Multimodal Content? What is it and how does it benefit creative ad personalization strategies? 

Claudio Vaccarella, CEO

Here at Connected-Stories, we’re constantly educating ourselves to improve: the NEXT platform UX, the company culture, and the approach we take as an ad tech vendor. We share these educational moments internally (and externally soon!), and sometimes we find new ways to explain the workings of the NEXT platform that really stick for us. Most recently, “multimodal content” has been used internally to describe our patented “complex content” model – the foundation of our platform’s creative building mode or Creative Studio. 

Connected-Stories NEXT is multimodal by design – we built the platform from end to end with an appreciation and understanding of the impact of multimodal creative. From our building studio to our AI-powered automation and Creative Intelligence data dashboard. With multimodal creative as the “why” behind Connected-Stories, we’ve opened up new opportunities for building personalized and contextualized creatives at scale. 

So what is multimodal content? Traditionally, multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. Commonly used in educational technology, multimodal content addresses the various needs, attention, and learning styles of learners/viewers by combining video, text, and audio. Here at Connected-Stories, we use the term to describe elements unique to our platform- where we have taken a step further adding interactivity and data-driven dynamicity.

We apply the concept of multimodality to advertising content because now more than ever the ad industry needs innovation in creative technology. With the transition of the old paradigm of TV to online digital and Web3 making its first steps toward the mainstream, advertisers need creative innovation to finally reach their consumers with ad creatives that are useful, relevant, fun, and privacy compliant.

Connected-Stories NEXT has enhanced the multimodal approach to render ads that fit the medium they’re shown on (bi-directional, interactive, high-speed, and connected to consumers through powerful personal devices) – reaching consumers who are adopting full online behaviors before the broader AdTech landscape has caught up. With the goal of being relevant and informative to different types of consumers, the multimodal approach to advertising begins within the Connected-Stories NEXT Creative Studio. Beginning with ad building all the way through creative intelligence, we’ve democratized the creative process in even the most complex scenarios because we’ve developed a new multimodal language that takes into account the creative as well as the data and real-time signals or modes that can power it. This approach allows brands to develop rich expressions in our Creative Studio that are integral to the ad-building process.  

To round things out with an example: the talented Connected-Stories team recently developed a performance-drive and first-to-market campaign within the NEXT platform for a telecom company. The strategy allowed the company to build a consumer funnel while introducing prospective converters to an internet speed test. Each of the three (3) multimodal content experiences was data-driven, allowing the brands to target and retarget consumers based on their individual speed test results. Across each format, we dedicated attention to specific modes of interactivity that contributed to the overall ad experience for the consumer while nurturing them through the fun from the initial ad impact to the retargeting moment. With triple-digit lift in engagement compared to non-multimodal ads for the same company, Connected-Stories’ ability to transform content into multimodal experiences proved fruitful for our telecom partner.