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BEN JONES: I am a relentlessly curious person,
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and so what inspires me is everything,
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the way that words and images come together
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to move us in all of its forms.
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I'm a creative director, and I work
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on a team called Unskippable Labs at Google.
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We run experiments in video content.
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We look at about a thousand ads a month
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to say what are patterns of creative effectiveness
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that advertisers can take advantage of.
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When we partner with brands, all our experiments run in-market.
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We don't do panels or focus groups or anything.
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Then we get the data and see what
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conclusions we can come to.
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Based on the experimentation, we see four primary opportunities
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in storytelling-- visual language, narrative structure,
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tuning for audience, and creative systems.
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We see the opportunity to evolve the visual language that's
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used in ads, and some of these are
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very simple-- tighter framing, faster pacing,
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use of large-type supers, brightness and contrast.
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The second opportunity we see is around narrative structure,
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and it's building for attention.
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You need to give them, we say, dessert first,
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or a punch in the face, a thing in the beginning that is like,
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ah, there's a reason I should pay attention to this.
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The third opportunity is tuning for audience.
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Making creative choices to reflect who you are
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and what you're interested in improves creative response
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The last is how are you sequencing ads
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and what are the right mixtures of formats and forms,
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and how do you best deploy creative and media
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assets for maximum impact.
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Google is in this space because if clients' videos are better,
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then the whole platform is better.
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But I think especially within Google,
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there is this idea that with a big enough data
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set we'll find enough patterns and we'll
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unlock the ability to figure out how every ad should work.
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The challenge with advertising is
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as soon as you make an ad that follows all the rules,
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all the rules change.
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So can machine learning help us?
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Bringing some data in can help creatives defend good ideas
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and make better work.
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It can help clients put more effective work in market.
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Then they can take more risks.
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I think data is a tool like many tools,
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and there is a lot that it can teach us
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and a lot that it can show us, but it works with creativity,
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not to replace creativity.
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And so the only way I think to really
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be breakthrough as a brand is to be experimenting all the
