It’s time to re-evaluate how we measure creative effectiveness

James Dodge

James Dodge

Senior Partner

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Demonstrating creative effectiveness isn’t easy. One of the biggest challenges facing marketers is that many of the solutions available to them don’t do an accurate job of measuring how advertising creative links to sales and media spend.

This is particularly problematic when creative is the biggest driver of sales, budgets remain under pressure, and marketers need to demonstrate to senior leadership that they are adding value to the business.

Fortunately, an advanced effectiveness approach can help by providing evidence about how creative positively impacts key business goals – notably sales growth.

But many marketers rely on approaches that do not do this. Take a moment and think about how you measure the effectiveness of your advertising creative. Are you a fan of pre-testing? Do you rely on gut instinct? Do you believe winning an award is the ultimate proof point? Or do you think optimising media is the best approach?

If your answer is yes to any of these, then it’s time to reevaluate how you’re measuring creative effectiveness.

Understanding the limitations of gut instinct, pre-testing and awards

In his 1963 book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy said: “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST.”

For as long as most marketers can remember, pre-testing has been the default way to test advertising creative. Gathering a closed group of consumers to undertake a survey, participate in a viewing panel, or agree to an eye-tracking test can be helpful in determining how well an ad scores for recall, brand recognition, emotional response, or overall likeability.

But most pre-testing does not provide an accurate prediction of how the ad will directly impact sales because it captures immediate consumer reaction, not in-market response – in other words, a sale.

Gut instinct is another approach that marketers have long relied on to make important decisions. While it certainly has its place, an overreliance on it can be counter productive.

Research published in the Journal of Marketing Behavior found that intuitive predictions – the term used to refer to gut instinct in research – made by a global sample of marketers were correct no more often than random chance.

When it comes to awards, a study by consultant Peter Field and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) found that creatively awarded campaigns are no more effective than non-awarded ones. In other words, there is no guarantee that winning an award for brilliant creativity equates to in-market sales.

Media is important, but we should broaden our horizons

Undeniably, media is a crucial part of the equation when it comes to measuring advertising effectiveness. Brilliant creative has limited value if you don’t invest in ensuring consumers see it in the right channels at the right time.

But let’s be honest, marketers have been guilty of using media as the main proxy for effective advertising when it is only part of the answer. This report from Nielsen suggests that creative is the biggest driver of sales, accounting for 47%, for example.

Despite this, media has been prioritised for two reasons: media budgets are bigger than creative budgets and it has been easier to measure and optimise media effectiveness using today’s approaches and tools, notably marketing mix modeling (MMM).

However, thanks to advances in AI and by applying the mathematical rigor already used to measure media effectiveness to the creative space, we can directly measure the impact of creative on sales. The key enabler is AI-generated data about creative assets.

Turning creative assets into data

I’m part of a team working on an approach that breaks down an individual creative asset into its constituent parts – features such as products, actors, and brand partners. This process creates data points that can be mapped against how effective the ad that these features appeared in were.

Analysis might reveal strategic insights, such as the incremental value of featuring celebrities versus influencers, or more tactical insights, such as the optimal length of time to show a particular product or brand logo.

When you apply this approach to all the creative assets ever created for a brand, you’re looking at a database with a substantial number of data points and actionable insights.

Imagine if you could take the least effective creatives in your current campaign and tweak the execution to make them 10% more effective, for example. That could generate significant incremental sales for comparatively little extra effort and investment.

When you integrate these creative insights with media insights about which channels the advertising should run in, when, and for how long, you can really improve effectiveness and accelerate growth.

This approach could also help to reduce wastage in the creative production process. More than half of new content produced annually by brands is never published, per a recent report from WARC. But if you know what works, you can cut down on producing what isn’t working.

Early results from this new approach are promising. We have found instances in which creative accounts for over 50% of an ad’s in-market performance, for example.

Data and creative can work together

In the meantime, I want to stress that the process of generating data-informed insights about how creative directly links to sales is designed to complement – not replace – creative ideation and development, pre-testing, intuition, awards, and media optimisation. But it could become the most effective approach, enabling marketers to go to market with high-performing creatives that drive business growth.

In many ways, a new data-informed approach to creative measurement gets to the heart of marketing’s age-old art versus science debate. I believe you need both to overcome the challenges involved in demonstrating creative effectiveness.

If you’re not doing so already, it’s time to re-evaluate how you’re measuring the effectiveness of your advertising creative.

Contact James to discuss more about this topic.

This article first appeared in Performance Marketing World.


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