Question

(in article, Advertising Analytics 2.0) Programmatic marketing is becoming an important driver of the shift to data-driven marketing in many companies. It may in the future increase the role of digital advertising mediums like Google search, Facebook and Twitter at the expense of reduced television advertising? Is this likely to reduce the creativity of marketing initiatives?

Answer 1

Marketing is a discipline that is made of amalgamation of arts (creativity) and science (quantitative). In the past, the role of quantitative analysis of marketing initiatives were comparatively less due to limitation of data collection and analysis. For example, if we launched a TV Ad campaign, it was extremely difficult to determine the efficiency of the campaign. This left a large chunk of unanswered questions in every marketing initiatives. With digital marketing and advertising, this seemed to have reduced. This is why data driven marketing has become more popular as they tend to yield practical and verifiable results.

When it comes to the question of reduction in creativity, we may see the overall percentage effort in creativity reduce. However, this is not a bad event. There are plenty of creative approaches which can likely be taken in digital field as well. For example, a TV ad can also be used on YouTube as advertisement. This is not a reduction of creativity and merely a shift of an avenue from one channel to another. We need to realize that people’s behavior are changing. People are moving away from TV/Radio/Newspaper to a more digital approach. In this regard, it is best that Marketing approaches and initiatives change their way to target audiences as well. Creativity levels can be maintained but the amount of data driven initiatives need to be increased.