What you need to know:

• Six 'addressable content' hubs launched globally, with Sydney now scaling up output and hiring.
• Aim is to follow the sun and use automation to deliver faster, cheaper, dynamic or personalised creative that drives sales and counters in-housing trend by better aligning creative and media.
• Menezes and Moseley think 50 per cent of GroupM client campaigns should be personalised by 2025, but aim to start small – ten variants not hundreds or thousands, beginning with basic personalisation before going deep.
• Declined to comment on whether move is a direct counteroffensive to S4's 'better, faster, cheaper' approach, but pointed out practices focus beyond digital to traditional media and point of sale.

Germane riposte

Dynamic creative optimisation has become a dirty word, because brands tried to run before they could walk and found executing thousands of pieces of creative in a bid for personalisation at scale was harder than talking about it at conferences. As a result, only about 3 per cent of campaigns currently use dynamic iterations.

Meanwhile, upstarts like S4 Capital are tearing up trees by beating the drum of ‘better, faster, cheaper’ and chasing the sun with a decentralised production and delivery model.

Now Hogarth and GroupM are trying to kill two birds with one stone, launching an 'addressable content practice', or ACP, with six hubs around the world. The Sydney office is open for business and ramping up both headcount and output. The WPP units aim to make 50 per cent of creative dynamic/personalised/addressable by 2025 and say early work is already saving a government and a telco client 20 and 35 per cent respectively, with the money recycled into media spend.

The firms refused to be drawn on whether the move was a direct counteroffensive to Sorrell’s incursions, but they think delivering personalisation at scale will both move the needle for brands, and pose an alternative to in-housing – with marketers becoming increasingly vocal about being overcharged for creative iterations.

As ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra told Mi3: “It pains me to pay two thousand dollars, five thousand dollars for tiny edits here for a banner, a tiny edit for a video which frankly my son could do.”

Blake Moseley, National Digital Strategy Director at Hogarth thinks the practice can change all that.

Alongside GroupM technology chief Ryan Menezes, Moseley has led the development of the joint venture, with the practice’s direct workforce pulling in teams across GroupM globally in a bid to blend media smarts with personalised creative and delivery at speed. The two think it will deliver results for brands – and unlike S4, are thinking beyond digital.

“We’re focusing on everything, including offline and point of sale,” said Moseley. “We have a bunch of retail clients that think about addressability from an in-store experience perspective. So it’s beyond digital channels.”

Dynamic creative – or addressability/personalisation – is also way beyond display, he added.

“Display is probably about 15 per cent of what we are doing,” said Moseley. “It’s very much focused on video and social … but it’s omnichannel.”

Machine earning

Moseley said the cited savings for early ACP clients are achievable because the practice uses automation to do much of the iterative work.

“We're using technology to help create content. We're not doing things manually – that's a fool's errand – because you're not going to be able to save time, save money. You're going to be sitting there building creative after creative after creative, and that’s just not scalable,” said Moseley. “So we use tech to be able to scale and that's how we reinvest that production cost [saving] into media. But we’re also removing all the different handoff points, keeping it flatter, more streamlined, to be able to deliver that.”

Menezes said the holdco will use the practice to funnel clients into creative iterations so that they become comfortable – learning to walk first. He points to stats (albeit from 2018) from Accenture which suggested that 91 per cent of people said addressable content is more likely to make them buy something, and from Adobe that 66 per cent of people stated non-personalised messages were a deterrent.  

“Talking about hundreds and thousands of [creative variants] can scare the crap out of clients. So we’re not going to do that. I’d love to get there at some point, but let’s start with ten,” said Menezes.

Moseley said the model is “crawl, walk, sprint”.

“It’s about building confidence … because ultimately every media or creative should be personalised in some way, whether it's very simple – just being more relevant – or very sophisticated and one-to-one,” he said.

“We need to build that confidence, rather than worrying about cost, resource or platforms. And it doesn’t have to be complex – we’ve seen something as simple as location-based personalisation drive two times uplift with automotive dealers. It doesn’t need to be overly-convoluted and require a deep understanding of the customer. It can start simple.”

In-house extension

Menezes and Moseley said the model works with in-house teams to automate the legwork as well as any other set-up.

“We are a global media and production business. We stay abreast of tech evolution, which can be more challenging when in-housing,” said Menezes. “But ultimately it doesn’t matter to us. Regardless of the model – in-house, hybrid, outsourced – it’s adaptive.”

Moseley said the same applies to creative. “We have strategists, developers, art directors, copywriters that build addressable brand platforms … but we can also take an existing asset and make it sweat.”

Bringing together creative, automation and media is driving the circa 30 per cent savings the two claim early clients are now reinvesting.

“Seventy per cent of campaign performance comes down to creative. But it’s always the media agency that’s held up on its performance,” said Moseley. “What we’re trying to do is flip that on its head. Creative has to be more accountable.”

By better aligning relevant creative and media, he said, that imbalance should begin to shift. “But the creative is the most important piece.”

Which sounds suspiciously like a modern day – dynamic and decentralised – variant of the full service agency.