Google says it takes 50 milliseconds for someone to decide if they like an image on an ad. Facebook says if someone does like an image on an ad, they’ll dwell for 1.7 seconds. It is your creative that has get that attention from someone who has seen 15,000 ads a day.
Shutterstock’s director of innovation solutions, Stefan Britton, was invited to speak as part of ANA’s Thought Leader Series. Below are edited excerpts from his webinar, in which he discussed the future of data in advertising.
Creators are making more content than ever, faster than ever, and they can no longer rely on gut instinct alone to do so.
Tech really isn’t helping as much as it should because, currently, creators have to go to one place to do their research, somewhere else for image storage and asset management, somewhere else to access tools for creation, and then to another set of tools for collaboration and planning.
What is needed are tools that help simplify the creative process, improve collaboration and asset management, and allow teams to make more confident decisions using data.
How data can help
Many of us in the industry are still making decisions the same way as we did in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s guesswork, it’s gut feel, human bias, or it’s the person with the loudest opinion in the room.
AI tools can bring this process into the 21st century.
Using computer vision, we can analyse all of the elements in an image: objects, colour, movement, depths of field. That gives us a rich data source that machine learning can analyse to be able to predict—with confidence—how certain pieces of content will perform in the future.
This has incredible applications, particularly in advertising.
Imagine being in programmatic and being able to win an ad slot, and AI can then create the perfect piece of content for you. We can have customers test their ads in advance, so they know exactly what will work and, most importantly, what won’t work.
Content creation
Given that 70% of all content creation is for social, we don’t need a full creative studio just to create a quick social post.
It’s important to inject data here, because we need to be able to help right at the point where these decisions are being made and where this content is being produced.
Improved workflow
We know the collaboration is hard, especially with many of us working from home remotely for the last couple years.
Imagine having to manage this sort of complex workflow that’s full of iterations, people from different teams, different companies, who all have opinions and comments that need attending to.
If we can bring data into this creative process, and hone into one suite of products and applications, we can help streamline that collaboration and that communication piece.
By enabling them to work more efficiently together, you’re putting them under less pressure and setting them up to deliver work as a happier team.
At the same time, AI can be monitoring trends in the market, looking at what’s working in various places, and bringing in suggestions to these content plans.
So, when someone comes into this content plan or this particular project, they can see that AI has already started giving them some help, it’s already started giving them some concepts and some creative that’ll help that project.
AI can help creatives, not hinder them. It’s still relatively early days, but we want the industry in the creative world to be open to data and see it very much like spell check for a copywriter — technology that can help.
We hope this technology is going to usher in this new era of more thoughtful creative marketing, where intuition and data can be married to bring out the absolute best in creativity.
