70% Of Advertising Effectiveness Depends On The Creative: Ross Jauncey, Head, Create With Google

Create with Google, which was launched to support the creative marketing community with tools that serve to foster creativity, is receiving great response from agencies worldwide. This new platform is enabling a new era in marketing communication which is more focused, impactful and efficient. Ross Jauncey, Head, Create With Google spoke to BW Businessworld’s Ruhail Ameen about this innovative product and its impact on creative agencies.

Excerpts from the interview:

What was the inspiration behind launching Create with Google?
My role previously at the Google for five years was to work with the creative industry in Australia and New Zealand. We had some really great partners to do that with and we got some really great case studies done.

What it showed was that when you take six-second format to the market for the very first time or when you take the sequential storytelling on YouTube to the market for the very first time, it is a very difficult pitch without a great expression. What we realized is that creative people are the first to embrace platforms that make sense of them for others.

We thought it will be great to give them a credible platform which they could access on scale. By the time of Cannes it will be translated into multiple languages and it is already available in Korean and Japanese, and we are moving into Latin American translation and Chinese as well.

How does Create with Google enable a new era in creativity?
What we have learned over the years is that the more we share with our industry in terms of capabilities, the more inclined they are to show us the possibilities on our canvasses. For me the information they can access on scale should show us some amazing work coming our way and celebrating creativity through technology. For me it’s really about getting honest with the industry about what is possible and feeding their creativity with what we have on offer.

Where does the human factor stand in this tech-enabled creativity?
If you think about the human involvement in creativity, it has been used to come up with big ideas that no machine could come up with. But humans are also best at the application of technology. Creative minds are great at storytelling and also at the application of technology, which, in turn, takes those capabilities to create something we did not think of. I think that is the role of human’s in creativity.

What has been the response so far for Create with Google?
The response has been incredibly strong. I think it has been surprising to everyone that it is available on scale to everyone who has been working on our platform. It is not something that they have to spend with us to access it or anything like that. It is virtually available on scale. So it has been certainly a very positive response. When we tested some of our material in the market to see how it resonated with the creative audience, we did that a few months back, we had a great response from some of the major agencies. We think we are definitely hearing all the right signs and we are already having super strong site traffic from India so it is a good thing to see.

How does the future of creative agencies look like?
It is a question that comes up a lot. It is one that I don’t like to pick a winner because I think my role is that regardless of who is responsible for making work that lands on our platforms, I want to make that better and support that.

Right now we have loads of partners and it is a very big space and some people leveraging our site who are much smaller makers and it is not my job to pick who is going to lead the future of the industry.

I do think that we have to keep an eye on everyone to make sure that whoever is. We do things that work for everyone and not just one kind of creative makers, something where everyone can get value from.

In your view what are the biggest challenges facing creative storytellers today?
There are a couple of challenges. One is that every media platform wants a bespoke version of assets made for their platform. The other challenge is that clients can sometimes get too caught up in ensuring that the ads are landing at the right place at the right time and to the right person, and not focused on what is contained in the ad itself.

We know that 70 per cent of advertising effectiveness comes from the creative and that is a statistic not from Google but from the industry itself.