Now we all realize it’s a crazy world where anything could suddenly up-end business fundamentally – but at least we can plan for the next major enforced change.
Preparedness and resilience for large-scale resets are emerging onto the agendas of businesses around the world, and marketing is no exception.
In the last couple of months, many brands have had to quickly adjust their advertising strategy for different business circumstances and their creative to be more suitable for pandemic-era consumers.
Greg Anderson thinks this agility in pursuit of brand suitability can be expressed through dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the advertising technology that can allow ad buyers to quickly reassembly the creative in their ad slots.
“One area where I think we will see some adjustments is in the approach around planning and how advertisers want to adjust for any type of changes that may occur in their approach, in the economy or marketplace itself,” says the MD of Xaxis Media Group, the GroupM unit.
“With the adjustments to the economy and the consumer, we’ve seen a lot of brands leaning into dynamic messaging and changing that strategy altogether.”
Post-pandemic dynamic
DCO was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.
Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.
“We’re templatizing that approach for the brands and allowing different types of messages to be fed-in based on the consumers they’re reaching and how they’re trying to drive different types of performance metrics for their campaigns,” Anderson adds.
“Within pharma and health, we’ve seen them changing their approach around messaging and how they align with the consumer. In some cases with retailers, we’re seeing a shift from driving people in-store to picking up kerbside or to their e-comm sites.”
Pricing-up
Although TV ad rates are commonly known to have crashed, Anderson says, in a DCO world, that isn’t always the case.
“It’s not as simple as that,” he says. “We’re seeing that some brands are actually leaning into it in a very big way, wanting to align with COVID messaging and new sites, others want to steer clear of it.
“And so, depending on that strategy, we’re actually seeing, in some cases, prices increase.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
