Media Dojo

Online advertisers spend an obscene amount of money, time and effort to organize and target an audience, but often revert to a Soviet mentality with the variety of creative that ends up being delivered to the consumer.

We have pork with the rib side up! We have pork with the ribs side down! Choose!

There are a few companies that are trying to work the other side of the equation, namely how to optimize ad creative at the margin.

I spoke today with A.J. Kintner, Director of East Coast Sales with Tumri out of Mountain View. Tumri is blowing up ad creative into its constituent elements and re-assembling it on the fly to present a consumer with a unique ad message.

For a one pager on the company click here: MD Tear Sheet on Tumri

Here’s the gist of our conversation:

Media Dojo: What’s the problem that Tumri solves?

AJ: Ad creative is static for many reasons. Creative executions can be very time consuming to make and just as time consuming to capture and make sense of the data the ad throws off. I spoke with a group in South America working with a big IT advertiser. They needed 33 people for just one account to make the creative, capture and crunch the data, and use that insight for the next rev of the campaign. What we do is enable a team to launch an ad and then change pieces of it on-the-fly as the data rolls in on who clicked where, when, and under what conditions. So instead of having just creative 1, creative 2 or creative 3 that are going to be served up, we take the main elements that go into the execution (the background, the price point, product offer, color scheme, call-to-action) and reconfigure it hundreds of ways to find the best recipe for different customers.

MD: Kind of rapid prototyping for online ads

AJ: Yep

MD: Who are your customers?

AJ: We pitch to agencies, advertisers and publishers. For advertisers and agencies, our solution makes life a little easier on man hours and performance. At the same time, they’re learning about their consumers. So we helped Intel learn about which part of their ad creative that people were looking at, what they were clicking to find out more information. Within a 4-5 month period, Intel learned more about their consumers than in the 2.5 years they had been running web media in that space. It’s because we set up the creative in a way that they could actually learn how their users were interacting with their products.

MD: So Intel gets a twofer with better ad performance with customer research, yes? Where do you see that going where you’ve got rolling feedback between creative and research?

AJ: We were working with a major shoe company and were able to show them that anywhere from 15-20% of the click thrus on the ad originated from the brand logo. The brand logo was very small part of the overall banner. The creative agency wasn’t taking any action to raise the profile of the logo. It seemed that both the marketer and their agency were taking the brand for granted. But once they had the data suggesting that the brand was so strong that people were just clicking on it to go to the home page, they integrated that brand logo into a 2-3 second attention grabber before the rest of the ad started. A lot of advertisers take their brands for granted: “everyone knows who were are” etc.

MD: What do you see happening in the next six months from an industry point-of-view?

AJ: Look, things are changing so fast because of the general economic shifts to where what you knew last July isn’t relevant now. I will say that almost every marketer and agency is focusing on the bottom line and ROI like they were direct marketers. I’ve seen the conversation go at industry events in which a branding person talks about a new ad launch to another branding person, “New banner looks great. What’s the CTR?”

MD: Nothing like a recession to inject a direct marketing mentality into what had been a brand marketer’s world…

AJ: No doubt.

Comments are closed.