This article is sponsored by Comcast Technology Solutions.
In the last few years, brands have wrestled with whether to prioritize broadcast or digital video channels in their advertising campaigns. The short answer? Emphasize both. A blended, multichannel strategy has been shown to increase ROI by as much as 35%, according to the Advertising Research Foundation.
But this answer creates new questions, as advertisers struggle to execute high-quality multichannel campaigns across the full spectrum of video destinations. In fact, half of marketers say that the inability to plan media seamlessly across platforms is a top challenge, according to a survey by 4C and Advertiser Perceptions.
The problem stems from a lack of full-funnel visibility and control. A typical Fortune 500 advertiser currently cobbles together solutions from across dozens or even hundreds of media sources, technology partners and data providers. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to get a full picture of the television media supply chain from ad creation to delivery.
While the ad still reaches the end user, the inefficiencies built into these workflows create costly redundancies and time-consuming manual processes that hinder an advertiser’s ability to take full advantage of the sophisticated targeting capabilities now available.
That’s where Comcast is reimagining outdated ad versioning and ad management processes by bringing automation into play – helping advertisers generate customized ad creative that can drive a measurable ROI lift.
Where once it might have taken weeks and millions of dollars to manually create hundreds of video ad versions that matched creative with granular-level targeting, now advertisers can create hundreds of ad versions in under 60 seconds.
“Being able to match targeting to creative execution on the fly is really the holy grail of marketing,” Nunn said. “It gives consumers the personalized experiences they’ve shown they want to engage with, and it reduces the complexity of execution by removing many of the manual interventions that were slowing advertisers down.”
But in order to fully realize this dream, advertisers also need to adopt more unified approaches to enable faster, more seamless transactions that can deliver personalized creative in near-real time. Many advertisers and their agency partners still rely on emails, spreadsheets and individual vendor platforms to communicate media and creative availability, delivery and reporting.
A centralized, automated ad management tool where media buys are identified, filled and tracked is an essential partner to sophisticated ad targeting and versioning – allowing personalized spots to be delivered in minutes, not days.
“This isn’t the silver bullet, but it solves one of the big underlying problems – automation and trying to connect the dots in this world of converged channels and formats,” Nunn said.
Bringing together many of these “dots” – including campaign planning, distribution, creative customization and reporting – in one management tool helps restore advertiser control over an increasingly fragmented process. Advertisers and brands are, in turn, empowered to deliver near-real time customization that satisfies consumer expectations and drives measurable results.
