5 Ways to Improve the Ad Experience with Adobe Advertising Solutions

Advertising is, hands down, core to a customer’s experience with a brand. TV commercials, social media ads, and branded video content are a constant in our daily lives. The same ads often evoke vivid, unforgettable moments of interaction with them. If you’ve hummed a jingle, recited a tagline, or recalled a product’s host of benefits after coming face-to-face with an ad, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s an experience — and a memorable one.

Even so, advertising experiences often get siloed outside of the rest of marketing. They are often deprioritized compared to other customer experience management (CXM) initiatives. We saw this trend in our latest Digital Trends Report published with Econsultancy — 45% of digital industry professionals ranked customer experience among their top three priorities, but only 21% prioritized advertising. When it comes to marketing budgets, 58% planned to increase spending on content marketing and 55% on personalization, but only 36% planned to do so on display ads.

When advertising became an “experience”

Until recently, companies mainly relied on one mass communication message for everyone — delivered across TV, print, and out-of-home (OOH, or billboards), for example. When digital advertising burst on the scene — and, more specifically, the tools to analyze, interpret, and optimize ad campaigns — the industry swung from “spray and pray” to hyper-personalization.

Suddenly, brands could scale messages and the creative in a very granular way, reaching a single customer or audience segment on the right channel (perhaps TV, or maybe just the web), at the right time (soon after a relevant product search, for example), with the right message (tailored to the specific customer’s needs).

Adobe Advertising Cloud helps you, as a marketer, with these experiences. It lets you connect the dots, tears down the silos, and makes advertising part of your organization’s overall CXM strategy.

By merging advertising data with data from other channels — websites, call centers, brick-and-mortar stores, mobile phones and other connected devices, and voice assistants — you can use your advertising campaigns to set the stage for greater customer engagement and greater ROI.

Here are five ways you can enhance advertising experiences, and improve your company’s CXM strategy as a whole.

1. Create a central source of identity

While some customer data is attributed to a specific person, the lion’s share of the available data — from ads and web browsing, for example — is largely anonymous. This results in a patchwork view of your customer that stymies any good CXM strategy from the start.

Integrating Adobe Audience Manager, you can overcome this challenge by building a central source of identity for every customer. By integrating with Adobe Audience Manager, you can unify the worlds of known and anonymous customer data to deliver a more complete view of your customer that would be impossible to duplicate working strictly within separate data tools.

2. Ensure consistency across experiences

Consistency is a critical component of customer experiences. It can be jarring, confusing, or even disappointing for people when they see ads that are noticeably different from other company touchpoints, such as web pages. And this can drive people further from buying your company’s products and/or even diminish loyalty.

This is an especially big issue in the television advertising space, where many brands are still buying ads to target an audience in isolation from other ad spend targeting the same audience on another platform, like digital.

Unifying the data in Advertising Cloud enables you to avoid this inconsistency. You can use the same data points across media channels — from TV to search and beyond — so you can plan advertising and search remarketing against the same audience, which is a critical step toward delivering consistent relevance at scale, across multiple channels.

3. Automate dynamic creative

Imagine you have a cinematic, 30-second auto commercial shot at night with a lot of deep black color fading in and out, interspersed with thrilling shots of cars whipping around hairpin turns. It’s beautiful — but consider the context.

While this commercial could be amazing on a desktop computer, it could be a total miss on a smartphone — so much deep black would make the video tough to watch on a mobile device.

The content must be modified to fit each context. Advertising Cloud solves this problem by providing customers with a dynamic creative ad template. Campaign assets can be designed in Adobe Creative Cloud using the ad template, then automatically made available in Advertising Cloud. From there, it’s easy to optimize and target ads and ad sizes without the heavy lifting.

4. Focus the creative on what works

It’s one thing to count impressions or clicks on advertisements, but another thing to confidently say what a customer is doing when they interact with your content. Often, creative choices in advertising are based on vanity metrics, leaving you and your creative team to guess at what’s working and what’s not.

Advertising Cloud provides a deeper, more granular level of performance data — for example, what users are doing after they click on the ad. It will give you greater intelligence to definitively tell your creative team what is most effective and what is not, and focus their brilliant creative minds on developing more effective content.

5. Build a feedback loop so everyone gets — and can use — actionable insights

Having detailed customer- and campaign-level data and acting on those insights enables advertisers to generate better-performing content — and that’s great. But that’s just the beginning.

Advertising Cloud enables you to use that same information to both target relevant users and influence paid media optimization. When analytics, marketing, and creative teams are all optimizing based on the same data and metrics, your campaigns become more focused and you derive greater value from your advertising spends. This focus also manifests itself in greater consistency and relevance across both offline and online points — advertising and non-advertising alike — throughout the customer journey.

Involving advertising for better CXM

The days of advertising being treated as separate from the rest of the customer experience are numbered. In fact, true CX success depends on your ability to break down that silo and integrate advertising seamlessly with the rest of your channels. Thankfully, technology that weaves unified customer profiles together with the creation and delivery of content puts this goal well within your grasp, enabling better blending of advertising and other experiences, improving ad performance, and driving more conversions and greater loyalty. And that’s when you’ll start seeing CXM pay off for your business.

Learn more about integrating Adobe Advertising Cloud with your existing Experience Cloud solutions to drive greater personalization and better ad experiences across every channel.