Last week at Advertising Week New York, I moderated a panel on a topic that’s both professionally relevant and personally nostalgic for me: The Art and Science of CTV Advertising. It’s nostalgic because I started my career on the creative side of ad agencies—back when the “science” part meant Nielsen ratings and small focus groups were what constituted data. And it’s relevant because the balance between creativity and precision targeting—the art and the science—has never mattered more. We now have access to so much data that it’s easy to become overly reliant on it. Brands decide that finding the right person, at the right time, on the right device is all that matters, the actual story the ad tells be damned. But as anyone who’s ever sat through a beautifully targeted but completely forgettable ad can tell you: reach and resonance aren’t the same thing. Because what actually moves people—what makes them care, laugh, remember, or buy—is still storytelling. The ability to connect emotionally through sight, sound, and motion. CTV Is Changing the Equation We’ve hit the point where many advertisers view streaming as their primary advertising medium. One where they can manage frequency, measure results, and experiment with formats that don’t exist anywhere else. Which is what makes a new report from LG Ad Solutions, The Art and Science of the CTV-First Era, Part One, so timely. It casts a light on the current conundrum: how to make use of all the data we now have available without crushing the sort of storytelling that creates commercials you remember 20 years after you last saw them. Ideally. CTV will give us the emotional power of TV in conjunction with the accountability of data. But the weight given to each part of that equation is still very much open for debate. Data Should Inspire, Not Dictate According to the report, 70% of CTV buyers say insights spark their best ideas. Which I firmly believe is the right way to think about it—data as the spark, not the script. Too many campaigns take the data as a literal roadmap, not as guidance. Which is to their detriment because inspiration only happens when you use the data to give you permission to take a creative leap. Look at what Lexus and Wells Fargo did in the LG study—Lexus used dynamic countdowns around the U.S. Open to blend luxury with live excitement, while Wells Fargo used ACR and financial data to reach a very specific audience with shoppable home screen ads. Both worked because the creative still told a story. Creative Is a Performance Tool One of the report’s more interesting takeaways is that 84% of buyers using advanced creative formats say they directly drive business outcomes—brand lift, site visits, purchases. Meaning TV actually does work as a performance vehicle. If you let it. LG’s own data shows that advanced creative formats result in 5.9x higher brand favorability, 2.4x higher purchase intent, 1.4x higher awareness. Meaning TV’s days as an RVO (reach vehicle only) should be coming to an end. Old Habits Die Hard Even as tech connects everything, most advertisers still separate the teams that handle data and creative—sixty-three percent of respondents to the LG survey admitted those groups still operate in silos. Which is ironic because for years, we’ve been hearing how agencies are breaking down the walls between their “TV” and “Programmatic.” Yet it seems that in many cases, those walls are as high as ever. AI: Friend, Not Foe Then there’s AI. The LG report found that 56% of advertisers somewhat trust AI to help generate ads, as long as humans review the output. It’s a smart take, because AI isn’t coming for creativity—it’s coming for inefficiency. It can take over the dull parts like versioning and testing, the things that make production expensive and slow. The fun part—the emotional insight, the spark—that’s still ours. During our panel, we talked about how AI might actually bring back iteration. Instead of creating one perfect ad and praying it lands, marketers can now test, refine, and adjust in real time. In other words, AI might make the process feel creative again. Barriers To Creativity For all their talk about innovation, a lot of brands are still treating creativity as optional—a nice-to-have once the targeting and data science are done. Which is a little like building a perfectly engineered car and upholstering it in low grade velour. Much of this stems back to measurement: if the only things you are quantifying are reach and completion rate, then it’s easy to see why creativity is not worth the effort. And while the true impact of a TV commercial is still largely a difficult thing to measure, digital style metrics like brand-lift studies, ACR data, and real outcome tracking can help prove that creativity isn’t just black hole of unnecessary spending The challenge is convincing organizations to see it that way. The Real Balancing Act If there is one key takeaway from the report, it’s that advertisers are looking for a more harmonious relationship between art and data. Not a world of wild creative ideas looking for a strategy but not a world of overly strategic and overly forgettable ads created by committee. The real test will come as AI plays a bigger and bigger role in the equation. Will we use it to kickstart more memorable ideas based on insights from the data? Or will we use it to create a roadmap for ads that hew tightly to the strategy but do nothing to inspire us? Art vs Science. TV’s eternal debate. |
