“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Daniel Meehan, CEO at PadSquad.
Sharing data between agency partners is critical, though not as common as one would assume. But marketers need easy access to data for better creative, and data is easier to access when marketing is done in-house.
Any company looking to bridge that gap between data and creative has a behemoth on its hands, but an in-house or integrated digital team with multiple areas of expertise could break down these artificial walls and increase transparency.
Knowing what demands are already in place on a given webpage, for example, is a great start, since individual partners each have their own threshold for the number of calls to a page (for latency purposes), ad size, amount of third-party JavaScript and basic benchmarks for what user experience looks and feels like. With that data in hand, in-house media efforts are freer to create valuable and unique ad experiences that are optimized for the site and its target audience.
In-housing lends itself to a holistic creative development approach across all media for digital media production. The existing method of bespoke creative developed by multiple vendors is an unwieldy concept, demanding numerous management touchpoints, including the media agency, creative agency and client. It’s clunky and inefficient considering the number of different and disjointed arms required for any ask or implementation.
When marketing functions are performed in-house, this process can be a simpler, two-way exchange of data that allows for specialized and proprietary assets to be developed with little lag and fewer managers. Since the creative and formats have been informed by what’s already on the backend, they’re more easily integrated into any strategy, programmatic or otherwise. That helps with scale, while also reducing potential redundancy.
If a brand or publisher works with a sprawling list of agencies or creative partners across platforms, there’s a greater chance for inconsistent experience or ads that appear with far too much frequency, leading them to become less impactful. A shared approach with in-house creative sheds light on those potential issues before they occur, and it allows for quick adjustments informed by direct access to the pipes, so to speak.
Consolidating the development of consumer experiences should be the entire point of in-housing. By doing so, a brand can take control of media activations, tools and data. Integrating the creative into that process is the logical next step. It brings an additional level of expertise to the table right from the beginning: to ideate, design and develop creative at scale with efficiency.
That efficiency fits into the programmatic buying workflow and helps garner better performance from media spend because it’s informed by brands’ own data.
In-housing has key benefits, but it only goes so far unless it’s embraced with distinct goals in mind. If brands embrace in-housing for cost-saving purposes, what do those savings get folded into? For smart marketers, perhaps the savings could not only make creative cheaper and more efficient but also enhance the consumer experience.
Bringing creative under the hood a bit more puts the goal of maximizing performance at the forefront of in-housing. If not, what is the point of in-housing in the first place?
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