Spice manufacturer McCormick’s online ads draw in consumers with recipes that include unexpected but on-trend pairings, like a Greek yogurt taco dip. But creating many versions of online ads ran up costs with its creative agency. “We would get very targeted with our media campaigns, and we wanted our creative messaging to follow suit,” said […]
Programmatic and data-driven creative will likely be a buzzworthy topic at the 2017 Cannes Lions festival. Programmatic creative has progressed since last year, thanks to the maturation of machine learning and standards released by the IAB for dynamic content ads that makes it easier to customize ads for audiences and publisher sites. But media and […]
When Bloomberg writes a story about a public company or commodity, it’s bringing market information dynamically into the adjacent ad. Bloomberg is packaging up this programmatic creative as a new ad unit, which it’s calling DataLock. Bank of Montreal and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group this quarter agreed to be the first advertisers to use it. DataLock is designed to reduce […]
Tailoring individual messages to someone based on past behavior is easier said than done, since media and creative usually operate independently. Spongecell wants to fix some of the issues stymying dynamic creative optimization (DCO) at scale in the programmatic space, and has raised a $10.5 million growth round in combined debt and equity financing from […]
Marketing a major motion picture is a complex affair for all stakeholders involved, including the studio’s internal teams, media agencies and relationships with filmmakers and talent. And studios like Warner Bros. Pictures have to think well beyond the movie’s run in the theater. “You want to capture all the data around what people are talking […]
Custom content was all the rage even as early as 2007, when entrepreneur and actor RJ Williams founded celebrity and lifestyle site Young Hollywood. The millennial-focused publisher claims it averages 150 million monthly video views across desktop, mobile, OTT and social today. Young Hollywood evolved from content partnerships with portals like AOL, Yahoo and YouTube, […]
Campaign briefs are increasingly filled with demands for advanced creative versioning, forcing agencies into closer collaboration with ad tech providers. It’s one of the reasons why Mindshare partnered with dynamic creative optimization platform Spongecell last fall to support a Mazda Rebels campaign, featuring a series of short films profiling engineers and innovators on the cusp of […]
When many creative agencies failed to pivot into mobile, tech and media companies converged on their own solutions. “Creative agencies were disinterested in making experiences for mobile,” said James Chandler, mobile director for the GroupM agency Mindshare. After all, app-oriented mobile campaigns aren’t built around flashy art or high-production videos. While this mentality frustrated him […]
Interactive video ad server Innovid has rolled out a programmatic creative tool designed to let agencies and advertisers personalize video messages across devices. This capability is driven, in part, by Innovid’s experience tackling different ad-serving requirements through a series of connected TV partnerships. Innovid entered an audience solutions agreement with Roku in the summer, which […]
Creative and tech have an uneasy coexistence. But the advertising world is in the early stages of a new hybrid model, where creative relies on tech for personalization and storytelling. “With programmatic buying and targeting, the contextual opportunities are increased to quantum levels, and we’ll need machines in order to address them,” said Chick Foxgrover, […]
In the oft-cited litany of “right message, right person, right time,” the creative is often given short shrift. “Programmatic gives advertisers the ability to target infinite segments, but if they’re delivering generic messages to a targeted audience, they’re simply wasting their ad spend,” said Victor Wong, CEO of creative management platform PaperG, which announced $5 […]
The programmatic pipes have been laid, but programmatic creative is still ramping up. “There’s a disconnect between media and creative that prevents the industry from taking advantage of what’s possible,” said Adam Cahill, who left his post as EVP and chief digital officer at Hill Holliday in April to found Anagram, a consultancy/agency hybrid focused […]
Undertone is consolidating around creative. The programmatic ad network acquired Buenos Aires-based rich media startup Sparkflow on Thursday as part of a move to integrate data-driven creative capabilities into Undertone’s overall tech stack, which it calls Virtuoso. The deal was on the smaller side, clocking in at “less than $20 million,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO […]
Digital advertisers often become enamored with ad tech at the expense of creative. “We are still miles from being able to generate great varieties of good creative to suit the various permutations of user brand environment,” said Chris Stark, SVP of product marketing for Grapeshot, a UK software company that does algorithmic ad optimization. Defining […]
When “Serial” broke the record for the fastest series to reach 5 million downloads, it created new interest in podcasts as an advertising forum. Though podcasting still has measurement hurdles to clear, it’s attracting more attention from larger advertisers. “Early on with any kind of new advertising medium, there are going to be institutional advertisers […]
Adam Cahill is taking his 20 years of digital media experience – during which he has worked at Dentsu Aegis Network agency Carat and, most recently, as chief digital officer at IPG’s Hill Holliday – and launching his own programmatic firm: Anagram. The agency, which opened its doors Wednesday and will work exclusively with MediaMath’s […]
As programmatic buying continues its steady forward march, many are wondering when and how data-driven media buying and creativity can be reconciled. According to Nandini Nayak, managing director of design strategy and innovation at Fjord, the analytics and creative worlds are gradually coming together. Purchased by Accenture Interactive in 2013, Fjord has 500 designers and current […]
It’s clear what makes a bad mobile ad – desktop banners scrunched down to smartphone size or disruptive interstitials with tiny, seemingly invisible Xs. That’s the kind of thing mobile ad startup Yieldmo is on a mission to eradicate. “We’re sitting at the intersection of ad-tech and design,” said [x+1] and Rocket Fuel vet Eric […]
Following ad network Undertone’s summer snap-up of programmatic exchange Upfront Digital Media, the company rolled out on Friday a programmatic platform called Virtuoso. The platform is part of Undertone’s developing ad stack, said cofounder Eric Franchi. The company will stagger the release of Virtuoso’s functions, first beginning with programmatic execution and workflow via the Upfront integration. There’s a […]
For many product-pushing brands, investing in airtime simply makes sense to reach as wide an audience as possible. But as brands begin to apply real-time data to contextualize ad buys, demand and dollars will shift from TV budgets to digital video and mobile. But creative challenges around dynamic creative will accompany this shift. For brands […]
