client categories include e-commerce, retail and, increasingly, automobiles.
“The storytelling is something that I think folks in programmatic have to do a better job of embracing,” says Sweeney. “At the end of the day, even our best clients, our closest partners, are a little tired of hearing about ad tech stack and data integrations.”
Asked about the value proposition of investing in numerous creative iterations for targeting a variety of audiences, Sweeney says Xaxis can use benchmarks to show clients that with dynamic creative, “the incremental cost of being smarter in engaging customers has tremendous, tremendous ROI.”
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.
