Major Challenges in the Ad Creation Space
The advertising industry has had a fair share of challenges in the past two decades:
Decreasing Attention Spans: A global publication recently released an analysis showing how decreasing attention span had brought trends to a narrower horizon. On popular social media sites like Twitter, the lifespan of a trend had fallen from 17.5 hours in 2013 to 12 hours in 2016. That makes a reduction of 32% in less than three years. This means that brand managers and advertisers now have less time to adapt to and capitalize on a consumer trend.
Banner Blindness: It is a simple concept to grasp - when banners interrupt the search for important information, users tend to ignore it outright. This meant that creativity had to substitute intrusive campaigning.
Ad-Blockers: By 2019, close to 25% of users in the USA were actively using ad blockers. This shifted the advertising narrative from pushing the user's message to attracting the user towards the message.
Ad Frauds: In an eye-opening study, AlixPartners revealed that 50% of ad spends in digital marketing were getting wasted. Fraudulent traffic, sub-optimal campaigns, and increased spending on less or non-optimized campaigns were the causes of these issues.
Intrusive ads, story-based campaigns, and bright colored & creative banners were once the tools of effective advertising. Digital marketing operates on fundamentally different foundations that focus on engagement.
10 Ways The Creative Revolution is Changing the Brand-Audience Engagement Using Ad Creation as an Avenue.
1. Provide More Control to the Audiences Using Rich Media Ads with Action-Specific Triggers.
Many conventional ad formats have been intrusive.
Intrusive video ads, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, banners covering a large portion of the page with next-to-invisible exit signs – these formats usually guaranteed impressions. If your entire page is covered in an intrusive ad, it will generate an impression for your advertiser and revenue for the publisher.
However, such ads did not generate simultaneous conversions for advertisers. As users would often shut the tab and search for another website, even the publishers got the bounce rate's heat. Finally, in 2017, Google decided to ban such intrusive ads from its network.
Instead, the ads got replaced by rich media ads. Formats like interstitial, expansive, and Lightbox ensure that the ad is covering the page only when the user chooses to interact with it. Even the push-down ads have limited impressions per user. Post this, the user has to engage with the d for it to be a push-down ad. Rich media ads, in general, pay more attention to engaging users with interactive media formats like games, animations, and sequence ads.
2. Leveraging Sequence Ads in the Ad Creation Process to Produce Cohesive Narratives.
Imagine you are a user who is looking for a tutorial video. Suddenly, you are treated with a non-skippable but very well produced ad on airline experiences. While the ad might be creative, there is a very low probability you will engage with it. The advertiser, however, still had to pay for the impression. The entire ecosystem loses in this process.
Rich media sequence ads make the ad creation process focus only on engaging users with high intent.
Sequence ads generate impressions by showing sequential ads to users across different websites to the same user. This optimizes your resource allocation by targeting high-intent users.
3. From Intrusive Pop-Ups to Engaging and Gamified Mobile Ads.
Most websites have dropped the pop-up banner format. Instead, with rich media ads, gamified mobile ads have taken a center-stage.
Mobile ads constitute a large proportion of the entire media consumption spectrum. Hence, by targeting devices, advertisers can focus on a key segment with just one click. When the gamified ad is well-produced and interactive, it generates incremental purchase intent beyond the 50% mark. Some gamified rich media ads have shown statistically significant results in the ad creation process. Non-skippable YouTube ads can hardly cross 30 seconds of viewership. Gamified rich media ads can touch 70 seconds per view.
4. Augment ROIs with Integrated Lead Generation and Brand Awareness Campaigns Using Rich Media in Ad Creation.
By the nature of the content on the page and in the ad, text ads are preferable for lead generation. Display ads work well for brand awareness. Display campaigns can carry the product's image, brand identity, and creative copies to attract audiences. Text ads communicate the product, pricing, and recent offers.
Rich media ads have the luxury to serve both purposes. These ads use same attention-span and space to deliver more information.
5. Provide Personalized Ad Experiences with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO).
Dynamic Creative Ads take personalization to an altogether different level. Here, the personalization takes place at the ad delivery level. Based on the recent browsing history, purchases, preferences, and other data available on the user, the ad creative gets dynamically adapted. Demographcis, location, browsing device, context of the search are the key data points that help in producing dynamic creatives.
Brands and advertisers can use this data to provide more cohesive narratives across ads. They can also create data-based segmentation, and mirror the user's browsing journey to create relevance. With rich media ads and DCO, the engagement levels can be further increased with more interactive and personalized messaging.
6. Digital Ads as an Experience: Leveraging Google Lightbox.
Google Lightbox is a rich media ad experience that gives more information on the same page as the user engages with the ad. Lightbox is more of an expansive landing page and less of an ad.
Here is how Google Lightbox works:
1. The user either clicks on the ad or hovers on it for more than two seconds.
2. The ad expands into a floating ad. It covers almost the entire page with videos, copy, images, text, CTAs, and other elements added to it.
3. Since the ad takes prominence and the user has shown an intent to engage with it, Lightbox ads can produce better CTRs.
Airtory allows you to integrate your product catalog into your ads along with adding multiple links to the same ad. You are then able to use the same engagement to drive a more comprehensive message and can measure the exact click with granular details.
In research conducted by an online platform, Lightbox ads generated 6x – 8x more engagement than other expandable ads. However, Lightbox ads are a premium format of ads that also have a higher bidding price and cost of production.
7. Deepening Engagements with 360 Interactive Videos without Losing the Objectivity of Conversion.
While video ads tend to deliver a story, 360 Interactive Videos are designed to deliver an experience. A recent Mission Impossible campaign used 360 video. It showed Tom Cruise's POV in an action scene.
It is not difficult to imagine how the ad would've clearly stood out on the page. In fact, it was able to produce 12x better CTR than what is generated by video ads on average.
Airtory makes it easy to create 360, 180, and vertical video ads that can create unique experiences and generate better engagement rates. With innovative ideas like end-cards, you can deliver CTAs without interrupting the video ad experience.
8. Data-Driven Creativity: Using Real-Time Analytics, A/B Testing, and Rapid Design-to-Deployment Cycles for KPI-Relevant Creatives.
With 50% of digital advertising spends not yielding positive results, creativity and the creative revolution cannot exist in a silo. The more data input they receive, the more relevant they will become, with a higher probability of generating better conversions and engagement.
Airtory streamlines this entire process of producing creatives and optimizing campaigns on one platform. With real-time analytics, you can observe how the users are interacting with your ad formats. A/B Testing helps in separating the causal success of campaigns from sheer randomness. With the Airtory Studio, you can use all these inputs to rapidly develop and deploy rich media creatives.
9. Creating Seamless Experiences Between Ads, Landing Pages, and Websites with a Focus on Uniform Brand Experiences.
Generally, as different ad creation platforms come into the picture for a distributed team of creatives, maintaining a uniform brand experience becomes difficult.
Airtory helps you produce the creatives that go at the beginning and end of each micro-conversion. With Airtory's library of 350 rich media templates, you can quickly produce creatives without putting in much time. You can then use these creatives as references to produce landing pages with the Airtory LP Builder. It uses templates and tools to help you create dynamic landing pages that use all the 80 elements on the page.
10. Increased Focus on Accountability Towards Brands and Privacy for Audiences.
GDPR has forced most brands, agencies, and publishers to pay close attention to the privacy of audience data. Rich media campaigns play by the same principle and take the center-stage on the page only after an audience member has engaged with it.
Besides this, Airtory provides a dedicated fraud detection tool for rich media ads that help advertisers and brands stay away from fraudulent traffic. With more attention to the UX, everyone wins. Users see only the relevant ads, brands & agencies get traction, and publishers get revenues.
Conclusion
Conventional ad creation systems have become ineffective. Agencies and brands can take this as an opportunity to evolve. Airtory can help brands, agencies, and publishers can garner better performance of ads that use formats like rich media to drive engagement. But, the biggest beneficiary is the user who gets to see only the relevant and the most engaging ads. Users are now searching for more direct information. This allows brands to filter target audiences based on intent, early in the process.
To know more about how Airtory can help you get better engagement rates without compromising the user experience, click here.
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