What Creative Goals are Digital Advertisers Setting This Year?

April 8, 2020

This article is included in these additional categories:

Advertising Trends | Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Creative & Formats | Customer-Centric

Celtra Digital Ad Creative Goals Apr2020Effective creative can have an impact on business in the form of increased brand recognition and customer engagement. As such, a new study [download page] from Forrester Consulting and Celtra found that digital advertising decision-makers are making improving creative relevancy, performance and quality key goals in the next year.

Three-fifths (61%) of the more than 200 digital advertising decision-makers surveyed for the report say that they will be working on improving creative relevancy over the next year. This comes at a time when personalization is fast becoming a norm and consumers are saying they want advertising that is relevant to their needs. Not only that, but consumers also say they feel valued when they are only contacted about promotions and new products that are relevant to their specific needs.

Meanwhile, 58% of respondents say one of their goals is to improve process/workflow efficiency in creative, while many are also prioritizing scaling creative output without increasing costs (55%), improving digital advertising creative performance (53%) and improving creative quality (51%).

Challenges to Creative

That said, a full 70% of digital advertising decision-makers believe they are devoting more time than they would prefer to advertising content creation. This could be due to some of the challenges digital advertisers are facing not only in the production of ad content but also in developing digital ad assets.

When it comes to producing digital ad content respondents express that they are coming across challenges in localizing content (44%), optimizing campaigns (39%) and keeping up with rapid digital growth (36%).

Additionally, respondents also report challenges in educating employees and reducing the skills gap (36%) as well as analyzing data and metrics (35%). It’s challenges like these that have led many companies to outsource to agencies.

Challenges such as difficulty in consolidating campaign input (43%), lack of visibility into local asset use (38%), slow campaign time-to-market (37%), translation errors (36%) and repetitive production work (33%) also persist in developing new digital ad assets.

Is Automation the Answer?

Eight in 10 respondents say their digital advertising strategy could benefit from improved creative technology, with just more than three-fourths (77%) reporting that their firm could benefit from a more automated digital advertising strategy. Furthermore, three-fifths (58%) of respondents also say they do not have the proper technology to assist with digital advertising content creation.

Many of the advertisers surveyed are already using automation either mostly or completely for distribution/publishing (69%), ad testing (66%), versioning (53%), creative development/production (52%) and quality assurance (51%).

Although prior research found that some marketers think that automation will have a negative impact on brands, the same research revealed that others said that automation is best used for creating content more efficiently and quickly. This is backed up by this new study that shows that automation is expected to help increase the volume of ad campaigns launched annually (84%), improve workflow efficiency in creative (83%), as well as improve creative performance (83%) and improve creative relevancy (82%) and speed (81%) in the years to come.

The full report can be downloaded here.

About the Data: Results are based on a survey of 224 US digital advertising decision-makers.

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