Welcome To The World Of Connected Creativity
by Cory Treffiletti, Featured Contributor, November 2, 2016
There’s a trend in digital marketing that will result in what I am referring to as Connected Creativity. It’s the ability for marketers to leverage data, create more engaging, more personalized storylines across channels and devices, and be truly creative in their execution. This three-dimensional strategy represents the evolution of the role of creative in a digitally driven marketing environment.
TV — or actually video, these days — is considered by many to be the best platform for delivering emotionally charged creative. But video is but one component of the tool set a marketer has to work with. Video is the easiest to tap into the emotion of your audience, but other avenues can be just as effective when the marketer leverages data to understand the person they’re speaking with and can personalize the message to that exact moment when they interact with them.
The best campaigns are able to understand the mindset of the audience, unpack what connects them to a topic and deliver a message that taps into that connection. On one side you have to connect to the emotion of the audience, and on the second side you have to connect the audience across channels and devices; it’s a dual-connective system at the core of your marketing efforts.
In leveraging these two dimensions of connectivity, you identify the people you are speaking to, recognize where they are, and hypothesize what message will resonate with them at that moment. You then tap into a suite of messages that are aligned with different stages of the customer journey and are pre-executed to fit in with different formats, channels and device types.
This may mean you have an emotionally charged message delivered to a vertical video format or on a TV platform via commercials at the beginning of a campaign to spur initial interest, with an FAQ-style message focusing on specific use cases for a product later in the journey, delivered via banner and landing page or even through an informational video across TV, desktop or mobile platforms. Maybe you even include a community-based interactive element for delivery in a social environment for when the audience is in an exploratory mode.
The best digital campaigns recognize these dimensions and deliver emotionally impactful, informative messages that resonate regardless of channel. Campaigns like the Pedigree Found app and the campaign around it tie into the love someone has for their dog, and the community of people around them who are of a similar mindset. What I find most effective about these campaigns is they have a disregard for the channel because they are able to identify their audience regardless of where they are seeing them. They tell a unified story through a collection of messages that fit into a storyline and reflect the tone and feel of a brand.
Strategists in today’s creative agency have to be thinking and talking about data because it makes their jobs easier. No longer do they need to hypothesize who the audience is or what they may be feeling. They can simply let the data tell them whom they need to speak to, what they have been doing and what information they are looking to uncover.
The customer journey may not be a linear path anymore, but it is clearly legible to someone who has the skills and the training to read the path.
Connected Creativity means connecting the dots between stages of the customer journey and delivering a message that resonates, with no concern for format or device. You know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are delivering the right piece of the story to the right audience at the right time.
Are you practicing Connected Creativity? More importantly, is your agency practicing this model? If not, I suggest diving in deep, because the data is there.
MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily
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