Data and creativity, who holds the power?

Last week I attended the Advertising Week Europe for the second time. Originated in New York 12 years ago, it’s now in its fourth year in London and attracts advertising and marketing professionals for a week-long event featuring key leaders in the advertising world to deliver keynotes, seminars, panel sessions and parties.

In comparison to last year when I attended three days of the week long event, this year I had unfortunately time to attend only one day, Tuesday, and, intrigued by the title, I chose the session “data and creativity, who holds the power?”.

As a blogger and organiser of #EventPlannersTalk live events, I see how brands I work with or who invite me to their events are different in placing importance on creative content and data, so I hoped I’ll get some tips on how to have this conversation with them.

The panel consisted of John Travis, VP Marketing EMEA at Adobe, Ann Wixley ECD at OMD, Layton Han CEO at ADARA, Rob Bradley Global Director, Digital Ad Revenue & Data at CNN and Krane Jeffery Head of Digital Solutions at RTL Group. The panel was moderated by Laurie Segall Technology Correspondent at CNN Money.

© The MICE Blog - event management blog

Great ad campaign: starts with data or creativity?

The panelists suggested that great ad campaign starts with insights about your audience and added that the ability to test content empowers creativity. They added that people visit branded content because they are targeted in the right way, but they also reach people who don’t know what they like yet.

Analytics and insights gained from the campaign can help make better and more informed decisions for the next campaign, combined with a good creative idea.

The panelists added that marketers can back up their creative ideas with data when pitching to clients and that puts them in a more powerful position. By being able to back their creativity with data, it allows marketers to take more risks and makes them more credible.

One of the advantages of collecting data is that marketers can launch the campaign and adjust it based on insights collected.

Customising message with data

Starting with a broad customer segment, it should be narrowed down based on performance and delivery. The segmentation shouldn’t be the same in the end of the campaign as it’s in the start, data allows marketers to optimise and change the segmentation as the campaign progresses. Additionally, even if you have a set of data it’s not always complete, e.g. – you don’t know the impact of the article on the audience and you don’t know who the decision maker is.

When does data go past personalisation and into violation of privacy?

Media owners can control how long to target someone and how their audience is seeing the ads. Advertisers should be responsible for putting a cap on ad frequency and ensuring that the creative is smart and interesting as possible. If they’ll over-serve the consumer with ads they can expect them to turn ad block on, but if consumers are not willing to see the advertising, there will be different formats of this content.

I really enjoyed this session and I got very interesting insights to further develop my business.

The event this year was at a new venue, the Picturehouse Central in Piccadilly. Last year it was at the BAFTA, St James Church and temporary build next to them. The advantage in the old venue was that when changing sessions you could enjoy the daylight, here all sessions were inside.

The queues this year were very long but the organisers handled it very well by offering water to participants. The team on-site insisted for attendees to leave the room before they could enter for the next session which was a bit inconvenient if you wanted to attend the next session in the same room but had to go to the end of the queue, what also made the process a bit slower and the sessions late.

I really find it great that all sessions are available online to watch for free. Honestly that’s not the same experience, much better to be present, ask questions and maybe networking with the person sitting next to you. But for those who are not able to leave the office for the entire week that’s definitely a good alternative!

© The MICE Blog - event management blog

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