Technology, The Remedy to Most Business Problems

“Brand consistency has never been more important than it is today, or more at risk. First, there’s no longer any real separation between consumers who’ll see your content on TV vs. social media platforms, and the phasing out of third-party cookies will mean that more of brand content will be seen by a wider audience. Secondly, brands can now be built on social media platforms with a fraction of the time and a fragment of the cost, meaning that competition is everywhere,” says Anastasia Leng, CEO, CreativeX, in an exclusive interview with TalkCMO.

TCMO Bureau: Marketing content is steadily increasing every year, do you see any challenges or complications that brands face from the extensive availability of creatives?

Anastasia Leng: Three years ago, Gartner predicted that content would be the biggest bottleneck and cause of failure for marketers by 2020. And they were right. Content now lives on more platforms, all of which have their own recipe for success. Content shelf life is continually decreasing. As a result, marketers are tasked with launching more content, customizing it to each platform, and producing it faster — all the while remaining on-brand, under budget, and increasingly effective. It’s never been tougher to be a marketer, and reconciling all of these competing needs is complicated, but technology can help.

TCMO Bureau: Technology has proven to be a solution for most business problems, how can AI and data help marketers enhance their creative decisions?

Anastasia Leng: As a result of the rapidly increasing volume of image and video content, thanks largely to the rise of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, marketers can no longer rely on brute force to do everything they need to do in order to achieve creative excellence. In fact, our analysis has shown that only 20% of a brand’s content actually meets its own internal quality standards, which leads to wasted media dollars at best and brand erosion at worst.

Technology has been built to help with all aspects of the creative cycle, from creative production, dynamic ad optimization to creative analytics. Slowly but surely, the industry is building detection to recognize whether an ad is on-brand, adherent to quality standards, compliant with industry regulation, and representative of the audience. This means that we can create hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and know that there are systems that can be customized based on a brand’s standards. It will check all that content to ensure that it leverages all of a brand’s best practices and is in line with their guidelines and creative learnings. Once that piece of content runs, all the digital performance data collected is used to inform future learnings, thereby continually refreshing our understanding of what makes content effective and incorporating that back into an automated review cycle to make sure those learnings are scaled.

Also Read: Consistency – the Strength of Great Branding

TCMO Bureau: With the vast spread of creatives, do you think there is a need for an increase in regulatory guidelines for marketing/advertising, and how can technology play a role?

Anastasia Leng: Similar to most industries, the practitioners of a craft and its regulators are always tied in a lengthy battle. The regulators are forced to keep up with all the new technology and how it may be used to take advantage of, or mislead, a consumer. The practitioners are trying to keep up with all the new, constantly evolving regulations, and the risks for getting it wrong are high.

While there are bad actors in every industry, many of the mistakes made are due to the sheer volume, complexity, and nuances of regulatory guidelines, which are further exacerbated by the content proliferation challenge. As technology can be used to automate the recognition and tracking of brand consistency and content quality, the same principle applies here. Brands’ legal teams can start to slowly automate the tracking of different regulatory standards, transferring legal checking over to an automated process once they’re satisfied with the accuracy rates. Regulators should in turn work with technology providers to roll out new regulations through them and provide industry-sanctioned tools that help automate and scale the protection of consumer rights.

TCMO Bureau: In your opinion, is there a greater need for brand consistency due to the drastic change in consumer behavior?

Anastasia Leng: Consistency has never been more important than it is today, or more at risk. First, there’s no longer any real separation between consumers who’ll see your content on TV vs. social media platforms, and the phasing out of third-party cookies will mean that more of your content will be seen by a wider audience that’s slightly outside of your control. Secondly, brands can now be built on social media platforms with a fraction of the time and a fragment of the cost, meaning that competition is everywhere. There are too many studies to name that have repeatedly shown that brand equity is a competitive advantage and a valuable asset that drives everything from decreased price sensitivity to increased sales, and the only way to build and maintain that asset is through painstaking repetition and consistency.

Also Read: Bridging the customer trust gap

TCMO Bureau: The global mindset is pretty focused on equality and eliminating/reducing bias. What are your thoughts on the portrayal of diversity and inclusion in creative content?

Anastasia Leng: The main conclusion drawn from data is that positive intent does not always lead to positive action. In short, brands are doing their best to increase who they cast in their ads, but in their effort to feature more diverse groups of people, stereotypical portrayals also increase. For instance, analysis shows that while Black people were more frequently cast in CPG ads in the US in 2020 (in 52% of ads vs 42% in 2019), they were more likely to be portrayed as athletes, featured as the “token Black friend” (surrounded entirely by white people), and rarely shown in positions of leadership. An analysis of gender diversity yielded slightly more promising results, with women featured frequently in leadership roles and with men being regularly portrayed as active fathers. However, despite these gains, women are still more likely to be featured as sex objects than as professionals or mothers.

We can do better. Technology can help.