5 more tips for making ads more beautiful, the tech edition

This week we have a guest blog from Ben Humphry, Chief Commercial Officer at Intelligent Optimisations, a marketing technology company which has developed a proprietary, big data driven, automated media buying platform.

We recently ran a fantastic guest blog post on our website written by Jan Golding, Director of Strategy and Experience at ALEXON, where he gave some incredibly useful creative tips for ensuring that online advertising is effective.

Beyond this, I’m keen to highlight a few technology tips that will also help drive more beautiful ads.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that relevancy is important. Advertising has to be effectively targeted to an audience which is able to buy and has an interest in the product or service. At a basic level, this might mean only advertising a product to the intended geographical region where it is available to buy.  Beyond this, finding consumers who are likely to be interested in buying. Technology makes this easier to do, by finding that audience at scale, matching individuals based on their habits and behaviours.

The right audience can be tricky, so it deserves another point. Audiences aren’t a static constant – they’re amorphous, constantly changing, depending on what is important to them at any point in time. For example, I love gin, but right now it’s 8.30am and I’m writing a blog in my (shared) office. An advert for gin would not resonate with me right here and now, and even if it did, I’d probably deny it.  The ad would certainly resonate at 5.30pm on a Friday afternoon as I start planning my evening. To be truly beautiful, an advert has to be relevant to both the audience and the audience’s situation.

If you know me, show it! If I’ve just bought a bottle of gin online, stop trying to sell me bottles of gin. At least for the next hour or so. Retargeting has value, but can be a very blunt instrument. Advertisers looking to bring in new prospects should exclude their known customers to avoid trying to convert the converted.

Apply data intelligently. For example, third party ‘intent’ or ‘in market’ data can be expensive, but not always useful. As stated before, a consumer’s level of intent can be affected by all kinds of external influences; time of day, location, etc. It can also disappear completely once a purchase has been made. Different products move from intent to purchase at different rates; my decision time on buying a car is longer than my decision time on buying a bottle of gin. Once I’ve bought a car, it’ll be a few years before I’m in market again, whereas with the bottle of gin it is somewhat more rapid. Third party data can expire quickly.

If the ad isn’t in the eye of the beholder, how can it be beautiful? If an ad isn’t viewable, it is wasted. There are many choices of technologies which predict or measure the view-ability of an ad impression.
Beautiful advertising is relevant advertising. I want to see ads when they fit with my surroundings, my needs, my state of mind, my purchase status and a million other factors. It is pretty difficult to imagine the ability to plan ads to reach a sizeable audience when all of those million factors are right.

This is the great advantage of machine learning; it’s able to build a multi-dimensional, dynamic model of the ever changing audience which is most responsive to a particular product or service. It can find that audience at the right time and in the right environment across billions of ad opportunities every day.