I, Robot: When Creativity Meets the Machines

NEW YORK The sci-fi thriller Minority Report has aged well. At five years old, its depiction of a world saturated with super-targeted ads has proved prescient as real-world digital technology has begun to deliver on its promise. One thing not addressed in the Hollywood flick: Who would create all these customized ads? Today, tech providers like Yahoo and upstarts such as Spot Runner and Visible World are building tools that can turn a dozen creative executions into 1,200 or even 12,000 permutations. "Typically, one-third of the value [from campaigns] comes from media targeting and two-thirds from creative customization," said Tara Walpert, president of Visible World, a New York tech company that automates the creation of customized TV spots. "It's that two-thirds that drives much of the value. I think that's going to be the next wave of focus."Last week, Yahoo provided a glimpse into such automation with the introduction of SmartAds, which makes rich media banners on the fly. The hope is to bring the targeting and relevance that has made search advertising so successful—it accounts for 40 percent of online ad spending, yet search sites are just 4 percent of the pages visited, according to Nielsen//NetRatings—to other ad formats. (Analysts say the need for consumer behavior data is the rationale driving Google's $3.1 billion pact to buy DoubleClick and Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive.)The SmartAds technology combines Yahoo's trove of user-behavior data with inventory feeds from advertisers. Executions are built based on a profile of what users have searched for and the pages they have visited, information that is then matched with product listings and creative assets from advertisers. Frequent fliers from New York to San Francisco, for instance, would see auto-generated banners with deal offers from airlines on that route, with Yahoo's system combining creative elements provided by the marketer's agency.The automated system, said Todd Teresi, svp of display marketplaces at Yahoo, "opens up an entirely new era ... of brand marketing and direct marketing coming together. ... We're extending the targeting of the buying process to the creative process.""Now that Yahoo has gone down this path, Google and Microsoft will follow very quickly and at scale," predicted Martin Lash, senior director of search strategy at SEMDirector, a provider of search management services to agencies and clients.While creating banner ads is one thing, the ability to bring this type of automation to video is quite another. For now, few video ads, much less TV commercials, are highly targeted, according to Visible World's Walpert. The company takes creative assets from advertisers and constructs TV spots on the fly, piecing together scenes to target different audiences with custom product pitches. Its clients, which include auto companies like Subaru, typically end up with about 50 different executions. It recently inked a deal with MTV Networks to run its targeted placement on its cable properties and online. In a campaign for a bank, Visible World made different executions for target markets based on the positioning of convenience. For young consumers, it highlighted online banking; spots for adults pushed widespread ATMs; and for older consumers, the location of bank branches was the selling proposition. The spots were further multiplied by different versions based on geography. "Technology is a key enabler," said Walpert. "It allows you to make that much more out of great ideas and the creative that you have."Spot Runner has built a database of thousands of stock TV commercials, but it has also built relationships with agencies to automate the conversion of their existing spots into hundreds of permutations. For example, Spot Runner is working with JWT to turn its creative for the Diamond Promotion Service into hundreds of localized commercials for jewelers. For online ticket reseller StubHub, Spot Runner is altering spots based on scheduling changes in the sports seasons. "We're able to take an overarching brand message and drive that down to the local level," said Kurt Weinsheimer, vp of partner development at Spot Runner.But will all this automation make creativity into a commodity? Not necessarily, said David Kenny, chairman of Digitas and director of digital strategy at Publicis Groupe. Instead, he noted, it could free agencies to focus on ideas that drive business results for clients. "It allows us to have thousands of executions without creating thousands of assets," he said. "And the interesting thing is we actually learn what works and doesn't work." Kenny believes for the Internet to attract substantial portions of budgets currently earmarked for TV, it must prove that it can run campaigns "at scale." This led to a move earlier this month to split off Digitas' creative production capabilities into Prodigious, which plans to use cheap-labor markets abroad to churn out creative assets, now mostly for Web site builds but also display ads, he said.While technology platforms will help, Gaston Legorburu, CCO at independent Sapient, said it would not solve the biggest problems agencies face when required to create mass-quantity, targeted creative operations. "I don't know any agency that's focused on that," he said. "It's just not that sexy."What's more, automation won't change the core of what agencies produce, said Tarik Sedky, chief digital officer at WPP Group's Young & Rubicam. "We're not going to fully automate creative and the production of ideas, but we will get better at automating the production of advertising."

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I, Robot: When Creativity Meets the Machines

Brian Morrissey

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