Is a CMP right for your brand?

SUMMARY: According to Celtra “a creative management platform is a cloud-based tool for brands and publishers to produce, distribute and measure their digital creatives” With more and more brands ditching their agencies a CMP might be right for you.

Today’s consumers are savvy and more inclined to make thoughtful decisions than ever before. This poses a big question to brands: How can they adjust their creative strategies to remain attractive to today’s consumers? One of the ways advertisers have started to shift toward a more singular customer focus is through a concentration on their digital advertising creative processes to ensure they remain relevant across regions, languages, channels, and needs, without sacrificing the quality of content or speed of creation.

Celtra further states “a creative management platform has different benefits for different groups. From a designer’s standpoint, a CMP is the best tool for bringing ads to life because it allows them to create effective ads that take advantage of the latest technologies while hiding much of the complexity that makes them run across a dizzying array of screen sizes, formats, and platforms”.

From a marketer’s standpoint, it’s the best tool for deploying and optimizing ads; it works seamlessly with your media buying tool and it provides further insights into detailed, real-time creative level data, and offers an easy way to test every aspect of a creative. From a marketing or design team’s perspective, it’s the collaborative engine that ensures everyone’s on the same page, working efficiently to turn out high-quality, effective ads to maximize ROAS.

CMP’s promise an easier workflow and monitoring of online ad campaigns, but it’s been my experience working with CPG brands that it’s not always true.

In A/B tests, CMP versus static ads, the click-through rate was not always higher even when the same creative was used. I tell clients that it comes down to the message of the creative and the ads themselves. In one case, we used a CMP to advertise a new frozen pizza brand. Without a coupon, the ad performed poorly, even with different messages. However, when we added a click-through to a coupon, the ad performed a gel of a lot better.

I have suggested to clients that if they use a CMP they need to also employ a team of creative and analytic people. I’ve also seen the “too many cooks in the kitchen” with creative. Marketing people love to think they know what to advertise but that’s not always true.

Be honest about the quality of your digital advertising. It can be measured with great analytics, but too many brands wait too long to drop bad ads. A CMP can create many problems if too many people have input and your marketing team doesn’t have experience managing CMP’s.

Originally published at https://www.newmediaandmarketing.com on March 1, 2021.