Data is used in every aspect of advertising today. So, bringing technology in-house to utilise data for driving creative development and execution makes sense. ExchangeWire speak with Victor Wong (pictured below), CEO, Thunder, on the trend of marketers taking control of their own creative work, and the tools available to make this work possible by traditionally non-creative professionals.

ExchangeWire: What are the benefits for advertisers using a Creative Management Platform (CMP)?

Victor Wong: A creative management platform (CMP) powers cross-channel data-driven advertising. Thunder CMP enables advertisers to better personalise ads, improve operational agility, and perform more tests. As a result, they see decreases in their creative costs and improvements in creative performance.

For advertisers looking to bring work in-house, a CMP makes creative work doable by non-creative professionals, just as a DMP makes data accessible to non-data specialists. This radically changes how an organisation can be set up. For advertisers who use agencies, a CMP allows the marketer the ability to control their messaging and assets across many teams working on their brand(s), in the cloud.

How does data-driven creative change the game for advertisers?

Advertisers today already spend over USD$6bn (£4.68bn) collectively on data-targeting systems like DMPs and DSPs. We have found that over 90% of these programmatic campaigns that pay for data-targeting systems haven't built creative specific to the data being utilised. That means over USD$5bn (£3.9bn) is wasted every year on data that doesn't get used in paid media.

Data-driven creative promises to stop the billions in waste by producing creative segments that match audience segments and utilise what we know about people. Data-driven creative will have as disruptive of an impact on its field as evidence-based medicine had on medical care. Prior to evidence-based medicine, doctors went with gut feelings and common knowledge to decide how to solve a problem. Afterwards, doctors learned what worked for each person and could use their learnings to improve treatment for specific patients, and patients overall. Data-driven creative is rooted in the idea that we need to know who we're targeting, what we're saying, and testing, to see if it works, so we know more overall.

What in-housing trends have you seen by agencies and/or brands?

Victor Wong, CEO, Thunder

Brands increasingly bring the technology in-house for two reasons. Brand marketers want more transparency and control. They also want to own the tech contracts and know what they're paying so they can activate the appropriate agency, as needed. Direct-response marketers desire greater speed and lower costs, and find that with today’s intuitive technology it is more efficient to do everything in-house.

Enterprising agencies are also taking more ownership of technology by embedding it as a core capability for clients. Now agencies can offer new levels of service, at better rates or margins than before, taking on costs and assuming the gains.

With both brand and agencies, we're now seeing the role of a 'creative planner' emerge, too. It may go by different titles, but the role essentially means taking a data, media, and an audience plan, and translating that into a creative plan to execute. Just as the DMP created the role of 'DMP manager', we expect the CMP to create the existence of a 'CMP manager' title. Regardless, brands and agencies are finding it critical to have a designated point person responsible for taking the media planner’s targeted audiences, and tailoring creative to those audiences, making sure every ad is relevant to the consumer who sees it.

With the rise of programmatic, has the need of a CMP changed for both publishers and advertisers? 

Absolutely. Publishers are selling more ad formats and trying to segment their audiences more than ever – both of these trends mean more creative versions. For advertisers, on the flip side, they can buy ad formats and segmented audiences with low transactional costs; but, to take advantage of that, they too need more creative versions. The rise of the CMP is the culmination of these trends on both sides of the market being powered by programmatic's rise.

What were some of the drivers leading to new app development on your platform?

In some cases, building more creative so easily created more ad ops work on the trafficking side. In order cases, it was clients wanting to do new things like dynamic testing and optimisation. This demand led Thunder to work with various partners to create a unified platform, we set out to not only facilitate creative production, but also offer everything clients need to create and manage highly optimised cross-channel campaigns, from ensuring creative viewability to simplifying trafficking/tracking.

Our clients don't want to deal with multiple point solutions. Brands are looking for a way to simplify the process so they can get back to focusing on the message. Issues like fraud detection and prevention are important, but marketers expect that to be resolved in the first place, not introduce new operational headaches and tech vendors to deal with. Thunder Apps starts where the ad campaign begins – the creative – and streamlines the entire process, enabling seamless campaign management and tech integration.

Unlike Adobe, Thunder understands that the creative problem is so big that it will take more than one company to solve it. We aim to be an open platform, so clients have access to best-in-breed technology in one place, even if those technologies come from different sources. We also won't offer subpar proprietary solutions to benefit from a common platform. That’s why we developed Thunder Apps, which offers the best partner APIs and systems integrations available, rather than working on our own creative cloud of proprietary solutions.