Start-up tackles $1.89b ad industry ‘waste’

A new data solutions provider, magnetic has set out to address

what it estimates to be as much as $1.89b of advertising waste in New Zealand, by using advanced tech to improve ROI.

Launced today by Waitapu Group,

Auckland-based Magnetic provides advanced marketing data and analytics solutions to enhance performance of advertising creative and media.

The company says it will work with leading brands and agencies to quantify and mitigate advertising wastage, and reduce subjectivity, to greatly improve return on investment.

Using computer vision and AI, Magnetic provides creative teams with an understanding of emotional responses to ads on a second-by-second basis, insights that help to refine ideas, messaging, visuals and composition to better resonate with target audiences.

Creative and media plans can then be optimised to ensure that more of the moments that matter in each ad are viewed, instead of played out to no-one. The company says this data-driven approach allows for iterative experimentation, which leads to higher-performing content and helps ensure maximum media suitability.

Magnetic is led by CEO, Phil Townend, who brings over 25 years of experience across the global advertising industry, including roles at Carat, Virgin, Unruly and Amplified Intelligence. Phil specialises in using data and advanced analytical technologies to measure advertising effectiveness.

“The time is right”, says Mr Townend. “There’s more ad-waste than there’s ever been. Marketers are being tasked to deliver greater value for the same budget, or the same results for less. From a technology perspective, we’re at an inflection point, where AI-driven biometric media and creative analysis tools exist to augment and inform marketing communications beyond proxy or hygiene metrics such as viewability and view through rate. Magnetic offers a powerful, new solution.”

A recent study from Amplified Intelligence and PepsiCo – looking at over 1,000 ads across major digital platforms in Europe – found that only 42 percent of the branded moments in PepsiCo ads were actually seen^*. So, despite the age of connectivity, with digital metrics at our fingertips, even the world’s biggest, most sophisticated brands are seeing ad-waste of 58 percent or more.

If this level of wastage were mapped over the NZ$3.3bn annual media spend in New Zealand**, it would represent almost $2bn of ad-spend playing creative content to little or no real human attention. A large driver of this waste is the fractured nature of creative and media practices, where ads are being created and deployed in silos.

Waitapu Group Managing Director, Greg Partington, says, “The days of relying on guess work to make decisions about content or media are over. It’s time to harness data end-to-end and I believe our group is in a unique position to bring together the two fractured practices of creativity and media to drive performance”.

“Consumer attention is fleeting,” says Townend. “We must ask ourselves, is the creative work engaging and persuasive enough? Does it entertain and inspire? And does it map effectively to the media formats in which it’s intended to run? We created Magnetic to answer these questions and give brands more certainty that the dollars invested in creative or media are actually delivering an optimal return.”

Source: * Amplified Intelligence, ** ASA https://www.asa.co.nz/industry/asa-advertising-turnover-report/

Originally published on: https://stoppress.co.nz/news/start-up-tackles-1-89b-ad-industry-waste/