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by Jones Tim
, Op-Ed Contributor,21 minutes ago
As we descend upon Cannes, there’s one thing on every marketer’s mind: Creativity.
We’re an industry underpinned by creativity indeed. Creativity is the heart of what we
offer—and for good reason. Brilliant creativity has the power to make us to stop and look, listen, and think. It captures our emotion and creates engagement, to drive shares, clicks and sales.
The problem is, when not done well, it also has the power to drive us the other way.
Consumers no longer tolerate a poor experience. Why would they? Today, consumers hold ultimate power in an
era of choice, immediacy and personalization. Their standards are at an all-time high and marketers must rise to meet consumer expectations or risk becoming irrelevant. So how do you deliver
unparalleled consumer experiences in the age of ultimate consumer expectation?
Make consumer experiences right through the careful application of data.
Data is the foundation
upon which you can build a truly great experience. At the same time, it’s a bit like crude oil. Just as oil needs to be refined into gasoline in order to power an automobile, data needs to be
properly organized, tagged, and analyzed to power consumer experiences. It has to be fit for a purpose to drive an outcome.
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We need the right data to understand the context of location,
intention, and mindset in order to optimize campaigns, to determine right use of technology, and to enable creative message to land in the right way. Take KitchenAid, for example, a 100 year old brand
who is among the most relevant brands for millennials today because of its bold creativity and hyper-personalized messaging. In their recent “The Marks” campaign, they leveraged audience
data and listening tools to understand consumer passion points and developed 14 unique videos that spoke to key consumers profiles. By better understanding consumer interests and behaviors, they were
able to use technology to deploy personalized messages, sequential storytelling and custom designed sequences based on skip logic.
Find the right technology to share your story.
While technology has made its way into nearly every facet of media through programmatic, creative is the next frontier. The rise of new technologies have completely revolutionized
the consumer experience, changing the way we communicate with people, transforming how we design consumer experiences, and enabling new ways for us to study consumers in new and different ways.
Chatbots, in particular, are an under-tapped resource that has the power to transform brand discovery into an interactive, personalized and instant customer service experience, helping consumers
find solutions quickly and delivering a truly one-on-one experience. Voice assistants, similarly, represent a highly-personal touchpoint along the consumer journey that builds trust and a relationship
that is personally relevant. AI gives marketers the power to track, optimize and improve our advertising efforts—whether it’s looking at things like facial recognition, computer imaging,
eye tracking, and natural language processing.
By leaning into chatbots, voice and AI as key pieces of the consumer experience and taking care to uniquely tailor creative to ensure that
experience design focuses on the consumer (versus the brand itself), marketers can create frictionless discovery opportunities within the consumer journey that respond to their needs and drive brand
results.
Make the experience magic with content that has purpose.
You can have all the data and technology in the world, but if your content is not contextually relevant, it
will have far less impact.
To take the first step in building the right content, marketers first must identify their brand purpose. Through the use of data, they can then mine for relevant
insights about their consumer and create content and experiences that both entertain and provide value. Coors Light has done this particularly well by leveraging their brand purpose—connecting
with Explorers—and bringing it to life with visual storytelling in contextually relevant environments, whether it’s a video series with Great Big Story, expansive content integrations
within Hulu or building the first-ever branded Roku channel that brings them the content they love.
This is the true purpose of creativity—to work hard yet naturally across the
environments we place it in to achieve a consumer experience so seamless, it’s hard to tell where the experience begins and ends.
Brands are beginning to do this well, and the
proliferation of technology and rise of higher-quality, more precise data will enable a new wave of creative excellence that will allow beautiful consumer experiences to reach new heights and brand
impact.
