How effective is our creative? It’s a question that a lot of advertisers are asking at the moment as marketing budgets come under greater scrutiny and resources get increasingly stretched.
While it might seem an obvious question to those of us who work in data and analytics, for those who are focused on creative it can feel more existential in nature. So, it was with interest that I accepted an invitation to join a panel at the 2024 ANA Measurement and Analytics Conference to discuss this topic.
Part of me was expecting to be the referee, given my co-panelists were Jacob Bradbury, VP of Marketing and CRM Analytics at a large apparel retailer, and Aaron Frye, Executive Creative Director at VML. In fact, they had a lot more in common than I envisaged.
Aaron was under no illusion that current questions around creative measurement are valid, for example. “I don’t know if, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of measuring creativity,” he said. “We need to get a little more focused on what the main KPI for an individual piece of creative is.”
While the industry might aspire to making incremental in-market sales growth the most important KPI, it’s not always measurable for creative impact. Instead, we default to gut instinct, winning awards, and approaches such as pre-testing, as well as leaning too heavily on media effectiveness.
Don’t get me wrong, these approaches are all important, but they are not able to demonstrate the effectiveness of your advertising creative in a way that will enable marketers to get the investment they need from the c-suite. To do this, you need to link creative to incremental sales and ROI.
Focus on sales and test-and-control
Jacob was clear on the metric he’s focused on when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of creative.“There are intermediate metrics you can look at through the brand funnel, such as awareness and consideration, but ultimately it has to be sales,” he said.
When it comes to the best measurement technique to use, randomized test-and-control is “the gold standard”, according to Jacob, but he noted the ability to compare different creatives effectively requires two key ingredients.
First, the creative needs to be tagged accurately so you know what it represents. This might be what specific item of clothing a person in the creative is wearing and what activity they’re doing. Gen AI has “a lot of potential” to help in this regard, Jacob said.
Second, the test itself needs to be designed well to avoid significance chasing and spurious correlations. “We can’t just test every idea and see what sticks,” Jacob said.
Don’t stifle the magic: why creative risk is still essential
Aaron warned against having a one-size-fits-all approach to measurement that can lead to a check box culture.
“I worry that creativity is at risk because we’re afraid to put things out in the world because we don’t know how the world’s going to react. But that is what creativity is. It’s innovation, it’s vulnerability, it’s honesty. Brilliant creative is a perspective on the world that is untested, and it has to remain that way.”
That was the closest we got to a disagreement!
Jacob rightly pointed out that marketing measurement can serve as a strong foundation on which creatives can do their best work. “It does a really good job of illuminating what happened, why it happened, and why people responded,” he said.
When a creative person takes this knowledge on board, they can then go outside of the bounds of what the analytics says would work with more confidence and intentionality, he added.
“As much as I think the creative side of advertising sometimes poo-poos all of the [analytical] rigor that you put the work through, it does, to your point, gives us a foundation,” Aaron responded.
Bridging the gap between creative and analytics
Looking forward, Aaron said he hoped to see models that “show the emotional impact that the creative has on audiences”, while Jacob said he wanted to get to a place where he could accurately measure the net present value of creative.
This sums up well the two different tribes of creative and analytics. What is clear to me is that more conversations like this need to happen in marketing organizations to help us answer our original question: How effective is our creative?
Both tribes will need to lean in, understand each other better, and probably make some compromises.
We’re only at the start of a journey to measure creative more accurately. But getting it right will benefit both tribes – an advertiser that can demonstrate that creative contributes to long-term, sustainable growth will be in a strong position in its market.
Contact Shawn to discuss more about how to unlock creative effectiveness.