Blog

December 3, 2019

Recent Reports a ‘Win’ for the Creative Services Team

By Jay Bemis / Advertising Systems Inc.

As a marketer, you already know how vital the creative services team is to your brand.

After all, it’s the team that draws eyes to your content and product, having designed snappy looking logos, letterheads, business cards and marketing materials for print since your brand was born. And, more recently, it’s the team that has championed what has largely become a digital marketing world, adding online advertising as well as website design and development and search engine marketing to its portfolio.

Creative services is arguably the busiest team on your staff, and two recent developments indicate that it will remain a beehive in the years ahead.

The first development, actually a study from our friends at eMarketer, says that U.S. advertisers will spend $57 billion in programmatic digital display ads this year — an amount that will rise to almost $68.5 billion in 2020. More than half of that investment will go to digital display ads on social networks.

The second development is Instagram’s recent decision to show no longer the number of “likes” a user’s or social influencer’s posts have received, which some experts say will force brands to get their creative services teams more involved with influencers to attract brand attention.

Pushing the Hot Programmatic Button

The eMarketer report, Programmatic Digital Display Ad Spending in the US 2016-2021, predicts that by the end of 2021, US programmatic ad spending will rise to nearly $80 billion, thanks to “continued investment in areas such as digital audio, social video, connected TV and over-the-top (OTT) advertising.”

“Of the $57.30 billion digital display ad dollars transacted programmatically this year, a significant portion (56.3%) will go to banners, video and other display ad units across social networks,” the report says.

“We predict social’s share of programmatic ad dollars will rise through 2021 as advertisers continue to prioritize social video and other social network ad formats.”

Instagram Stealing the Heart Button?

Instagram, meanwhile, has begun hiding the heart or “like” button on its posts from select users worldwide, and CEO Adam Mosseri has indicated the “test” may be extended to all of the social network’s users.

The test worries some major accounts that team with celebrities to influence their audiences socially, hoping to outpace other influencers in a mounting battle of “likes,” but some marketing experts say the lost hearts may be a good move — for both brands and the influencers.

“The hiding or removal of likes shouldn’t negatively impact how brands work with influencers in developing successful content,” Dave McNulty, vice president of marketing at vodka brand Stoli, told eMarketer after the move, which he sees as a challenge for brands to be creative with their influencers.

“Successful content is a result of brands building real relationships with credible influencers and giving them the creative license to be authentic with their audience.”

Said Daniel Schotland, of influencer marketing platform Linqia:

“Likes make up the majority of engagement numbers, so we do see the likelihood of an engagement rate decrease due to the removal of likes. However, we think this forced change will be good for the industry. It will help encourage marketers to look at metrics beyond the like, such as brand and sales lift data.”

No doubt that whatever successes you and other marketers find in those metrics, you’ll discover that creative services played a major role.

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