While marketers (and creatives) may hear conversations about AI and data-driven marketing and think that marketing is slowly backing away from creative, the opposite is actually true: AI and data-driven marketing are increasing the toolset available to marketers, and are increasing the need for creative. As both trends continue to increase in popularity, there’s a tremendous opportunity for creative to personalise the massive expansion in touchpoints that will envelop marketing, argues Melanie Hoptman, VP and MD of brands and agencies, APAC at LiveRamp.
Data-Driven Marketing Offers More Personalisation
Let’s set the stage: data-driven marketing is unlocking customisation at every stage of the consumer journey. As marketers leverage identity to understand every platform where their customers can be found, how these platforms ladder into each customers’ journey, and ultimately, how and where customers convert and buy their products, each of these touchpoints becomes an opportunity to engage customers with creative that’s perfectly tailored to their stage of the journey, that also adds the value they expect from brands.
Furthermore, as AI platforms—whether AI browsers or chat-based solutions—add new touchpoints within customer journeys, identity will help marketers to understand their consumption habits across these platforms, adding to journeys that may start or finish across the open web, in apps, on retailers’ sites, or more.
AI + Creative = Dynamic Creative Optimisation
While AI and data-driven marketing didn’t invent Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO), these two forces push DCO to new levels of personalisation and effectiveness. Data-driven marketing, and identity, help marketers to better understand their ads’ exposure, improving the ability to A-B test creative to understand which is more effective. AI adds additional scale to DCO, creating orders of magnitude more complexity for marketers to test and learn about their most effective creative, iterate on what’s working, and seamlessly activate it to the right customers.
DCO’s added level of control around creative means that more creative is needed at every stage. More creative is needed to test at scale using DCO. More insight into creative begets more iterative work to double down on the creative strategies that are working the best, and put more investment behind the most effective campaigns. And finally, the insight into creative effectiveness also unlocks the opportunity for new projects, as marketers understand what works the best and develop ideas for new campaigns.
Measurement Unlocks More Insights
Data-driven marketing unlocks the ability to better measure performance across the customer journey—including connecting upper-funnel metrics like exposures all the way through to conversions and sales. At the same time that data-driven marketing offers more insights into every stage of the journey, it also offers visibility into each critical type of AI consumer platform as it emerges, offering marketers a unified view of performance that enables the most effective investments.
Just as DCO offers quick insights into what creative is working the best, and an opportunity for marketers to optimise at the beginning of campaigns, measurement also gives marketers to understand how their business outcomes are being affected, and optimise in real time, for the best possible returns.
Explosion Of Need For Creative Assets
Just as with many other aspects within marketing, AI and data-driven marketing will lead not just to more need for creative, but will increase the performance and returns of the additional creative as well. Marketers that are not leveraging—nor testing—data-driven marketing run the risk of being left behind while leaders are quickly getting their bearings and driving returns with these new solutions.
