This is the second of three articles based on interviews with senior marketers who took part in Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey.
In our previous article, we explored how marketers can have more productive creative budget discussions with their CFOs. But speaking the language of finance requires a solid foundation: an agreed-upon definition of creative effectiveness and a culture where creative, media, and analytics teams actively collaborate and embrace analytical rigor.
At Gain Theory, creative effectiveness is defined as the measurable impact of creative on key business goals, especially incremental sales.
Why you need a clear definition of creative effectiveness
The CMO of a global retailer is clear on why a shared definition of creative effectiveness is essential: “It’s important to have a clear definition, because otherwise creative becomes subjective. Every stakeholder ends up judging ads based on personal preferences instead of business outcomes.”
Achieving this requires viewing alignment not as a one-off event, but as an ongoing process. “Alignment is always work in progress rather than something that’s permanently achieved,” the Retail CMO notes. “Different stakeholders naturally have different priorities: creative teams value originality, media teams focus on efficiency, and leadership looks at business outcomes. So, the key is establishing a common definition of success before any creative work begins.”
To maintain this discipline, the retailer aligns all parties using detailed creative briefs with explicit objectives, target audiences, key messages, and success metrics. Agencies are brought in upfront to understand not just what to create, but why. After campaigns launch, performance is reviewed using data rather than opinions, and structured postmortems capture learnings for future briefs.
“That disciplined process creates strong alignment over time and makes creative effectiveness a repeatable capability rather than a matter of individual taste,” the CMO adds.
However, many organizations are still at the start of this journey as the CMO of a global education organization admits: “We do not have a clear definition of creative effectiveness. I think we’d be much more effective if we did have a clear definition because then we would be developing our work based on those goals and outcomes.”
Breaking down silos between creative, media, and analytics
Even with a clear definition, creative effectiveness can be stymied by structural silos. “Media and analytics/measurement collaborate a lot. Creative does not collaborate a lot with measurement,” notes the Education CMO.
In fast-moving consumer goods (CPG), collaboration is often restricted to campaign execution rather than early-stage strategy, according to one Head of Marketing: “The creative and media team sit under one group, and analytics and measurement sit on the other side. There is regular collaboration that happens, but it’s more around projects and campaigns rather than early-stage [creative] development. That’s not where the collaboration is, but I think it should be there too.”
Breaking down these silos can yield strong results. Citing regular reviews and shared KPIs that ensure creative, media, and analytics teams “make decisions based on the same objectives and performance data”, the Retail CMO notes a collaborative approach improves engagement and conversion rates while enabling the business to reallocate spend quickly toward top-performing assets.
Winning over creative teams with analytical rigor
Alongside developing more collaboration, marketing organizations need to tackle a lack of creative measurement sophistication. While 81% of respondents to the Gain Theory survey agree that creative and media are equally important in driving business impact, only 36% apply the same analytical rigor to measuring both.
Bringing analytical rigor into the creative process often meets cultural resistance. For decades, creative work has been treated as an artistic endeavor evaluated after the fact, rather than one that is informed by data. As a VP of Marketing in Financial Services points out: “Creatives have always been judged subjectively. I would like to think that they are very open to this, but it’s something that’s new to them.”
The Education CMO goes further: “I don’t think they’re very open to analytical rigor. They’re not used to it, and I think they would push back on it. They don’t like you getting involved in the upfront part of creative, because it’s a creative endeavor and not one that is connected to measurement.”
The Head of Marketing in CPG notes it is a challenge that is more applicable to external agency partners: “The creative teams in the organization are fine, but sometimes the creative teams in the agencies do have problems with analytical rigor.” Overcoming this resistance requires repositioning data as an enabler of better creativity rather than a restrictive judge.
The Retail CMO emphasizes this mindset shift: “Most creative teams are increasingly open to analytical rigor as long as data is used to improve creative rather than just judge individuals. When insights are actionable and objective, they become a valuable input into the creative process rather than a constraint.”
Shifting an organization toward data-informed creative is a leadership challenge, according to the Tech CMO: “Creative teams have their likes and their dislikes, and they have defined ways of working. It’s more of a change management effort… working with the teams to show them the benefit of the change and in which way it will help them become better, faster, and more productive.
Read the next article in our series
Building a collaborative culture and getting buy-in from creative teams for more analytical rigor is essential, but it is only half the equation. There are also structural barriers that need to be overcome. In the final article of our series, we examine the technical and data barriers holding marketers back and the single most important change marketers want to see to creative measurement.
Click here to read Creative Measurement: Understanding the Main Barriers and What Marketers Wish They Could Change.