Can creative automation solve marketing’s performance versus creativity dilemma?

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With budgets shrinking, economic headwinds a constant, and unpredictable geopolitical advancements, marketers are undoubtedly being asked to justify their spends.

And while creativity and branding are still important to marketers, performance marketing has, as such, gained prominence because of its measurability factor, and its ability to drive sales at the bottom of the funnel.

But while performance marketing offers a range of benefits in our current world, marketers and agency chiefs present at a recent round table held in Jakarta, Indonesia, by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, in partnership with Rocketium - a CreativeOps platform - said this can lead to a lack of differentiation.

A balanced approach that brings performance metrics and creative innovation together is needed for long-term success. The real question, said Yodha Caesario, head of creative at Tokopedia, is can we find a balance between performance and creativity?

“Sometimes when we talk about performance, we lose the sense of creativity as we just talk about business metrics. So, I think from my perspective, creative excellence will be a balance between performance and creativity,” he said.

The need for relevancy

According to a Gartner CMO study, 50.1% of CMOs said they plan to spend on brand awareness, with 49.9% choosing performance marketing. So, the preference between the two mediums is split right in the middle.

At the end of the day, be it tactical ads or branding ones, when it comes to creativity most clients and marketers want ads to be relevant, the attendees said.

Faradi Bachri, chief media officer at Future Creative Network, explained that many clients today want to be relevant and hyper-personalised. Gone are the days when marketers could spray and pray, hoping for the ad to drive some sort of conversion.

But one of the main challenges, said Bachri, is the rise in segmentation and fragmentation of the media.

“Everyone says they want to be relevant, but relevancy, for us, is kind of scary because there are so many more customer segments and ways to reach them today,” he said. “For agencies such as ours, we need to constantly justify the message we are delivering and reach the right audience.”

Echoing his sentiments, a survey by Rocketium and Demand Metric, found that 20% of study participants deploy their creative assets across seven or more channels, and 47% of companies face frequent creative process issues that cause delays in campaigns going live on time. For almost 20% of study participants, more than 7% of their ad spend is wasted due to delays in campaign go-live dates.

To counter this, agencies and clients must have in place an effective creative optimisation function which can help them work at scale, on time, and within budget, by producing high-quality creative content quickly that meets the needs of the business and target audience.

*From THE STATE OF CREATIVEOPS 2024 report

Kunal Joshi, SVP at Rocketium, added that in today's fragmented media landscape, creative optimisation and consistency are more crucial than ever. With an increasing number of customer segments and channels, maintaining relevance while ensuring high-quality, on-brand content, can be challenging.

"At Rocketium, we believe that the key to overcoming these challenges lies in streamlining the creative process, reducing cycle times, and enhancing the creative performance with a combination of data, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics," he said.

The need for data

In the cluttered world we live in today, to really resonate with your audience, you need to have the right data from all parties involved – the brand, the creative agency, and the media agency, argued Wira Gumay, general manager of Dentsu Creative.

Gumay added that currently there’s a gap in the data collection – media behaviour data, creative planning data, customer journey and experience data – and ideally all of these data points need to be aligned from different departments or sources for the best result.

Unfortunately, the gap gets even bigger when data from different expertise sits in a different company. With different sets of data, it makes it difficult for the brand marketer to optimise a campaign.

"Strong data helps in developing a creative strategy with a distinctive creative campaign idea, and aids in creative output to reach a potential audience," he said.

And, of course, brand marketers must also invest in building a pool of first party data – especially with the impending demise of third-party cookies, added James Fernandez, performance marketing leader at Decathlon.

"At Decathlon Indonesia, collaboration is key to gaining a deeper understanding of our customers. However, streamlining data integration remains a challenge, as some manual processes are still in place. We are actively seeking solutions to improve this aspect."

Beyond just being relevant, first party data also helps companies respond to customer needs, form highly precise customer profiles, and create targeted campaigns based on a person’s likely path of purchase.

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