Decompose your ads, not your brand

Raise your hand if you would like to advertise for your brand without knowing what the message will be? A lot of people probably remember Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) gone bad with the fancy syntax {KeyWord:OrElse}. It was a prime example of the dangers of automation, and maybe it was back then when ads started decomposing. I will always remember the eBay ads that would appear on practically any search query you could imagine. Search for “Dirty Thoughts,” and an ad would offer “Dirty Thoughts for Sale.” Or how about “Athletic Sweat” or “Vampire blood?” I think this is my favorite:

And there are even more examples including Free Dead Cats or ads inciting users to Meet Dead Singles.

At the time, I thought eBay had a special deal with Google to target just any keyword, but looking closer, I noticed many of them had the little “aff.” mention in the ad, showing they were affiliates rather than eBay itself. Affiliates are good for volume but not for branding.

Today, digital marketers have become accustomed to working with automation and dynamic ad composition. As an example of this, the creative process on Facebook is composed of four stages: identity (brand), format, image (or video) and text. The ad composer then allows the digital marketer to view what the composed ad will look like in each placement.

Beyond that, you simply can’t picture what the end product will look like.

Google has also progressively decomposed ads on its’ network into individual elements. Recently, on Google Marketing Live, a new type of ad was launched, the Discovery Ads. These ads are dynamically composed based on titles, description and images and are displayed on three different Google properties: Youtube, Gmail and Google Discover. Google recommends you to provide as many variations of each element as possible. Google can also scan your website for images, you can add them manually, or if you don’t have any images available, “try searching for stock images.” The machine will take care of the rest.

Do I need to say this? If you care about your brand and about the user experience – then don’t!

You don’t “look for stock images” when you are within the Google platform creating an ad. You will have done the thinking and the image search for this, working with other people, and in a structured process. And if not, that is where you need to step up and build a better process for building dynamic ads.

But it gets worse

Google also announced a new machine-learning based ad feature called the “Bumper Machine.” I like the dreamy nature of that tool and the vision on which it was based. It will take existing video ads and turn them into six-second long “bumper ads” to put in front, or at the end of a video on Youtube. It is a fantastic technological achievement, but does it really cover a need? The intention behind it is positive: help advertisers overcome the pain of having to create a new video format for Youtube when they already have one (longer version) of the video. It is, however, a complete disruption of the creative process and a mechanism by which the story and the message from the original video are also recomposed.

I asked one of the speakers at the SMX London conference, Roey Rafael, a Youtube ad specialist for Envato, what his thoughts were on this new solution. He already optimizes videos to convey a full story within the first five seconds, so that he can benefit from free impressions using the TrueView type of ad so he won’t be using it.

We cannot ignore what is at hand, however. Ads are continuing to be decomposed into individual elements and dynamically recomposed at the time of visualization, as ads become contextual, multi-format and personalized. As for the eBay example cited above, letting loose technology can have some unexpected and undesirable effects on the end-user.

Leading teams are building brand consistency

In my company’s research, we surveyed leading paid search teams and we asked the participants how “brand consistency” was being managed. The responses were encouraging, as a majority were actively building this with their clients or stakeholders.

But a number of them said this was not in their area of responsibility and relied on other departments or their clients to ensure brand consistency.

Is your process optimized for ad composition?

Creative disruption and ad decomposition are here to stay. And despite my warnings above, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing – we simply need to organize for it. This comes down to rethinking the way brand assets are put together and how communication channels are used. The “Bumper Machine” is there for a reason – advertisers didn’t prepare six-second ads and therefore, they can do it with the bumper machine. But in the future, they should build video ads with various outputs: six seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 90 seconds. This requires a different creative process, with a focus on the input rather than the output. Essentially it is one story to be told in various time frames from various angles and with various formats of output.

For images and messaging, the same philosophy should apply. Image selection should focus on the values they express and be made available in various formats and resolutions. And once the values are reflected in the images, they should also be carried by the various communication workers in an organization. Communication is increasingly transcending the entire organization – think about employee advocacy which a lot of organizations are striving for. Have you prepared your employees for carrying the values of your brand? Are you empowering them?

My favorite metaphor for an ideal communication process is that of the hologram. In a hologram, every pixel of the 3D image holds a representation of the entire image. The brand can be seen from many angles and with many nuances, but the image remains consistent from one communication instance to the other. From one ad to the next, even shifting devices or changing channels, the image remains consistent.

We have work to do.