MarTech360 Interview With Oli Marlow Thomas, CIO, SMARTLY.IO (AD-LIB.IO)

“Customized creative will only become more paramount in the coming years as advertisers use automation tools to ensure they’re engaging with the right audiences on the right channel with the right messaging.”

Hi, Oli, can you tell us something about your professional journey? How has it been so far?

I spent 6 years at Google focused on the role of creative as a performance driving lever. When I realized, via various studies at Google, that creative was responsible for 70% of campaign performance, I founded Ad-Lib.io.

Tell us about your new role as CIO at Smartly.io?

As Smartly.io CIO, I plan to aid in forwarding our cross-channel reach, moving beyond social to maintain a position as the leading digital advertising platform. As we continue our expansion into dynamic creative optimization across programmatic, CTV, and the entire Google ecosystem, I’ll be focusing on ensuring our digital advertising customers are offered the latest in AI and machine learning to optimize and automate their creative. Our big-picture goal is to continue offering customers a one-stop shop that combines creative, media and intelligence so they can achieve exceptional advertising results.

How does Smartly.io help brands be easily creative?

Smartly.io remains committed to aiding clients in leveraging their creative across platforms. For years, Smartly.io has provided an avenue to removing manual, repetitive tasks by quickly scaling ads, and now, our capabilities have only grown with the integration of Ad-Lib.io to open Smartly.io to the Google ecosystem.

Lately, we’ve seen success with clients using tools that produce interchangeable creatives programmed to provide a customized experience to consumers across platforms. These types of automation tools make it easy to take ads to the next level, creating relevant ads based on language, region, and even weather forecasts. This type of automation saves teams time and allows them to more fully focus on their creative efforts so they can surpass predicted performance.

Additionally, the ability to gain quick stats on the performance of different creative across each platform helps advertisers invest in the best assets and platforms for their messaging. Our centralized KPI management system makes it simple for businesses to create customer metrics across platforms and obtain accurate data across multiple campaigns. With this type of detailed measurement at their fingertips, advertisers can be confident they’re backing the best performing creative and making the right decisions to meet their business goals.

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How has modernized digital advertising reshaped traditional advertising?

In advertising, it’s said that the first five seconds are crucial for grabbing a consumer’s attention. I would like to amend the saying: if you haven’t hooked your audience in your first glance, you’ve already lost them.

Creative is more important than ever in capturing the attention of audiences, especially as brands move to a multi-platform strategy to adapt to privacy changes to ensure they’re engaging customers across multiple touch points. This cross-channel approach provides its own challenges, mainly in using creative across platforms and ad formats while simultaneously providing a meaningful experience to viewers. Customized creative will only become more paramount in the coming years as advertisers use automation tools to ensure they’re engaging with the right audiences on the right channel with the right messaging.

Additionally, advertisers can no longer afford to be disengaged from the platforms they are investing in. Increasingly, digital advertising is becoming a conversation due to the effects of social and digital media. Many channels have ongoing cultures, and without fully understanding the dialogue taking place, advertisers will have little success in building a relationship with consumers.  Advertisers must leverage the unique properties and audiences of each platform to meet audiences where they are.

How will the new trends and developments in digital advertising impact the future of marketing?

Building an effective omnichannel strategy, particularly on paid social, is one of the trends we are betting on when it comes to retail marketing in 2023. Understanding how your audience behaves online as well as in-store and mimicking those crossover moments is crucial to making the most out of social marketing. For instance, is your business catering to showrooming I where people browse in-store but want the items shipped home? Do you allow for in-store pickups for online purchases? And, perhaps most importantly for our topic, are you reaching people locally on mobile or are you still relying on traditional local media to get your message through?

The advertisers that will win in 2023 are the ones who embrace the age of the omnibrand and use it to drive successful campaigns. Their teams will source the best talent and ultimately generate the greatest results.

How has Creative Intelligence changed the marketing industry and how do you envisage it to evolve in the coming years?

I truly believe that creative can be the most important performance driving lever. At the moment there are very few advertisers really taking advantage of this. With the changes to the cookie and iOS restrictions the creative will hopefully become the most important performance driving lever replacing audiences. In fact in 2022 we ran a survey that flagged that 64% of advertisers felt creative intelligence was going to be what drove performance in 2023.

How do creative ideas and media decisions help in growing the marketing efforts of a business?

Creative automation is an opportunity for marketers to streamline the business. A key benefit of incorporating creative automation is to avoid repetitive tasks while unlocking new opportunities. Automation can help teams implement effective full-funnel, multi-platform creative production while saving time and money. And, most importantly, it offers a solution for the frustration that manual work usually creates. Creative automation brings operational efficiency to the creative and performance teams’ workflow, improving manual processes such as iterations to the creative assets, exporting, personalizing the creative, or uploading the files.

Can you list down 3 creative ad campaigns that left a mark in the history of the marketing industry?

Yes, I do have a couple to share and guess what? They are all memorable because of the creative!  The best ad of all time is the Guinness Surfer ad! And The Cadbury Gorilla.

Thanks, Oli!