Exploring creativity, attention and AI in advertising with Vyde’s Sam Peters

As Sam explains, traditional advertising is a one-way experience. “We’ve flipped the model on its head by creating interactive, conversational ads that put consumers in control.”

Consumers can decide what they want to see, with the video changing so it’s more relevant to what they’re most interested in. “Why not have a two-way experience where the consumer can interact with – and decide – what content they want to see?” Sam says. “It gives them a way more powerful, much richer immersive experience.”

This generates high levels of _Active Attention and gives brands detailed insights about their consumers. “We like the idea of taking a passive audience and turning them into active consumers,” Sam says. Brand recall goes up significantly, with conversational experiences seeing results +80% higher than passive, traditional experiences.

The power of creativity in capturing attention.

The role of creative in generating attention is huge – Sam talks about a stat by Google that says 70% of the performance of the campaign is down to the creative, rather than other factors like placement and targeting. “It has the biggest impact on attention and campaign performance as a whole,” he says.

There’s a growing demand from brands to use digital in new ways, with the emergence of video and CTV creating a huge shift in the industry. “It feels like there’s always the next place where creativity can come, especially with these more immersive experiences,” Sam says.

With Vyde having launched video last year, he’s seeing a huge appetite from brands to drive creativity and deliver big, powerful experiences via digital. “There are so many more opportunities and new technologies for brands to use.”

Using AI to enhance the creative process.

AI is a huge topic at the moment, and Sam sees its possibilities as limitless, with Vyde having already integrated the API behind Open AI into their technology to generate creative drafts. “It’s unbelievable what it can do,” he says. “It’s like having a super-powered assistant.”

For the Vyde team, this adds a layer of efficiency. “There’s a time-consuming initial phase to building a creative,” Sam explains. “AI can do a lot of the legwork.” This initially means quicker build times and SLAs for clients, but will also translate to output in terms of performance benefits.

While there’s no immediate need to use AI to make real-time changes, Sam stresses that it’s important to be mindful of risk. “You’ve got to have good safeguards in place for something that’s making decisions.”

Creating sustainable attention with conversational experiences.

With the increasing concern about the environmental impact of digital advertising, Vyde started to look into energy efficiency and recently found that their product already creates downstream energy savings.

As opposed to chasing CTR or directing consumers to the brand site, Vyde keeps the user in the ad environment in the moment. “This means there’s an immediate saving there because we deliver a much lighter, much more focused experience – on the page the consumer’s already on,” Sam explains.

What’s next for digital?

With the market seeing huge growth in digital, Sam is already seeing a big appetite for innovation among agencies.

Rapidly growing, CTV is a big area of focus for Vyde. “It’s a really exciting part of our future,” Sam says. “If you can make those experiences interactive, in a similar way as we’re already doing with video and display, there’s a big opportunity to massively drive up attention levels”.