“A jack of all trades is a master of none – but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
It’s a favorite saying among LinkedIn posters and business bloggers, who often tout this longer version of the iconic phrase as the original one. (In reality, it’s likely a recent variant.)
Where creative ad tech is concerned, Forrester is ranking vendors for the breadth of their capabilities over those with point solutions. And the “jacks of all trades” are in the lead.
The creative ad tech market is consolidating, said Nikhil Lai, senior analyst at Forrester. In other words, there’s increasingly higher demand for vendors that can address the entire production cycle, “from building ads all the way to optimizing them.”
This thinking informed the evaluations made in Forrester’s 2024 creative advertising technology wave, which the research and advisory firm released earlier this month.
Of the nine companies featured, only Smartly and Flashtalking were selected as leaders, primarily for their strong road maps and cross-channel capabilities.
Those who remember 2020’s wave might notice that some previous participants moved positions. Jivox and Clinch went from “leader” to “strong performer,” and Bannerflow went from “strong performer” to “contender.” But Lai stressed that each report was written with different criteria in mind, so comparisons are moot at best.
For this particular wave, omnichannel offerings, as well as horizontal growth and use of predictive and generative AI, were the criteria that separated leaders from contenders.
The Complete Package
Smartly, a company that got its start with Facebook ads, and Flashtalking, a dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform that now sits as part of Mediaocean’s ecosystem, both represented the “most complete vendors in the set,” according to Lai.
Smartly achieved its leader status in part due to its unique approach and product innovations, including its conversational commerce functions, which allow for direct communication with consumers on Meta and TikTok, and its ability to predict or flag potential creative ad fatigue.
Meanwhile, Flashtalking’s strong ad server, extensive partnerships and fluency with paid formats also set it apart from its competitors.
“[Both] are excellent at building ads. They’re excellent at personalizing them and sequencing them across channels, and they’re excellent at most, if not all channels,” Lai said. “That’s really what distinguished the two of them” from the rest of the vendors.
Master of One
Those companies that represent the “strong contenders” – Jivox, Clinch, Innovid and Vidmob – have all developed expertise in one field but not in others, according to Forrester.
Former leaders Jivox and Innovid were lauded for their retail media and video capabilities, respectively, but found to be lacking in other channels.
Ironically, although Clinch is able to “punch way above their weight for how big they are,” as Lai noted, the company is so focused on omnichannel breadth that it hasn’t been able to develop the same depth of expertise that others in the space have.
And although Forrester’s report cited Vidmob as a pioneer in creative intelligence, the platform’s production capabilities are limited compared to its data and measurement ones.
Coulda Been a Contender
Celtra previously found itself a contender in 2020 for scaling back on its offerings, specifically with regard to ad-serving and decisioning. Although the current report highlights its production capabilities as “excellent,” it finds itself in a similar position due to its lagging AI and retail media offerings.
Then there’s CreativeX, which finds itself in a difficult position maintaining long-term value for its clients. Once users are able to learn all the best practices they need for each channel, they’re more likely to move on – the ad tech equivalent of canceling your meal kit subscription after you’ve learned to cook all the recipes.
But despite that retention issue, it’s in fact Bannerflow that reportedly has the lowest retention rate of all the companies evaluated, according to the Forrester Wave. Although it’s great at authoring, its other functions, including its video production and AI tools, don’t seem to be what many advertisers are looking for.
Hitting the Jackpot
So why the focus on omnichannel capabilities? After all, most creative advertising technology was originally intended for decision-making and optimizing, not actual ad production. When there are already so many design-specific tools on the market, such as Adobe, Figma or Canva, it makes sense that a company wouldn’t be interested in reinventing the wheel in offering that same kind of product.
Apparently, customers say differently.
“They really want the end-to-end workflow, from creating the ad to personalizing it to measuring its performance,” said Lai.
There’s the obvious benefit in having a more streamlined tech stack, of course. Relying on dozens of different vendors at once can be costly (if not exhausting to keep track of), and for many companies it makes more financial sense to seek out vendors that can bundle together multiple functions and tools at once.
But more consolidation can also allow for a better understanding of cross-channel halo effects. If a brand or media agency uses a separate tool for TV and another for social media, for example, it may be difficult to track the ways that the creative output on one channel can influence the success of the other.
Because the media environment is more fragmented than it’s ever been, those kinds of insights can be critical to understanding and targeting consumers more effectively.
In the meantime, said Lai, creative ad tech companies will need to adapt. That means not just improving their horizontal reach beyond their core competencies, but finding new ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the process – whether that’s via their customer profile, services, overall go-to-market strategy or other distinguishing factors.
More importantly, creative ad tech as an industry must properly straddle the line between creative directors and performance marketers and form connections between both personas – something that this year’s wave prioritized.
“Creative is the lever that determines the performance of media,” said Lai. “Tighter connections between the creative process and the media planning process are really what I want to see more of.”
