Personalisation by default

Rapid advance­ment of dig­i­tal inno­va­tions and diver­si­fi­ca­tion of con­tent plat­forms over the last decade have trans­formed adver­tis­ing from a large­ly one-size-fits-all, mass-reach medi­um to one that allows brands to be much more tac­ti­cal in their approach.

Most con­sumers spend much of their day look­ing at a screen or lis­ten­ing to music or oth­er con­tent, leav­ing eight in ten feel­ing over­whelmed by the num­ber of ads they face, accord­ing to Mar­ket­ing Dri­ve. The result­ing “ad fatigue” means many ignore untar­get­ed adver­tis­ing, mak­ing tra­di­tion­al forms of adver­tis­ing much less effec­tive. Now as many as sev­en in ten engage with per­son­alised mar­ket­ing mes­sages, a study by SmartHQ found.

As audi­ences drift away from mass-media chan­nels like broad­cast tele­vi­sion and towards more niche and tai­lored plat­forms such as stream­ing ser­vices, adver­tis­ers are being forced to be smarter with their mar­ket­ing spend. Gone are the days when it was sen­si­ble to invest a £1‑million TV cam­paign in one chan­nel. The same mon­ey should now be spread across hun­dreds of chan­nels and in hun­dreds of for­mats to secure the great­est return.

“With advances in pro­gram­mat­ic, dynam­ic cre­ative and the var­i­ous ways of for­mat­ting ads for dif­fer­ent plat­forms, the tech­nol­o­gy is there to enable you to do that effi­cient­ly,” says Steve Dun­lop, founder and chief exec­u­tive of A Mil­lion Ads, whose per­son­al­i­sa­tion tools allow brands to engage peo­ple with tai­lored con­tent at any moment. “As an adver­tis­er, you can be much more tac­ti­cal with­out hav­ing to get down into the weeds on every buy.

“An adver­tis­ing exec famous­ly said that most peo­ple ignore adver­tis­ing because most adver­tis­ing ignores peo­ple. Per­son­al­i­sa­tion is a great tech­nique to break through that. Human beings like to feel they’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one they know and recog­nise because it makes them feel safe and com­fort­able. We nat­u­ral­ly use data to shape our day-to-day con­ver­sa­tions accord­ing to who we’re speak­ing to. Infor­ma­tion per­son­alis­es the way we inter­act. Why should it be any dif­fer­ent with adver­tis­ing?”

Data-dri­ven per­son­al­i­sa­tion com­bines with the pow­er of audio to pro­vide new oppor­tu­ni­ties in the dig­i­tal age. Adver­tis­ers have long under­stood that it’s what peo­ple hear which gives the emo­tive reac­tion need­ed to engage them with the mes­sag­ing of their ads. Per­son­al­i­sa­tion pro­vides fur­ther sub­con­scious prompts of that kind, which means com­bin­ing the two enables cam­paigns to per­form bet­ter than tra­di­tion­al adver­tis­ing.

A Mil­lion Ads reach­es lis­ten­ers across dig­i­tal audio ser­vices, includ­ing music stream­ing, inter­net radio and pod­casts, and com­bines adver­tis­ers’ mes­sages with con­tex­tu­al user data to deliv­er dynam­ic ads that are more effec­tive than tra­di­tion­al adver­tis­ing. Each time a user hears an ad, the tool adds a per­son­al­i­sa­tion lay­er based on con­tex­tu­al data. A visu­al edit­ing tool allows cre­atives, stu­dio man­agers and pro­duc­ers to build ads that can be tai­lored to the real-time data, with many hav­ing mil­lions of per­mu­ta­tions.

McDonald’s part­nered with A Mil­lion Ads to dri­ve aware­ness of McDe­liv­ery avail­able on Uber Eats across the UK. The ads utilised real-time data includ­ing the time they were played as well as the weath­er, loca­tion and even whether the lis­ten­er had heard the ad before to serve per­son­alised, rel­e­vant ads that gen­er­at­ed aware­ness and encour­aged peo­ple to use McDe­liv­ery dur­ing dif­fer­ent peri­ods of day.

Ads deliv­ered with dynam­ic audio achieved 37 per cent more pur­chase intent than those using stan­dard audio, accord­ing to research con­duct­ed with Attest to test per­cep­tion of the ad.

“This is a new cre­ative approach; a new way of telling sto­ries and talk­ing to audi­ences,” says Dun­lop. “The best adver­tis­ing has data and per­son­al­i­sa­tion at its heart. When a client real­ly thinks about per­son­al­i­sa­tion upfront, all their oth­er mes­sag­ing feeds from it. In an always-on world; if you know some­thing about your users, why wouldn’t you use that in your con­ver­sa­tion with them? If you walk into a room with some­one you’ve known for years, you don’t act like it’s the first time you’ve met, so why do we expect adver­tis­ers to do that? That’s why per­son­al­i­sa­tion should be on by default.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it amillionads.com