Technology is changing the advertising world and stretching what is possible with each passing day. However, what about the people in the creative process, looking at more than just CPA optimisation, focused on creating an emotional engagement with an advertising campaign? We’re still lost in the plumbing and it’s time to remember what it’s really all about, says James Naylor (pictured below), product director, Affectv.

When I first moved out of the world of recruitment software and into ad tech, I have to admit that, I, like most people, found the plumbing pretty damn cool.

I had already seen how natural language processing could be used to parse CVs for topics at massive scale (impressive enough) – but the sheer complexity, the power, and interconnectedness of the open ad ecosystem was clearly something else: data management systems storing and shifting billions of data points. Insights platforms capable of telling you the tastes of a whole country. Machine learning that can precisely rank in that country exactly which people should see which ads, and the insanely complex network of calls, responses, and interconnected systems required to make a single real-time bid and subsequent personalised ad server – all before a single page finishes loading.

You have to say that, technically, ad tech has it all. For a technically minded digital product manager like me, its potential and capabilities for the most sophisticated kind of automation verge on the pornographic.

The problem is, however, that all of this incredible pipework is still precisely just that. It’s plumbing we’re still geeking out over. But plumbing isn’t the point of ad tech. The point of ad tech is the point of advertising: to get people to buy things they might actually like or find useful.

Why is this such a problem? Because it means we’re forgetting things that people used to know about advertising. Gone are the concerns with producing great, memorable moments, of making experiences that people connect with, that affect people on an emotional level. Instead, creative is just some afterthought made by design guys. We think that all we need are machines, more data points, and more data scientists to keep wringing out extra cents on a CPA, even as ad blocking rises and the true extent of just how expensive every step in a single bid request adds up to be is revealed (if you’ve read Ad Contrarian – which I know you have – you know what I am talking about).

The evidence for this blindness is clear in one of the industry’s current biggest clichés. We’ve all seen this headline, or one of a hundred variations thereof: “forget about Mad Men, it’s about Math Men now”, occasionally accompanied by a group shot of some group of guys sat casually on their desks, looking like the cast of Silicon Valley.

James Naylor, Product Director, Affectv

But this mentality only makes any kind of sense if you actually believe that a team of data scientists building predictive models was any kind of replacement for the kind of creativity, sense of aesthetics, and understanding of human emotion that made the great ad campaigns great.

Don’t get me wrong – the 'math men' are super important. It’s the brilliant algorithms they designed and selected, implemented elegantly by gifted engineers, that make doing personalisation at scale even possible. It’s they who will save some poor soul at an agency with the tyranny of dynamic creative as it is today: a cumbersome, arbitrary decision tree with segments so microscopic that no one really knows if a particular message-audience combination is actually working.

But their job isn’t to work out how to connect with people. Their job is to build the tech that lets us test the messaging, the ideas that experienced, talented people believe will connect with people and then skew towards what works.

If you don’t have anything good – anything meaningful that touches someone – to chuck into that tech, then your marketing will still be bad, no matter how many data scientists you employ or how big your DMP is. The hard evidence is in any campaign where you’ve A/B tested a terrible creative versus a good one. That’s why Don Draper, armed with the kind of tool set available to advertisers today to test his ideas, will absolutely destroy a team of statisticians armed with a mood board.

Perhaps retargeting made this illusion that the tech itself was all that was needed, because it was actually a very different beast from the rest of online advertising. Even when the creative experience was poor, it has been monstrously successful at smashing post-click targets, the de facto standard created by Adwords, by simply reminding users about something they already wanted and providing a convenient link back to it. But think about the human journey involved in most advertising and it’s clearly a special case, true for only a tiny amount of the impressions that need to be served. Even when you’re doing lower funnel prospecting, with display you need to build desire: you need to make someone want something; and that is not just a rational process.

The emotional potential of video and native in this regard is obvious (and one day, sooner than we think, we will have an incredible canvas to play with in VR) but this is relevant even in display where we started. Even if there are, so far, no truly great display advertising campaigns in the TV-sense of the term. In the tiny amount of real estate allowed, the craftsmanship of how to trigger an emotional response is even greater, not less.

Will I, and technology people like me who understand this, be creating those creatives? Will we take over that role? Emphatically not. But we will be building the tech that makes that emotional connection happen and helps designers and creatives create things that are beautiful, meaningful, but also automated and, crucially, fast to use. If anyone has anything to fear from the much-heralded onslaught of AI, it’s the traffickers and the buyers. It is they whose futures are less certain. The technology can very successfully automate the admin, the pouring over of impressions and site data to optimise delivery. But the people pulling the strings on the tech will ultimately be the people with the big ideas and the ability to move hearts and minds.