Data-driven creative poses a huge opportunity for marketers, but also a plethora of challenges. ExchangeWire hear from Ray Jenkin (pictured below), chief strategy officer, Affectv about the steps marketers can take to overcome those challenges and take their creative campaigns to the next level.

For those marketers capitalising on the intersect between programmatic buying, audience targeting and dynamic creative, it is an exciting time to do so. We are seeing the opportunities truly emerge in 2016 for scalable, data-driven creative campaigns, and those marketers who capitalise now get the edge on their competition.

Early 2016 saw the first marketer-focused conference in the UK dedicated to tackling the topic of programmatic creative and marketers were there, en masse, to discuss the challenges and opportunities in tackling the creative frontier in this brave new programmatic world.

What was clear from the conference was that in order to execute a successful data-driven creative campaign, smart planning, discipline, and clear connections between business goals and creative innovation were paramount to delivering value to consumers and, in turn, brands.

If you are looking to pursue data-driven creative in the coming months, here are few considerations to help you navigate this exciting space, develop a plan and execute it without first getting lost in the detail, acronyms, and technical complexity. Doing the groundwork here will unlock an exciting area for you, as a marketer, to tackle.

Let insights drive your data-driven creative

Too often I hear marketers and agencies jump at the idea of the new creative 'gadget/widget' without a real sense of what key communication challenge it addresses or business goal it drives. Starting with your own consumer insights is a rich and meaningful ground to support your data-driven creative. A solid insight, like consumers providing you the most favourable reviews amongst your competitor set, or that time pressure drives a higher average order value, can be used in data-driven creative to great effect.

Consider all the usual data sources, such as site analytics, campaign performance data, data management platform (DMP) insights driven from first- and third-party data and consumer panel data to inform your data-driven creative strategy. Lastly, review your key site and content strategies and tools, often these can be replicated in dynamic creative modules to great effect.

Plan and build for the omni-device world

Ray Jenkin, CSO, Affectv

Does your data-driven creative strategy apply effectively across device? Does what you are trying to communicate on a desktop device translate well onto other devices and contexts? Also, is the consumer engagement with your dynamic creative, and in turn your site, the same on all devices? Addressing these questions upfront in the early planning stages will avoid a scenario where you have misaligned messages across channels, personalisation starts to get 'ugly' if you don’t plan effectively here.

On a more practical level, most of the major web browsers have gone to war on Flash, and mobile doesn’t love it. Make sure your creative tools and technology vendors have built their stacks to truly accommodate HTML5 and that you understand both the key opportunities and limitations in using HTML5 for your creative builds and linkage with data.

Keep on-message

Is all the copy in your data-driven creative tied in with your overall business goals and marketing communications strategy? Don’t retrofit a cool data 'widget' or module into your creative unless it enhances your existing wider communication goals.

I recall a year or two back when weather targeting and messaging was all the rage and marketers were linking weather to everything from cars to nappies. Your data-driven creative and copy should bolster your key marketing messaging not distract from this.

Furthermore, make sure if you are using a variety of vendors for data-driven creative, that you have good birds-eye view of the consumer experience across these vendors to avoid a situation where messaging is over-saturating and distracting rather than meaningful and delightful.

Understand the 'cost' of data-driven creative

Beyond fees for technology, data access and media, do you understand the cost to you and the business in terms of time for setup, testing, resources, approvals, and creative iterations? This is often one of the most overlooked planning and selection criteria in the process. Ask questions and plan upfront with vendors and internal stakeholders to get a sense of the 'heavy-lifting' required to get data-driven creative up and running. Just because it’s automated and programmatic, does not always mean it’s easy, quick, and scalable.

Get a solid sense of timelines, key milestones, roles and responsibilities to make the process more seamless. Good planning and evaluation of vendors on this additional 'cost' can often make or break your first foray into the world data-driven creative.

Keep testing simple and scaleable

What are you looking to test when it comes to dynamic creative? Have you thought about the set-up of this? It can be a minefield to fix this later, so plan for this early. Start simple, make sure the testing approach is robust. Don’t overdo the number of variables you want to test, alongside your KPI’s. It is easy to get into the minutiae of every element of creative reporting. Often driving down to this level of detail leaves results shaky in terms of statistical significance and makes it tough to decipher any meaningful learnings from this. Also, consider that you will need a decent period of time to draw out robust results. If using a vendor for dynamic creative, make sure they have a strong approach to testing and that it is baked into their technology.

Report, learn, and iterate

Brief your stakeholders on what the key objectives are and make sure all parties involved are on the same page about KPI’s, testing criteria and testing requirements. Too many data-driven creative campaigns fail at this point, where all the work done upfront does not materialise in data to measure success and learn from.

Understand what changes in your existing processes for digital creative trafficking, reporting, and optimisation with the introduction of these data-driven components. Identify who needs to be briefed and put in the time to make sure all of these stakeholders are educated and informed about benefits, challenges and requirements well in advance of the live date. Allocate time during and post the campaigns to review and iterate on your current strategy and share learnings widely to get long term buy-in.

Lastly, make sure you 'manage up' to key senior staff to ensure there is a good baseline understanding of what you are doing. Data-driven, programmable marketing is starting to permeate all areas of the marketing function and learnings; results and experience in driving data-driven creative can spur more action and adoption of this approach more widely.