Beyond Vanilla, it's Spaghetti Sauce (and Branding)
This blog post is actually about dynamic creative technologies in the online advertising space, so if you are patient and read the introduction, you may be rewarded, but I cannot offer any promises :)
First off, I need to attribute all of the ideas I'm about to write to my former boss and mentor, Pete Kim. His last blog entry on The Curse of the Vanilla and having heard him talk about Malcolm Gladwell's spaghetti sauce story are really what this is all about. I'm simply trying to add convenience by tying some of these thoughts together.
To briefly summarize, Gladwell talks about how the pursuit of science (and in many ways human happiness) has been the attempt to find universals in our world. And, the world of media has followed along nicely. Print, radio, television, and even the internet all follow that paradigm of broadcast: I have one message that I want as much of the world to read/hear/see as possible. Then he talks about this man named Howard Moskowitz who changed the world of food science forever by figuring out that not all people like exactly the same spaghetti sauce, but different types. And, he went on to develop this concept of horizontal segmentation, which is now taught in the most basic of MBA marketing classes.
So, what did Dr. Moskowitz really do for the world? Probably a lot, but these are the two I care about the most.
- Discovered the diversity of functional, emotional, and aspirational needs of consumers (at least in food)
- Put forth was the notion that people don't really know what they want.
Remember these two points as they carry directly to the two main points I make later.
It's scary to imagine that at one point people thought this was foolishness, but yet, the old accepted way of doing a marketing study was by getting a bunch of people into a room and asking them what they wanted. Now, we know to perform market segmentation studies and CPG companies, for example, send our free trials knowing that people won't know if they really want it until they try it.
So, how does all of this relate to the world of dynamic creative? Simple: People are different and in the online world, there's no reason why we have to show the same creative to every single person, so why do we? It's the same problem that Dr. Moskowitz ran into: Because we had always done it that way in the past. It's not a technology constraint. We've just been programmed into this mindset of "one-size-fits-all" and thought that if it works on TV, it'll work online too.
I haven't extended any thoughts beyond what's already been written by Pete and others, but here are some slight twists to ideas that have been offered up:
1. If you already have gone through the trouble of segmenting your market, dynamic creative is a way to make the most effective use of your online media buy. Right now, marketers go through this sloppy process of trying to line up their market segments with the audiences being offered in various mediums. There are overlaps representing wasted spend and gaps representing missed opportunity. In the online world, it doesn't need to be that way. You just need a way to buy your exact market segments (audiences) at scale. The obvious missing component here is data. For the dynamic creative to get to the right person, you need some idea of who that person is. Whether your segments are composed of something simple like demographics or complex like psychographics, the better data about the user, the more efficient the media. (Psst..digital media buying agencies..this is really important because if you can demonstrate your buys are more efficient than your old media buying counterparts, dollars will come your way.)
2. Because people don't know what they want, even in advertising, you should always be testing and learning.
Go and listen to Gladwell's TED talk, but we all know what we say we want is very different than what we really want. Therefore, it also makes sense that we put new (and old) brand messages out there every so often to see. A good dynamic creative algorithm will never stop showing a particular message, even if it's extremely unpopular. People change. A well-run dynamic campaign will also get messages added in over time. People may like something else. (Psst...creative agencies..this is really important because it gives you a way to quickly see if other message/creative ideas are worth exploring.)
