The advertising landscape of today is a far cry from the supposed glory days of Don Draper’s Mad Men – and not just in terms of how much whiskey is consumed neat before lunchtime. Just as technology, and in particular the Internet, has exerted its disruptive influence on everything from how we date (no matter how specific your tastes might be) to how we shop (almost half of the UK’s online shoppers are spending from their smartphones – see Criteo’s Q3 2015 Mobile Commerce Report), Adland is now a very different place. And a very much easier world to navigate: in the same way that we can now catch up, face-to-face, with friends and family on the other side of the earth via little more than a laptop or smartphone, the advent of digital platforms have, ‘shrunk ‘the world, and extended the reach of advertisers to a global audience of millions, if not billions.
But with such progress comes both opportunity and obstacle – modern advertisers need to continually adapt and evolve to meet the ever increasing demands of today’s savvy consumers, or risk being left behind. That’s not to say, however, that today’s tech-driven marketers shouldn’t be open to some of the founding principles of their practice; in fact, there’s plenty to be learned from a cursory flick through the history books.
In 1900, the “father of modern advertising”, Thomas J. Barratt, created a series of ads for his Pears soap products that introduced the then-revolutionary concept that ad campaigns must be re-evaluated from the perspective of the consumer to ensure that messaging remains relevant. As well as informing the content of ads as they moved from painted billboards to radio and television broadcast and eventually, to PC and smartphone screens, this idea has since come to influence how and where those ads are served. Barratt’s approach, in heightening the importance of the perspective of the end consumer who would be viewing the ad, could be argued as effectively establishing the concept of targeted advertising – long before the technology needed to make it happen existed.
Fast forward to today, and targeted advertising has all but become the norm: Criteo’s recent survey of UK consumers’ attitudes toward advertising, found that 70 percent of consumers now expect recognition and highly-personalised communications from the brands with which they interact. This is a trend largely driven by the rapid advance of online programmatic advertising – intelligent advertising that can account for the needs and desires of individual consumers and deliver relevant ads, all within the time it takes to open a webpage – and one which has effectively taken Barratt’s consumer-focused approach full-circle; consumers rather than advertisers are now the driving force behind the content.
This however, results in a catch-22 situation of sorts, the same Web that makes millions of pairs of eyes and near endless streams of user preference data available to marketers has simultaneously heightened the challenge of maintaining the ‘importance of consumer perspective’ principle when there are so many competing perspectives in so many different places and times to account for.
While platforms for mass marketing – most notably television – already existed prior to the Web, they were more contained in terms of the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of ad serving and as such could incorporate at least some degree of consumer targeting (i.e. you’ll see an ad for beer brand on a Friday at about eight in the evening and suddenly remember how much you’d been looking forward to a pint of the cold stuff). The growing ubiquity of modern devices and communication platforms – smartphones, tablets, laptops – means that advertisers can no longer break their audiences down into a few select groups when targeting their campaigns.
But within this challenge lies its own solution: marketers, when considering the expectations of consumers, are left with little choice but to focus on the individual – wherever they are, and whatever they’re using to surf the Web – and personalise their ads accordingly if they want to continue to reap the greatest rewards from their campaigns. Which, in the spirit of Mr. Barratt’s love of reinvention and ads that “hit the present taste,” seems rather fitting.
By Jon Buss, MD UK and Northern Europe of Criteo.
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