More than a tweet, less than a blog.

This is a longer version of the thought piece published last week by M&M global.

Research consistently shows that in online media, creative is the most important component for driving effect. Some studies indicate that the quality of an ad can actually be responsible for up to 75% of a campaign’s total impact.

This might sound like much, but the importance of quality is really no wonder considering how the advertising landscape look today - thousands of advertiser messages being thrown at us in an increasing array of channels. In some campaigns it can be tens of thousands of sites. And naturally, we can’t pay attention all the time and remember all of them, or pay it forward to our friends using social networks. We filter the information - the good stuff wins, and the bad stuff gets ignored.

So, for online campaigns to work properly these days, our ads have to be better than ever before. However, media fragmentization not only increase the significance of great creative but also makes it harder to assess which creatives will do a great job. Knowing what works on before hand is getting harder, and great opportunities often have a way of presenting themselves halfway into campaigns that are already live.

The reason is simple - the media landscape is less predictable, and more dynamic than ever before. Complex and unpredictable.

Reaching consumers in more ways, on more places and thru more channels, means an exponential increase in the number of contexts our ads are supposed to work with. And understanding the circumstances and media environment for our campaigns is the key ingredient to gain attention, and drive impact. In fact, the same ad can have the complete opposite effect on the same person, depending on where and when it’s being shown.

It’s obvious we need to align our creative process with the increased complexity of the new media landscape, optimizing our workflow for responding to change, rather than following plan. Launching with a big bang may still work, but it’s an increasingly risky strategy, and in most cases we might be better off by welcoming the changing requirements, even late in the process, and use our ability to harness that change as a competitive advantage.

So online media both increases the need for great creative, as well as make it harder to predict what creative works. This means we we need to tweak our creative process to become more based on continuous learning and modification, rather than huge up front risks and speculation. Luckily, online media enables us to do just that.

Much has been said about how much more intriguing online media is compared to other mass marketing channels. Consumers can interact with ads and brands, purchase stuff immediately and recommend what they like to their friends.

What hasn’t been talked about is the massive opportunity to reduce risk while increasing quality thru a cycle of test, measure, refine and update. Because unlike tradtional, static media channels, online media allows us not only to see what’s working and why in real-time, but also update our campaigns on the fly. This idea - to learn and improve in quick iterations - isn’t something exclusve to online advertising, it’s at the heart of most successful projects and ventures in online media, from social gaming to search engine marketing.

But the advertising industry have been slow in adopting this mindset, the reasons being lack of tools proper tools and that it requires a substantial change in agency-advertiser relationships. Advertisers need to allocate budgets differently, and also participate along the process to ensure that activities are supporting advertiser goals. And agencies can no longer expect a clearly defined point of deliver, and instead they must take responsibility for their work over a much longer period of time.

Together with a couple of other companies, we’re bringing you the tools to improve your feedback loop and let solutions evolve over time. But the organizational challenge is something all you agencies and advertisers will have to sort out by yourselves.

Changing how you structure projects and allocate budgets might sound like very hard work, and it probably is. But first of all, I can tell you first hand I’ve seen it happen over and over for agencies I’ve met all over the world. And second, it’s not like you have any choice. Media fragmentization and more complex consumer behavior makes it close to impossible to predict and plan every campaign up front. There are simply too many unknown factors to take into account. And this problem will not only persist, but increase exponentially.

The most effective way to deliver high-quality advertising is to release earlier, learn from your mistakes and improve over time. The quicker your feedback loop, the quicker you can improve to the point where consumers pay attention you and not your competitors.