Ask a marketing leader if their creative is working, and the answer is almost always a resounding “yes.” But ask them to prove it to a CFO using hard business outcomes and that confidence starts to look misplaced.
Our latest report, Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey, explores this tension in detail. Featuring the views of 115 global marketing leaders, it reveals that while the industry is in a bullish mood about creative effectiveness, a critical blind spot remains: a lack of analytical rigor is leaving creative budgets highly vulnerable.
Below, I break down four key takeaways from the research and discuss what they mean for the future of your marketing investments.
1. There’s surface-level confidence about current creative
We began our survey by assessing marketers’ confidence in the effectiveness of their creative. The results reveal the industry is in bullish mood:
- 89% described their creative as either “effective” or “very effective” over the past 12 months
- 65% said their ability to measure creative effectiveness was “advanced” or “very advanced”
- 63% said they were “confident” or “very confident” that their approach accurately measured the impact that creative has on business goals.
If you’re reading this and feel equally confident, it’s important to think carefully about how you are defining creative effectiveness. Effectiveness is the measurable impact of your creative on key business goals, such as incremental sales. This definition is important as it ties marketing investments to the KPIs your CFO and CEO care about most.
If the primary metrics on which you’re basing creative effectiveness are brand recall, awards, or media-based proxies like reach, then your campaigns may not be performing as well as you think. What’s more, you’re likely leaving your budget decisions to assumptions rather than empirical proof.
Read more about why you need to align your marketing organization around a shared definition of effectiveness that ties creative performance to business goals and ensure your measurement framework is built on metrics and KPIs that track these commercial objectives.
2. There’s a lack of measurement rigor applied to creative
For decades, our industry has focused on measuring and optimizing media with sophisticated analytical models, notably marketing mix modelling (MMM). In contrast, creative has largely been left untouched by such rigor. This is a major blind spot given creative’s contribution to overall advertising effectiveness.
Despite 81% of survey respondents saying media and creative are equally important in terms of their ability to drive business impact, just 36% admit to applying the same level of measurement rigor to both variables. The result of this gap is that 62% of marketers agree they’re investing in media to deliver creative whose true value is unknown.
If you’re treating creative as a pure art form that doesn’t need to be informed by data and measurement, then you are risking both the performance of your creative and the investment you will get to develop it.
Explore why you need to break down internal silos by bringing creative, media, and analytics stakeholders together and challenge external partners to prove that their methodologies can isolate and measure the direct contribution of creative to business outcomes.
3. Creative budget is already being lost
One in four respondents admit they’ve already seen their creative budget reduce due to an inability to provide data-informed evidence about its effectiveness. Further, 49% said they’re not confident they have the data-informed evidence they need to defend their creative budget in front of the CFO. This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
With marketing budgets under ever greater scrutiny, marketers need to think carefully about how they’re measuring creative effectiveness. If your CFO is asking you to prove that value of your investments, then you need to have robust data-informed evidence that will stand up to questioning.
Learn more about why you shouldn’t wait for the next budget cycle to build a defense of your creative investment.
4. The barriers are largely fixable, but most marketers don’t know it
Marketers cited inadequate creative data and a lack of tools/solutions as the main barriers to measuring creative effectiveness. The good news is the means to overcome these barriers now exist, but many marketers are yet to discover what is possible.
Take cataloguing creative data as an example. Previously, it wasn’t realistic to tag every creative asset across all formats and channels with structured and detailed data – the time and effort needed to complete such a task was prohibitive.
Today, AI enables creative data taxonomies to be developed at speed and at scale. This is game-changing because accurate, structured and detailed data is foundational when it comes to analyzing how creative has performed in the past and how you can optimize its impact in the future.
Feeding granular data about a creative asset’s visual elements, audio cues, or call to action into advanced analytical models alongside other drivers (e.g. media spend, pricing, competitor activity) enables you to isolate the impact of creative on business KPIs.
Discover more about new AI-driven tools that can structure, tag, and organize your creative assets at scale.
Replace assumption with evidence
Misplaced confidence and weak measurement are a risky combination if you want to demonstrate creative effectiveness. To protect creative budgets and maximize performance, marketers need to move on from soft metrics and outdated habits.
Download Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey to learn more.
