Creative

This Wednesday marks the beginning of Hershey’s first major brand marketing campaign since 2018

According to CreativeX, ad creative is responsible for nearly half of sales lift, which is more than reach, recency and targeting combined. So why doesn’t creative get the credit it deserves? Until recently, says Anastasia Leng, CEO and founder of CreativeX, technology wasn’t advanced enough to measure creative decisions at scale.

Angela Zepeda is the former CMO of Hyundai Motor America – but not because she’s leaving the brand. She’s Hyundai’s newly-minted chief creative officer. Hyundai recently restructured its marketing department to split the CMO role into two jobs: creative and performance.

One way to get a handle on your brand creative is to, well, grade your homework, according to Anne Stilling, Vodafone’s global director of brands and media.

Kepler Group, which launched Kepler Creative in October, wants to fix the disconnect between media and creative.

Growth marketing firm Power Digital has acquired marketing consultancy Sproutward to strengthen its data and analytics chops. The acquisition is Power Digital’s fifth in the last four years.

Erik Huberman, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy Hawke Media, has some pretty strong – if not outright harsh – words for most media agencies out there: “They’re full of [expletive].” Before founding the Los Angeles-based company in 2014, Huberman launched and sold two commerce companies – Swag of the Month and Ellie – and […]

Baby Steps Facebook will block political ads in the week leading up to the US Presidential election in an effort to suppress misinformation. The platform will also flag posts that come from candidates either claiming victory before the official results are finalized or trying to dispute the outcome. Facebook has already restricted the ability to […]

Jam City is jamming, despite COVID-19. The LA-based casual mobile game studio plans to hire artists, producers, data analysts and people focused on creative strategy. Gaming is one of the few verticals that’s growing during the ongoing health crisis. People started playing more games when stay-at-home orders were announced in March, and the behavior has […]

Brands that haven’t gone dark still need a steady flow of creative, but production shoots are on hold. So with everyone practicing social distancing, brands are repurposing stock assets and using influencers as content creators. “People are looking for any cost-effective solution that gets them high quality ads,” said Alex Collmer, CEO of creative automation […]

Creatives still struggle to use data. Holding companies may have spent $12 billion collectively on data assets over the past decade, but creative agencies still don’t know how to use those tools, according to Forrester. But creative agency Heat has been able to bake AI into its creative process by tapping into its parent company […]

The analytics startup Civis was founded in 2013 with roots in political data and targeting and has since transitioned to commercial business, where advertisers are less familiar with testing messages to sway public opinion. Most big brands rely on panels or focus groups, which “have a lot of contamination” because more people self-select into groups […]

Marketing and ad tech companies are becoming more involved in creative planning and production. Ad tech vendors compete to out-optimize campaigns by even a fraction of a percent, said McKinsey partner Ed See, a leader in the consultancy’s marketing practice. “But in the past few years, the power of targeting has mostly run its course,” […]

Facebook’s Marketing Partner (FMP) program is getting a bit of a facelift with the addition of new badge categories and tools to help with measurement and creative. Hundreds of tech companies, agencies and consultants jammed into the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Wednesday to get the skinny at Facebook’s sixth global marketing partner […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Lux Narayan, co-founder and CEO at Unmetric. Data is often likened to oil, but the similarities go deeper than you might think. The first oil drills in North America were […]

For large CPG brands like Conagra that typically generate the most awareness through mass reach, hyperpersonalized video creative hasn’t always been their top consideration. But that is changing. “We’re seeing more personalized creative and ad versioning from CPG brands [that] might not own any data from the consumer up until the actual purchase point, because […]

Media agencies know how to find the right person at the right time, thanks to the growth of programmatic. But they’re still trying to pin down how to send the right message. “You want the media to recognize where they were, but you also want to recognize where they were in the conversation,” said Zimm […]

Mobile creative is a Catch-22. While rich media units are engaging, they’re expensive to make and tougher to scale than programmatic banners. But banners look bad on mobile and get a bad rap for ruining the user experience. Shazam and Waze are two apps championing beautiful mobile creative, but they can do so by relying […]

Leo Burnett, one of the most iconic advertising agencies in the game, is evolving the way it thinks about creative. “I’ve been focused on infusing technology, data and analytics to make creative more relevant, personalized and effective,” said Andrew Swinand, CEO at Leo Burnett. For Swinand, who spent time on the media side as president […]

As consumer attention continues to fragment, creative agencies are relying more on real-time insights to craft personalized messages and optimize them on the fly. That requires bringing media and creative services closer together. While smaller indie shops are bringing media execution in-house to make messaging more relevant, holding companies experiment with cross-discipline and cross-agency teams. […]

Make no mistake about it: Accenture Interactive is here to eat the agency’s lunch. “Our clients asked us to get in this business,” said Glen Hartman, Accenture Interactive managing director for North America, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Wednesday. Clients are starting to look for “nontraditional service providers” that can tie multiple threads together. That […]

Are programmatic advertising and creative storytelling finally coming together in a meaningful way? It’s a good question to ask at the Cannes Lions festival, where the whole point is creativity – or it used to be, before the twin powers of data and media started elbowing in on the joint a few years back. But […]

On the heels of Lyft’s first national TV spot that aired this spring, the ride-sharing app’s advertising efforts are still in overdrive. As a challenger to Uber, Lyft seeks to convert willing drivers and passengers in less-penetrated markets for the brand, such as New York, by combining big brand activations (TV and out-of-home) with smaller […]

Creative and tech have an uneasy coexistence. But the advertising world is in the early stages of a new hybrid model, where creative relies on tech for personalization and storytelling. “With programmatic buying and targeting, the contextual opportunities are increased to quantum levels, and we’ll need machines in order to address them,” said Chick Foxgrover, […]

Best practice No. 1: A tiny burger on a tiny screen isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. When Opera House, the creative strategy arm and ad lab under mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks, consults with a brand or an agency on a mobile campaign, developing the right creative is the big thing – especially when […]

Kinetic Social is choosing growth over profitability. The social ads company, which announced $17.5 million in venture cash from Multiplier Capital and Bridge Bank on Tuesday, will use the bulk of its funding to ramp up its content management and creative services through an internal outfit the company is calling Creative Studio. The infusion brings […]

With all the recent talk about automating the ad-buying process, it’s easy to forget about content. But Drew Panayiotou, president and CEO of BBDO’s Atlanta division, thinks agencies will sink or swim depending on their ability to produce the “next generation of content.” “Content is dramatically changing as media is changing,” Panayiotou told AdExchanger. Panayiotou […]

As more advertising happens programmatically, it’s increasingly difficult to blend automation and creative design. And though Brooklyn-based digital agency Huge doesn’t buy media, it feels the influence of automation in advertising and doesn’t necessarily feel it’s for the better, at least from a creative standpoint. With roughly 1,000 employees, Huge operates offices in Atlanta, Washington, […]

As Mindshare Chief Digital Officer Norm Johnston recalls, the impetus for Content+ occurred during the Cannes Lions advertising festival over several glasses of rosé. (What else?) Content+ is a partnership between media agency Mindshare and its WPP sister, digital agency POSSIBLE, that launched last week in London, Singapore, Shanghai and North America. “What came from […]