Creative is one of the biggest levers for performance, but the cultural clash between creative and media teams result in marketers underutilizing this approach.
On this week’s podcast, we highlight creative ad tech, an evolving field for marketers who want to bring rigor to their creative testing, produce tons of creative and serve those ads. And Forrester Analyst Nikhil Lai discusses the field’s leaders and challengers in the Forrester creative ad tech Wave.
“What I’m hearing from our clients [is that] they don’t want a separate bid management tool, a separate DCO [dynamic creative optimization] tool, a separate creative production tool,” Lai says. “They want it all in one so they can detect halo effects across channels and also bring disparate teams together.”
The “disparate teams” are often creatives (the artists) and media (the spreadsheet wizards), who often come at advertising problems from very different directions. But creative ad tech could close this gap by better connecting the two realms.
Creatives are “curious to know how the work performs,” Lai said. They want to know what the CPA is with Dog Breed A vs. Dog Breed C, or if they nailed the right shade of orange for the ad. “A lot of the creatives I spoke to are now hooked onto media metrics.”
The untold story of Prebid.org
Then, we peek into the IAB Tech Lab’s backroom politics that led to the open source header bidding wrapper Prebid becoming its own organization outside the major industry trade group. What happened underscores the influence of one the group’s biggest members, Google, and its still-open antitrust case.
AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher looked into the testimony made on the witness stand by Brian O’Kelley, then CEO of AppNexus. Prebid, an open source header bidding wrapper developed by the company, tried and failed to become part of IAB Tech Lab.
“Google thought it was quashing Prebid,” Hercher says, summarizing his story. “But by forcing the tech to stand on its own, you created the monster you were trying to prevent.”
