Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The AdTech Forum - Series 1 Episode 4 w/ Nikhil Lai
39 Plays1 year ago
💡Series 1: Episode 4 of The AdTech Forum💡
In this episode, we talk with the ever-so-brilliant Nikhil Lai, of Forrester, on the intersection between #creative and #performancemarketing - Nikhil is as sharp and well-spoken as they come. 4 key moments:
1️⃣ Creative Empowerment: Creative assets are the underutilized secret sauce in today's marketing mix
2️⃣ Innovative Testing: Breaking down ad components and testing variables allows for precise optimization
3️⃣ Forester's Vision: Stay tuned for Forrester's upcoming initiatives, including a comprehensive analysis of creative technologies
4️⃣ Cultural Shifts: Bridging the gap between creatives and performance marketers is key to #AdTech #creativeadtech #Innovation
Big thanks to our Inaugural "Creative" Series Sponsor, Flashtalking by Mediaocean!
What did YOU learn from this episode?
Lean back. Listen. Comment.
Welcome to TheAdTechForum.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Sponsor Acknowledgment
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the next episode of the ad tech forum and thank you to our sponsor Flash Talking.
Guest Introduction: Nikhil Lai
00:00:10
Speaker
We're so excited to kick this off with Nikhil Lai, a forester. Nikhil is a senior analyst of performance marketing at Forester, where he researches what performance means now that every channel parades his performance and reckons with data deprecation. He previously worked with Jeremy at Martpipe, built and sold performance TV at Silent Media and in-house performance marketing at GE.
The Role of Creative in Marketing
00:00:31
Speaker
Nikhil, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, guys.
00:00:34
Speaker
So Nicole, we're going to dive into this. This is a very quick 10 minutes. So in your expert experience, how vital is creative in moving the needle? It's a good question. I think that creative is the most underutilized asset in marketers mixes right now.
Dynamic Creative Optimization Explained
00:00:54
Speaker
I speak to the Fortune 100, the big six agencies,
00:00:59
Speaker
All the time and every conversation I have, I kid you not starts off with being about identity resolution or about CTV or about retail media and ends up being a discussion about
00:01:15
Speaker
pulling the lever of creative to lift performance, especially in absence of strong third party signals that marketers have relied on for years and years. So it is, I think, definitely the most underutilized asset. Nick, when we talk about innovation in the space, and there has been a lot, especially over the last few years with various technologies coming out and capabilities being made available to users,
00:01:41
Speaker
What do you think are some of the most innovative ways for testing creative and optimizing creatives to drive the results that people are looking for? Yeah, so I would say that the most innovative way is to break an ad, whether it's static or video into its components and test the performance of each variable to identify winning variables within the ad and then scale those winning variables using dynamic creative optimization.
00:02:09
Speaker
And so one example is I'm working with a fitness brand at Forrester. And it's a fitness brand that I think all of us know. And they have tons of short form video. They have seven, eight, nine different models that they're using in these short form videos. They have different text overlays, different calls to action. And they're testing each of those and then recombining with the winning variables into the most performant video that they're then running.
Forrester's Evaluation of Creative Technologies
00:02:35
Speaker
on Instagram. That I think is the most innovative and the most precise way to make creative work harder for you. What do you think in terms of what Forester is doing in the market? What should we expect from Forester in the coming 6 to 12 months in terms of your capabilities and services that you provide and consultation that you provide to your clients?
00:02:57
Speaker
Sure. So the big news, which isn't public yet, but now it's public, is that I'm doing a wave, the Forrester wave on creative technologies this year towards the end of this year. I'm doing a landscape in the middle of this year, which is going to summarize, it's basically a catalog of 42 different vendors in this space. Then the wave is going to pick the top eight to 12 of those 42.
Creative Market Trends & Tools
00:03:22
Speaker
in great detail and excruciating detail for both the author and the participants in the wave, evaluate the pluses and minuses of each of those vendors. So there's going to be a new winner in the greater bad tech market at the end of this year, according to Forrester.
00:03:37
Speaker
That is an absolute bracket when you're talking about that number, that size, that quantity. What an exciting time to be in creative. Yes, I agree. And the market is shifting shape all the time. So there's a cottage industry of creative automation vendors who are helping marketers 10x, 100x the volume of creative that they have to test.
00:04:01
Speaker
Then there's creative intelligence tools that are now that I have 100 X development created by how do I glean insights from those thousands of ads. Then there's DCO like flash talking. So now that I have a lot of creative and I know what's working. Let me scale those winners.
00:04:17
Speaker
And then each of those markets is acquiring a different connotation month after month after month. So now DCO may be out of favor and intelligence may be in favor of vice versa.
Cultural Understanding in Marketing Teams
00:04:28
Speaker
And so the market is fairly immature, but because of that highly dynamic and it's very exciting to follow it. One exciting space to be in. That's pretty amazing. When you think about ad creative, what are some of your predictions for 2024 or beyond?
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that this year and beyond, when we talk about creative, we're going to be talking less about technology, less about process, and a lot more about people.
00:04:55
Speaker
Because fundamentally, the problem here is one of personality. You have a creative director on one side who may have decades of experience, and they know from their experience what shade of orange tends to work. They know from their experience whether to film an ad during the night or the day, whether to have a bottle or a can in the ad. And then you have a performance market on the other side who's like, hey, I have 10 grand worth of testing budget this month. I'm going to break everything you just built down into components.
00:05:25
Speaker
And i may end up proving you wrong so your decades with experience that a bottle better than i can maybe proven wrong by my test. And then the director said alright but your test is not significant enough you know you didn't spend enough on the test and the market is as well we don't have enough created the test to get significance so there's a cultural disconnect.
00:05:44
Speaker
between creative and paid media SMEs that needs to be resolved at the foundation of this conversation about ad creative. It's not a matter of throwing technology at the problem or changing workflows. It's really a matter of building sympathy and empathy between two functions that have heretofore been disparate. And that's my prediction is that there's going to be a lot more work on the cultural and change management that has to happen, less on process and
Goal Alignment in Marketing Collaboration
00:06:12
Speaker
tech.
00:06:12
Speaker
Someone who just got married very recently when you talk about two disparate entities and you talk about sympathy you talk about empathy how do you what do you recommend to be able to connect both the creative and the performance marketer what is going to marry the two were some traits or characteristics.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that the goals have to be complementary. It's the same problem with paid and organic search. If you're goaling creative on something that the performance market is not comped on, then there's going to be disconnect. But if you get the creative director hooked onto lower funnel KPIs,
00:06:54
Speaker
And then when the designer is building an ad, they're then interested to see how that ad performs, how each variable within the ad performs, because they have pride in what they created. And then the paid media SME is then saying, hmm, like maybe we should think differently about the shade of orange in this because of what the data is telling us. And then they get into the process of how do you build different shades of orange? Is that workflow as efficient as possible? Then you start to build mutuality.
00:07:21
Speaker
But if the KPIs are misaligned, it's a non-starter.
Excitement & Future of Ad Tech and Martech
00:07:26
Speaker
Such a great response. Nikhil, what excites you about ad tech and martech? You are in the thick of it being at Forrester.
00:07:34
Speaker
What excites me most is the quality of the people that I meet. So it's guys like you, Jeremy. It's guys like you, ATG. The people in this space I think are genuinely good and they genuinely want to help their clients perform. And so I appreciate the people that I've met along the journey. All the mentors have gotten me to the point I am today are just invaluable and I can't thank them enough.
00:08:00
Speaker
The second thing that excites me, which is like a little wonkier, is the ability to connect ad tech and martech because you have these two massive industries. Both are being challenged by signal loss.
00:08:16
Speaker
And if you can take your customer data platform and find hidden gems in your CDP that you can then use to inform your credit belt, your credit development process that you then use to inform your media buy and mitigate the risk of wasting spending your buy. That is taking MarTech into ad tech and ultimately it's improving the customer experience.
00:08:38
Speaker
Because when consumers put up ad blockers and clear their browsing histories and empty their cookie caches, they're telling us that they're fed up with the status quo of audience targeting. And that's on us. The change is not on consumers to become more tolerant to
Conclusion & Farewell
00:08:51
Speaker
advertising. So that is what really excites me about the space. What a great, great set of answers so eloquently put.
00:08:58
Speaker
Nikhil, thank you. Thank you for joining this episode of the EdTech Forum. Our audience, thank you. Again, this has been sponsored by Flash Talking. We've covered a wide array of topics covering creative and performance marketing with Nikhil Live, Forrester. Stay tuned for future episodes and connect with us on social media. Again, thank you for watching and thank you Flash Talking. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.