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Trends and Insight in association withSynapse Virtual Production
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The Tech Transforming Creativity

07/01/2021
Asset Management, distribution and software
London, UK
136
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Amidst an accelerating trend of digital transformation, Adstream’s CTO Katie Nykanen explores how creativity can benefit from the tech revolution

While 2020 has thrown chaos at many industries, technology has held strong and in particular, AdTech is among the few industries that have even benefited from the crisis and seen a steady ascent. Tech products and solutions now exist in all areas of the marketing industry and in particular AdTech software development and ongoing evolution have become the primary drivers of success when it comes to digital marketing.

Whether you want to adopt AdTech to boost your profits or create a start-up servicing existing businesses, technology will play a big part in your success. 

With all this new technology entering the market, there are fantastic opportunities for creative businesses to take advantage of this fast-moving landscape of products and solutions. We should recognise that tech and creativity can, and indeed already are, working hand-in-hand to bring out the best in one another. When used wisely, tech can allow us not only to improve the quality and efficiency of our creativity, but free up time and resources for creatives to do what they do best – create fantastic, engaging content. 

I believe that there are already plenty of promising signs in which we can see the outline of an exciting and healthy future at the intersection of creativity and technology.


Collaboration in the Cloud

Today, 85% of businesses worldwide are making use of cloud technology in their day-to-day operations, and the Covid pandemic has brought to the fore how critical it is for people to be able to work from anywhere making Cloud solutions the only option. 

So, what does this mean for the creativity process? Well, consider how we’ve all been adapting over the past few months. Today, collaborative tools are king, with services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts coming into their own. From a creative standpoint, tech platforms have a responsibility to facilitate great ideas, and not obstruct them. That’s why collaborative platforms need to go beyond simply sharing a document online to allowing teams to express themselves visually, with real-time reactions and teamwork built into the package.

To that end, at Adstream we’re seeing new features emerge which can help with that process. For example, advertising assets can be auto tagged and grouped with similar assets using AI-based content recognition, ensuring high-quality metadata is set during the production process for tracking throughout the supply chain. Meanwhile, responsive analysis will cut through the vast amounts of data available to give accurate feedback on campaigns as data builds up in real-time. When it comes to collaboration there is little more important than the integration between your tech platforms, removing duplication of manual effort such as rekeying, downloading and re-uploading between systems. Happily, we’re seeing the arrival of platforms which are flexible, and ready to integrate with each other quickly and efficiently. Given that for millions of us remote working looks set to be a feature of our lives for some time to come, finding and investing in the right collaborative platform is of paramount importance.

For this reason, a modern tech platform should not be an island. There are a multitude of new AdTech solutions out there which all claim to be essential for marketers, but perhaps the most desirable quality therefore is the ability to easily and simply connect and integrate into other solutions in the ecosystem. 


Understanding the Data

More than 30,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every hour, 80 million small to medium sized businesses actively use Facebook pages every day, and an average social media user will see 1,700 banner ads. The sheer amount of data marketers are expected to grapple with is staggering. 

Quite simply we are swimming in a sea of it, an ocean which gets deeper with each passing click, share, and subscribe. The result is information which is overwhelming and confusing for strategists and creatives. Those marketers using technology solutions smartly will find it much easier to manage, analyse and understand the data to bring insights into their business.

The challenge for tech companies is to create solutions which organise data in a way that generates accurate and importantly, actionable insights. This will help marketers to be able to understand the effectiveness of their content and be empowered to make decisions based on that understanding. 

Brands and marketers desperately need to give context to their data and understand what it is telling them about their campaigns. This means that we need tech which is capable of pushing and pulling information from other applications as and when required. Ultimately, data is only useful if it helps us understand the effectiveness of our content in different contexts. Once we truly understand that we can use it to improve the quality and performance of content and ultimately business success. 


Check Yourself Before You Tech Yourself

In my view, in order for tech to benefit creative teams it needs to do at least one of three things. 

Does it empower creativity?

Does it improve or streamline workflows?

Does it help you understand effectiveness?

If the products and solutions you use today in your creative process are hitting at least one of these criteria, you’re doing something right. If not, it might be time to review your systems. Both your creative team and your bottom line will thank you for doing so.


- Katie Nykanen is chief technology officer at Adstream

Improve your visibility, productivity and control by inputting a data-driven decision-making process with Adstream, the world’s most powerful cloud-based advertising content platform. 

Creativity. Connected. 


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