A New Year, A New Way Forward For Video Personalization

Digital video can do so much more for a brand’s marketing campaigns. Let’s look at the shortcomings of the past process and why we as an industry need to make a change.

One-to-one personalization in the current digital video ecosystem is more talk than action.

To fully understand why it isn’t possible in the current framework, we need to take a look at video and how campaigns come to fruition:

This is a linear process with little room for circular feedback among the many parties. The different stakeholders are in separate groups, located in separate offices, cities, and often even countries. With no communication throughout the process, it’s possible that this linear ecosystem is actually hurting a brand’s campaign results.

To allow one-to-one personalization, this process needs to be circular. Then the campaign will create a continuous feedback loop on creative, audience, and data throughout. A more ideal process would look something like this:

This new process starts with data that feeds creative and audience selection, gathers feedback on how the creative is performing, and continually makes targeting and creative changes to find the right execution for every person. It’s fluid and allows for communication and changes throughout the process.

Although the current system produces successful campaigns, there is massive room for improvement. With this new process, digital video can do so much more for a brand’s marketing campaigns. Let’s look at the shortcomings of the past process and why we as an industry need to transition to the new ecosystem.

The Creative Can Be Flexible For Each Viewer

With the current process, marketers are typically sending one generic message to everyone, rather than producing different creative pieces for all types of audience segments. To truly achieve a higher level of personalization, the creative process needs to start with data. In a more perfect world, the process would have a different flow:

1. Start with audience data: Brands need to know the specific individuals they’re reaching to understand what messaging will resonate most.

• What message does a specific person need in order to buy? What are the hundreds of messages the brand needs for the many different consumers seeing their ads? How are they all different?
• Brands can use audience data, such as CRM, purchase data, previous behavior, interests, first-party cookies, etc. to accomplish this.

2. Bring in external decision factors: Once appropriate segments are established, the brand can consider what other information will be most relevant for their consumers to make a decision.

• Would external data like weather and location affect the target audience’s actions? How will it change their decision to purchase?
• What products are most relevant for each consumer? It can get as granular as examining exactly what type of toothpaste someone prefers.

3. Then you can start the creative process: The creative needs to be crafted according to the many data segments and decisions the brand has made in the previous steps. Filming and production must consider the different audiences and product variations that will speak to each individual.

For Personalization, Creative And Media Must Work Together

In the same vein of taking user data into account for the creative, the media plan has to be a part of the creative process as well. The way we’ve been operating for years has the creative stage completely separated from the media buying stage, but in reality, we can’t run an ad without an appropriate feedback loop to the creative.

Once your campaign is live, it’s really just beginning. There is a lot to be done after the go-live date to assess how the creative is performing and optimize it for the largest impact. When a campaign is running, marketers need to see how users are responding to the creative. In response, they can go back in and change it or target an audience differently for a more optimal effect.

Campaign managers need to look beyond CTRs and focus on comparing performance metrics for the highest- and lowest-performing creative in the campaign. As an example, campaign managers can see if people are responding to a small CTA at the beginning of an ad or a large one at the end and change the creative or targeting in response. These seemingly minute decisions all affect overall campaign performance, and this crucial step can’t happen when the media agency is three steps separated from the creative team.

Media-Buying Technologies Can Do More

What’s probably the most problematic part of this process is that current media-buying technologies, like DSPs, only optimize media, not creative. In a perfect world of media buying, ads should be optimized for media, audience, and creative together to deliver the biggest impact.

The majority of DSPs are built to optimize media metrics—get a higher CTR, manage the buying process, produce better GRP targeting. But in more specific terms, DSPs can’t show that a short 10-second video isn’t being received well by the existing consumer on a specific publisher and then change to a different video. They also can’t play the same video to the same audience on a different publisher and measure the difference. Current DSPs are only looking at two pieces of the data—media and audience—but to truly personalize, you need a three-dimensional bidder that accounts for creative as well.

If Media And Creative Agencies Don’t Change, Will They Survive?

We’ve all bought into a process with everything separated and siloed, but can agencies survive in that ecosystem?

If the current wall between creative agencies and media agencies isn’t solved, they won’t stay relevant for long. The system needs to evolve beyond what it has always known, and in order to do that, media companies and agencies need to challenge the status quo, rethink how things are done, and bring new ideas to life.

The industry is craving personalization, but it will take a fundamental shift in how campaigns are set up and executed to truly deliver on one-to-one creative.