Dmexco: Google's Jason Bigler calls for a bigger creativity budget for online, data-led campaigns

He covered the fifteen year evolution of Google's business and the data it had begun to deliver to reach, he claimed, an average of 90,000 key words for each Ad Words account, evolving into analytics and understanding search traffic and how brands can use it.

"Relevancy has created a $60bn industry in search alone," he highlighted, adding that it had become "an important topic that will be used forever."

He agreed that it was "possible" that the IAB was correct in its prediction that by 2020 behavioural targeting spend would likely exceed that of search.

"There's a massive shift going on. It's really important to think about and prepare your businesses for this eventuality. We need to create a better consumer experience if we want consumers to embrace advertising then it has to be relevant to them and it has to be immersed into their environment."

Bigler also stated that frequency was an issue, highlighting a personal issue with Icelandic Air, with whom he travelled. He said the airline had targeted him with display adverts for a period of six months, despite it no longer being of relevance or interest to him, and offered no feedback option for him to let them know.

This led to the need for data insight in order to target demographics, but to also learn about its audiences personal preferences, in order to deepen online campaign relevancy.

Bigler was clear however that storytelling was the engagement factor that could drive success for an online campaign and highlighted last year's display advert to promote the release of SkyFall on DVD, which would take the user to a second screen game through a QR Code that could be controlled by their phone. The campaign saw an average interaction time of one minute and 49 seconds, he revealed.

"These are different ways to think about creative concepts that, through the metric of interaction time, which has proven that it did have an impact," he stated.

"Adding behaviours to context is such a no brainer.'" Bigler continued. "Technology allows us to scale campaigns in an automated fashion that if done manually is impossible but it's what we've done for the last 10 years. Recently its become more automated, and its going to continue to be more automated. It's necessary, it's requisite. You need the machines to crunch this data, to spit out the segways that you should be targeting against specific creative messages and do to that to be used dynamically, and all in real-time".

Despite the growth of automation however, Bigler concluded by pleading for further investment into content creativity.

"Creative budgets need to catch up to what consumers are demanding from the Internet. That is a relevant experience with content that speaks to them. That cannot be done with one creative content. It can't be done with two. It can become dynamic as it is being deployed today as we now dynamic is being used. We've seen what can be dynamic and we know the majority of what we are seeing is irrelevant to us."

Earlier in the day, Keith Weed, chief marketing officer for Unilever also discussed the potential that the use of data can have in driving effective marketing campaigns.