The Importance of the Creative in Ad Campaigns

Despite big brand budgets going to TV, outdoor and radio, allowing them an impressive canvas upon which to display their message, we know that digital ad spend has high, and rising, for many years as consumers are targeted online.

It’s certainly easier to track the engagement and the impact of a campaign on the consumer through digital channels, but in focusing so much on these metrics and chasing results, are advertisers in danger of overlooking the importance of delivering engaging and beautiful creatives?

In Episode 3 of our Life in Digital Podcast, Ed was joined by Simon Kvist Gaulshøj, CEO of Adnami, a creative marketing technology vendor that enables the programmatic execution of high-impact formats at scale.

The work Simon and the team at Adnami are doing seeks to help publishers deliver innovative ad spaces, and to help brands do so much more from a creative perspective by delivering campaigns that break free from the traditional ‘little squared boxes.’

Campaigns need to start and end with great creative

It’s no secret that the pandemic has brought with it a change in consumer habits. All of a sudden, people were forced to stay indoors and the ways in which they engaged with brands shifted more online. As such, upper funnel marketing and brand awareness activities across digital platforms have become more important than ever.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Simon, who highlighted the need for improved brand awareness as brands look to engage with consumers through new channels, “the eyeballs are shifting from outdoor and TV and print, especially, into digital so it becomes so much more important that you make up for that in your digital media strategy and that you do plan for upper funnel brand activities.”

This all starts and ends with delivering great adverts and great creatives.

It can be very easy for marketers to get bogged down in the metrics and the data, but bad creative cannot be saved by the best media plans or data strategies, something Simon suggests has “been like this forever. No matter how sophisticated the data strategies you put together, it still comes down to the creative.

“It starts with that and then you build in the layers after.”

Marketers are beginning to, once again, focus their attention the creative and recognise its importance and impact on the consumer journey, and Adnami are giving them the tools to deliver these high impact creatives.

The convergence of media planning and creative agencies

When it comes to media planning and creative agencies, there’s a lot of opportunity for greater alignment between the two.

Media plans and packages need to be created with the creative in mind and decisions need to be made jointly between both agencies, and it’s important for agencies to think about from the very beginning.

“It makes complete sense from the whole media planning side, but also the creative planning perspective. When you’re building out your creative, you want to know what formats they’re going into.”

This convergence may well be driven by consumers and what they want to engage with online, and there’s a genuine opportunity to for advertisers to deliver richer experiences online.

In this respect, Simon favours quality over quantity, ‘I’d rather see one big, beautiful ad that make sense and is relevant to me than I would see 15 irrelevant ugly ads tearing up the website experience.”

Working together in a more joined up way will allow both media and creative agencies to deliver better brand and user experiences.

The role Adnami plays in the creative lifecycle

With the tagline, ‘a great creative deserves a great canvas’, Adnami simply delivers that opportunity for advertisers, allowing them to create completely different consumer experiences through their image and video formats.

As Simon himself states, “it’s not necessarily about features or those once a year, Cannes award-winning executions, it the day-to-day things.

“High impact delivers an opportunity to execute much more powerful brand advertising campaigns, just because it makes the creative come alive.”

Listen to the full episode of our Life in Digital Podcast:

Find more exclusive video content from our podcast series: click here

For more information on Adnami and how they’re delivering high impact campaigns for brands, visit their website: www.adnami.io/