Telling Multi-Funnel Creative Stories: Infillion’s Michael Colella on InfillionX’s Launch

At Infillion, our Creative Studio is at the core of our brand identity – we don’t just want to build ad tech, we want to enable beautiful campaigns to thrive on it. That’s why we made sure that our Creative Studio, which is responsible for building our award-winning campaign work for clients, had a major hand in the development and launch of InfillionX, our single-buy, multiplatform ad solution.

Where does a creative team lead when it comes to something like InfillionX? We spoke to Michael Colella, SVP and Executive Producer of Infillion’s Creative Studio, to explain.

Let’s say a brand comes to Infillion with a campaign that has two really disparate KPIs. How could Infillion’s Creative Studio build a campaign that is able to meet all these KPIs at once?

The Creative Studio is committed to being adaptable and responsive, building solutions driven by years of performative data to ensure our creative can meet and exceed client expectations and goals. 

Take our Blueprints technology, for example, which we built when we learned that the time required to adapt a video campaign into an interactive format is a big barrier to deploying them. Blueprints can take campaign assets and turn them into an interactive unit in less than half the turnaround time than it would otherwise. And those interactive campaigns can easily reach multiple segments of the purchase funnel at once, like a product exploration unit that can build consideration by introducing users to in-depth information about a company’s various offerings, while also using ShopX technology to allow in-ad shopping for people who might be further along the funnel. 

Even still, a single piece of creative often can’t be a one-stop shop for the whole funnel, and every functionality may not work well for certain KPIs. That’s where InfillionX really excites us, because we’re building a whole campaign strategy. Sometimes we can develop multiple pieces of creative that are each focused on the separate KPIs and demographics, and early user interactions with a component of the campaign can tell us where they stand in terms of the purchase journey and what version of the campaign’s creative they should see next. This also creates a very clean data set, aligned to specific creative to achieve specific metrics, that can be iterated upon over the course of the campaign to continue to fine-tune the performance to exceed client expectations.

How does your team ensure that the same spirit of creativity from the TrueX engagement endures no matter what platform the brand messaging continues on?

One major priority for the Creative Studio has been to ensure creative parity across our product suite – inclusive of not just the premium nature of the assets but also UI/UX, user flow, visual language, qualified interactive elements, reporting nomenclature, and tagging. This effort has allowed our creative to scale efficiently across our network, and also streamlined our process to develop creative and set consistent specifications for asset requirements and our timelines to deploy campaigns. 

As a creative director, what kind of campaign would you love to see a brand execute using this full-service offering?

An opportunity that would excite me to leverage our full-service offering would be a client that would want to drive product purchases. To me, a successful method to leverage our full-service to drive the greatest results would be a combination of leveraging ShopX shoppable ads (a subset of our TrueX interactive ads), and then retargeting with NeXt. But soon we’re also going to be able to leverage InStadium to target our live sports network through digital out-of-home.

We could begin the campaign using ShopX throughout the campaign’s TrueX ads, leveraging our premium video engagement network across all devices: desktop, mobile and CTV. Ideally, we would be able to offer multiple retailer options in this ShopX unit to see which retailer is any given user’s preferred choice based on their interactions. This would be one component of the creative strategy that has its own performance and data analysis. 

Leveraging the user data from the TrueX campaign, we can then deploy a second campaign with our TrueTargeting proprietary targeting and our data-fueled audience with a dual KPI. The first KPI would be to target a user base that has an affinity for a particular retailer and provide a one-click solution to purchase a product with this retailer. The second KPI would be to focus on a competitive set of users to see if we drive them to a different retailer to make a purchase. 

A final component of the creative strategy, which we’ll be able to incorporate into InfillionX starting in Q3 2023, could be to deploy an InStadium activation and retarget sports fans that were exposed to the creative while attending the live sports event. Leveraging Arrival, our footfall attribution technology, we can understand a sports fan’s entire journey by sending alerts when they are close to one of the targeted retailers and identify when they enter a retailer. 

Infillion’s Creative Studio is unique for its ability to both think big and think pragmatically, and nowhere have those both been in tandem more than with InfillionX. 

Want to hear about how InfillionX can bring your brand to new levels? Reach out and let us know what you’re looking for.