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What Do We Do When We’ve Reached Peak Click-Through?

31/05/2019
Production Agency
London, United Kingdom
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INFLUENCER: Alastair Duncan from Splash Worldwide argues effectiveness must be built in, not bolted on to advertising production
Talking to senior marketing executives around the world, they want to do two fundamental things. Keep their brands front of mind for buyers in their category, and ensure that all advertising efforts are measurably real and effective. It strikes me that there is an ever-tightening thread that binds these challenges together - the ongoing tension between the desire for creativity and the desire for performance. Strategists love a bit of tension in their work. It creates the spark for ideas. 

Yet this particular tension is more operational than creative. Because of the rise of digital, there are now two distinct approaches to advertising: creating macro impact branded ideas to get people talking about a brand, and creating micro contact branded content that nudges consumers along a purchase funnel. Both are vital, and both are enhanced by the power of creativity. And as the advertising ecosystem has become more complex, finding the right language for effectiveness has got more interesting. 

Short term attention or long term attribution?


There’s a great story about the head of the Wrigley’s business (told by Sir John Hegarty). When asked by a fellow passenger on a transatlantic flight, “now you’ve got 80% of the market why do you advertise?” came the apocryphal retort, “I advertise much like the pilot of this plane keeps his engines on; we may not notice for a while, but without them, eventually, we’d crash and burn.” Today, there is intense pressure on clients to demonstrate return in the short term. In global advertising production, we’re constantly challenged with new formats, new approaches to always on in social and search and new generations of consumers (had enough of GenZ already?) that don’t see ads at all on Netflix and live in Tik Tok world with the attention span of goldfish.  

Don’t be fooled by the attention span claim. Humans have not changed that much. The way they consume content has, where swiping leaves less room for branded emotional connection. And how advertising gets produced has changed dramatically. We need answers to multiple variables, multiple languages, multiple channels, and multiple outcomes. Keeping on course is hard work. We love the challenge of cultural resonance in every market. But now that 50% of all advertising investment is now in digital, isn’t it time for effectiveness to be built in, not bolted on? 

Creativity matters more than ever. 


Take Dynamic Content. Our recent ‘Five things you need to know about DCO’ research indicated it’s a hot topic with marketers. If done well, it’s an opportunity to put relevant messages in front of the right consumers, in the right way, at the right time. If done badly, it’s malgorithm hell where those pants follow you around the internet. As one senior media executive put is, serendipity is great, stalking is not. If the industry can crack the frequency cap code, DCO capability can provide help to advertisers to improve campaign performance by optimising campaigns as they get rolled out. Modern creatives get the idea, and embrace the ability to do this intelligently. Creative people shouldn’t run a mile from the word template. A rectangular canvas didn’t worry Matisse. 

We need to reimagine the measurement tools we use, to evaluate creative as well as we do placement. The industry, quite rightly, is obsessed with viewability. But isn’t our job to make the ads the consumer loves to see? Without getting too technical, I like the idea of multitouch attribution, applying an additional layer of data science to understand relative creative impact for each delivered ad, based on its ability to influence behavioural outcomes. One study by Flashtalking using this approach showed that the top performing creatives can be as much as seven times more impactful than the worst performing. It also gets us away from clickthrough rates and applies the artifice of intelligence to artificial intelligence.
 

Because we’ve reached peak click through rate. 


For the last 20 years, most digital creative has been judged on the “CTR”. It’s a simple metric, but does ‘smashing the industry average’ ring true when actual CTR is less than a percent of a percent? We’ve reached peak click through in a world where consumers trust how they receive their media less and less. As Robert Thompson, now CEO of the New York Times forewarned in 2007, “The problem we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment, surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear. Rumours will be believed, fiction thought of as fact.” And advertising has taken the biggest hit. 

It's a stark reminder that our job today is to make sure that the brand idea is improved, is relevant, accurate, timely, runs across markets and that any marketing technology ecosystem gives back control to the marketer. 



Alastair Duncan is chief strategy officer for creative technology company Splash Worldwide. Splash’s next Thinkfast event – ‘Can Creativity and Performance be Best Friends Again?’ – is set for June 19th at the LBB and Friends Beach in Cannes. Featuring Duncan along with Splash chairman Graham Hinton, The Economist’s chief marketing officer Mark Cripps and Sir John Hegarty of The Garage, those interested in attending are encouraged to contact thinkfast@splashworldwide.com as soon as possible for an invitation, as seating will be limited.
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