“Digital Has Ruined Advertising; So Here’s How We Fix It”

When it comes to digital advertising, there’s a fine line between ‘relevant’ and ‘annoying’. If you’ve ever booked a holiday only to be pursued for weeks around the internet by adverts for other holidays (which you can no longer afford having spent all your money on the original holiday), you know how it feels for that line to be crossed. 

It’s a near-universal experience. The tool kit after your house has already been renovated. Or the great ‘deal’ on the product you just bought five minutes ago. There’s a point at which, with all the data and targeting at their disposal, digital advertisers sail so closely towards relevance that they become irrelevant. 

If there’s anyone who understands both the great potential and the cognitive dissonance at the heart of modern online marketing, it’s Josh Rosen. Josh is the co-founder of Hotspex Media, the media buying and planning agency, as well as Reticle, an contextual data tool built around emotional AI. More on that later. 

“I’d invite you to think about some brands who have really built strong identities for themselves, and how they did it”, he suggests. “For example, BMW has planted its flag in being performance-driven, Mercedes is steeped in tradition and luxury, and Audi is future-forward and technologically curious. These are identities that help differentiate amidst an ultra-competitive category”. 

But those examples of brands, as LBB replies to Josh, were all built and established before our current era of digital marketing. “Bingo!”, he retorts. “And therein lies the tragedy of it, and the space where we need to improve”. 

In Josh’s view, the trouble for brands in the digital space isn’t that their strategies are failing. Rather, it’s that they’re succeeding at all the wrong things. 

“The metrics you use to measure success are things like impressions, reach, landing page views, click-through rates and CPM. But none of that tells you what folks actually think of a brand”, he laments. “Think about what our advertising forefathers had available to them. They put up a billboard, and they waited to see what happened. They let the market drive their optimisation”. 

This was the logical starting point which eventually led to the creation of Reticle. Rather than wistfully bemoan the lost arts and beauty of advertising in an age of big data and optimisation, Josh set out to marry the best aspects of both eras together. 

The result is a platform which focuses on emotions; helping advertisers align the emotional intent of their ads with placements that convey a similar tone. The thinking is that ads will feel more at home in their digital surroundings - relevant, but not overbearing, interruptive, or annoying. 

“I think digital has ruined advertising, but it isn’t beyond saving”, explains Josh. “There’s a place for metrics and algorithms, they’re just not the be-all and end-all. We’ve let click-through rates drive decision-making at the cost of human connections for too long. At the end of the day, humans are still the ones buying things. So we need to remember that we are connecting with human beings, not data points”. 

The emotional science underpinning Reticle is, as Josh proudly explains, the Hotspex Insights Human Motivation framework. Established over 20 years ago and used globally by hundreds of brands and built in collaboration with the help of former P&G behavioural scientist Dr Daniel Young, the framework is also powered, as so many emerging platforms are, by AI. But, as Josh goes on to note, this is actual AI - as opposed to an imitator. 

“I sat on a panel recently with Rite Aid's CMO Jeanniey Walden and she put this beautifully recently, when she pointed out the difference between something that was artificial intelligence - AI - or simply an intelligent automation - IA”, he says. “Intelligent automation is nothing new, and many of them are being rebranded to AI in order to cash in on the current hype. But real AI is about making complex decisions resulting in unique outcomes. That’s what Reticle does, finding the perfect placement for an ad based not just on data points we know about the user, but the nuanced emotional attributes found in a piece of content across connected TV, OLV, YouTube, or written text. 

The ultimate aim is to cure that feeling of irritation which plagues so many of us when we encounter digital ads. “It’s funny”, notes Josh, “that we get annoyed when we see an ad for something we’ve just bought online - we think it’s totally irrelevant to us. But if you’d just bought some jeans and you found yourself walking under a giant billboard for Levi’s, that wouldn’t annoy you. You wouldn’t think twice. Ergo, it isn’t the ad itself which is irritating - it’s that we know too much about how the sausage gets made and we find the failure of that process to be annoying”. 

In practice, Josh believes that digital advertising is held to a higher standard. “So it’s about time we started to deliver on that”, he concludes.