What are your biggest opportunities and challenges for the next 12-24 months?
The culture of doing more with less resources is always a big challenge for us, whether in a positive or negative economic climate. Clients continue to want more transparency, more data, more visibility and more ideas with the same resources. With this culture of more, comes constant measurement, we are continuously validating and ensuring our efforts are worth the time and energy for us and ultimately for the client.
At the moment, we are working on closing the loop between marketing efforts and their impact on sales. Right now it requires us to create a test ecosystem, but once the technology starts to move from IP to ID, we will be able to generate incredible customer journeys. This is really exciting for us as marketers!
2016 will be the first year that all digital media are on programmatic platforms and it creates interesting considerations–ad blockers, evolving formats, and cross devices. And lastly, one of the biggest challenges will be designing and thinking for “thumbs” –because anyone not focusing on mobile is missing the point.
What keeps your clients up at night?
The very real issues that many clients come to us with is transparency. They want to be able to clearly report and justify each action to their team or board. We are helping them achieve results through real integration of PR/Social Strategy/Programmatic buying/and Design. Occasionally we are still astonished that some companies want different agencies for each function, keeping them in silos. The real issue is that some agencies either haven’t evolved to integrate all these different elements or are unable to scale to many functions, leaving their offerings static and to some degree, stale.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
Everyone wants agile learnings and leading innovations, but those are dependent on the existing culture. Part of what we try to educate our clients on is the value of collaboration and integration. Greater ideas happen when people work together. Secondly, there is a race to be premium, but sometimes the definitions of premium between industry and consumer perceptions, are very different.
What are some unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
We need to seek technology that provides insights and analytics on successful conversion rates, an example is communication, influenced by communication, made purchase based, by communication. We need to find simple tools that will allow a multitude of teams to easily understand and utilize them separately and together.
Secondly, the ability to specifically attribute a purchase–we know someone purchased, but we are not 100% certain of who, and I think that is something that technology is capable of handling, but most retailers and point of sales haven’t developed it yet.
What social network do you anticipate accelerating growth in 2016?
Video and more video! We will see a continuation of social campaigns around Snapchat, Vine, Periscope, Yik Yak, and of course Instagram. However, from a marketing perspective, the value of these amazing social networks come from aligning the right audience, with the right messages and on the right platforms.
–Arthur Ceria is the CEO of Creative Feed
