Adobe Advertising Cloud Gets “Creative”

Consumers are taking action on growing dissatisfaction with the digital ad experience. The industry is seeing consumer’s increasing ad blocking, learning to ignore ads and agreeing to pay a premium for an ad-free experience. Given the negative trends in digital advertising, it is a critical time for the industry to reverse course and take steps to improve the experience of digital ads. Importantly, marketers should add focus on the creativity of ads in addition to targeting and return on investment. With consumers exposed to so much content, digital ads need to establish a stronger emotional connection with their target audience.

It is towards the goal of improving the advertising experience that we are excited to announce Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative. Advertising Cloud Creative is a new product and self-serve platform designed to increase the creative velocity and personalization in digital advertising. Advertising Cloud Creative significantly expands Adobe’s existing Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) capabilities by introducing upper-funnel tactics like sequencing based on decision trees, integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud assets, and an intuitive self-serve user-interface.

To truly understand Advertising Cloud Creative and how it is uniquely positioned to simplify creative production, lets unpack some of the current trends.

Good collaboration is no longer optional, but essential.

A 2017 McKinsey report showed a positive correlation between companies that fostered advertising creativity (tracked by number of Lions won at Cannes) and the financial performance of the company. One of the reasons being that these companies have invested in the processes that nurture creativity and allow speedy decisions and activations of new marketing campaigns.

Remember the time when you wanted to launch a campaign, and had to wait for your design team to send you huge files of creative? Imagine asking for a change in the headline, or your font size – and as a designer, imagine making those small tweaks.

With our new announcement, creative assets that are designed in Adobe Creative Cloud will be automatically available in Advertising Cloud Creative, so marketers can take charge of their marketing campaigns by owning their headlines, call-to-action etc., and designers can continue to be creative. Simple changes to ads can be made easily in a self-serve user interface, without needing to go back to a design agency or re-trafficking tags.

Storytelling is written into our DNA. Advertisers need be storytellers.

The stories we tell each other, whether created in our own heads or written down on paper, keep us engaged and interested. Be it baby boomers, millennials or Generation Snowflake – all of us have stories of our life experiences.

Experiences are at the heart of creative story telling as well. As a marketer, it is important to take consumers on a journey of experiences with your brand.

Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative strives to convert all advertisers into storytellers. With the sequencing functionality, advertisers now have the power to outline the stories they want to tell their consumers at different steps in their customer journey. The goal is to create a positive brand perception through ads, to treat every opportunity to serve an ad as a moment to deliver beautiful creative that tell a relevant story.

And a big part of that consumer experience hinges on good orchestration between devices, so we can identify the person across devices and continue the story seamlessly. The Adobe Co-op provides a trusted, independent device graph to better reach consumers regardless of what device they are on.

Creative velocity can be mastered with technology. However, relevant ads (without hyper-personalizing) is key to good, responsible advertising.

The current online ad experience swings between two opposites – completely irrelevant advertising that shows up in all corners of our digital experience, or hyper-personalized ads that have tracked our personal details and follow us online.

Irrelevant ads are the bane of advertisers grappling with managing creative scale. Many companies have only a handful of generic ads that are shown on loop to generic audiences. The result is ad fatigue or ignoring.

Dynamic assembly helps address creative scale. The capability to assemble ads and dynamically stitch together relevant content in real-time is something Adobe has been doing for years with its Dynamic Creative Optimization solution. Feed or product catalogs can be ingested to dynamically create millions of ad variations at scale. With our new Advertising Cloud Creative announcement, we extend the functionality to include flexible reusable templates that can be created and stored for future use.

The next time you are in that 5 p.m. meeting where a decision is made to launch a campaign a.s.a.p for a new promotion cycle, you no longer have to work late to make it happen. The flexible templates allow you to easily swap ad components to build new creative. The integration with Creative Cloud assets allow you to pull assets your designer has worked on and kept ready in the asset library – to spawn new campaigns with new ads with a few clicks.

We still must work to address the issue of hyper-personalization. Adobe is partnering with our customers to build responsible advertising. While expandable ads may get viewed more than others, it matters that the viewers may leave annoyed by that ad and may develop a negative perception of the brand. Similarly, good personalization is akin to a refined concierge service – they gather the right amount of information about your likes and interests to make useful suggestions, however they know better than to get too familiar.

The integrations to Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager act like the sophisticated concierge service informing the Advertising Cloud Creative ad experience so it is relevant and useful. This data is powered by real-time updates that allow us to know when someone is no longer part of a segment, so an advertiser can dynamically change the experiences that need to be delivered.

Ultimately, Adobe is in a unique place to bring together asset management, data and audiences, and media buying. The result of this union is Advertising Cloud Creative – a solution that plans to raise the bar on creative.

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