The Importance of Creative Flexibility
Over the last couple of years, I have looked over integrated digital campaigns for some of the worlds largest brands. I feel fortunate to have such an amazing opportunity and it has given me a look into the mechanics of campaigns from a very unique purview. For example, SPO is an often talked about term amongst programmatic campaigns but never spoken in other channels. Flexibility and transparency of the interoperability of campaigns is a big concern but finding solutions for it are not easy.
Another interesting finding that I don’t think many people talk about is the easy of creative testing per channel. In the early days of programmatic, vendors like Dapper were around to enable quicker dynamic creative builds but they were quickly bought and lost in the shuffle of bigger ad tech plays. Now, when you deploy programmatic campaigns you are at the mercy of big platforms and how much they were willing to invest in creative testing side of the house. As of yet, I have seen one platform build ample creative testing tools that allow for quick testing and constant iterating. Many people might disagree with me on this one but I believe Facebook (while it has a way to go) has built the right tools to satisfy creative testing.
To understand why, I think you first have to think about why it is important to always be testing. If creative influences approximately 60% of the consumers mindset and you are running the same creative for long stretches you are basically burning money with your online campaigns. In my career, I would estimate that most advertisers change creative way to infrequently and have not adopted a mindset that is flexible enough to take full advantage of both consumer mindsets per channel and the flexible nature of digital.
Facebook (and social) for whatever reason has thought about creative much different than other digital channels. Instead of a wild-west approach to formatting they have limited the constraints of the creative in a way that allows for ultimate flexibility. Some might argue that they have squashed the idea of creative by insisting on standards but I disagree. Other channels have packed sites so full of ads/trackers and rich media experiences that it becomes hard to accomplish you primary goal of reading an article or watching a video. Facebook on the other hand has tightly controlled its UX with rules that allow for the creative to display in a manner that does not compromise its site.
The ability to restrict image sizes, creative lengths and formats has also allowed Facebook to build a framework for advertisers. The nice thing about that framework is it serves as a starting point for a testing. It’s much more common to be creative testing way more in Facebook than any other media you may be running. And that testing is the key to much of the success you see on the platform because you are constantly bringing new creatives to your audience.