"John Anonymous," former ECD of a holding company agency, experienced the shift to digital and social media. He is now a brand consultant, advising clients on how to manage today's complex media mix.
John Anonymous has a few valid points, though he sounds like a crusty agency guy longing for the past. "Depth and richness of individual creative pieces" as the main output is great for captive audiences on a couple of TV networks and forced-exposure 30-second cinematic video ads. Which people still don't want to watch, most of the time. That's the past. Why does a world with more environments to connect with consumers necessarily mean loss of creative? There are more creative options in which to create the magical cocktail of audience, creative and media context -- with more personalization. The "new creative" is orchestration of all of these ingredients, not just a few "individual creative pieces". Sure, creative has had its own challenges with scaling (not necessarily linear), though the tools to support creative execution at scale, at high quality, are emerging quickly (i.e., GenAI and much more). This is not the end of creative quality, this is only the beginning of a richer world! The definition of creative quality is changing, and hopefully it will be judged not on intuition of ad tirekickers, but of validated measurement. Separate related topic: Why do ad creative people shun data so often? Why do attribution systems (i.e.. MMMs) omit creative and creative quality 99.9% of the time when the creative has disproportionate influence the sales outcomes of campaigns?
John Anonymous has a few valid points, though he sounds like a crusty agency guy longing for the past. "Depth and richness of individual creative pieces" as the main output is great for captive audiences on a couple of TV networks and forced-exposure 30-second cinematic video ads. Which people still don't want to watch, most of the time. That's the past. Why does a world with more environments to connect with consumers necessarily mean loss of creative? There are more creative options in which to create the magical cocktail of audience, creative and media context -- with more personalization. The "new creative" is orchestration of all of these ingredients, not just a few "individual creative pieces". Sure, creative has had its own challenges with scaling (not necessarily linear), though the tools to support creative execution at scale, at high quality, are emerging quickly (i.e., GenAI and much more). This is not the end of creative quality, this is only the beginning of a richer world! The definition of creative quality is changing, and hopefully it will be judged not on intuition of ad tirekickers, but of validated measurement. Separate related topic: Why do ad creative people shun data so often? Why do attribution systems (i.e.. MMMs) omit creative and creative quality 99.9% of the time when the creative has disproportionate influence the sales outcomes of campaigns?
Cheers!
- Max