• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, April 25, 2016

“Thunder” is a direct jab at Adobe’s dominant creative cloud suite.

PaperG, which launched more than five years ago with the goal of helping print publishers transition to digital, is eager to take advantage of a programmatic display market that’s expected to reach $26.78 billion by 2017, according to eMarketer

“We live in a world of multiple ads, audiences and screens... and other regions of the world have a lot of different formats and sizes” -- which means marketers will increasingly need to run more versions of advertising creative, according to Victor Wong, Thunder's co-Founder and CEO. Programmatic and data management platforms (DMPs) that segment audiences are helping fuel a need for improved creative management.

Research by AppNexus found that while $6.1 billion will be spent on demand-side platforms (DSPs) and DMPs, 97% of programmatic campaigns lack targeted creative tailored for each audience segment. Marketers that haven’t invested in DMPs don’t yet know how to scale creative to match their audience segments.

Wong maintains that as marketing becomes more fragmented and advertising on platforms like Facebook is a must, it’s important for agencies and marketers to take more control of managing creative assets.  He contrasted the company’s creative management platform to Adobe’s, explaining that Adobe exists in a file-based world while his platform is one where everyone can collaborate, version, track and update via the cloud.

Increasingly, publishers need to render ads in a special format that represents a different way of thinking about how ads are created and tracked. Brands are realizing the need to own all their own creative assets much in the same way they think about owning their data.

“We’re applying machine-assisted design to creative,” Wong said, explaining, “if you’re a designer, you don’t want to spend all day on image cropping and adjusting ad sizes.” Thunder has built algorithms to do all that, plus build additional ad sizes.