Marketers Waste Millions During the Holiday Season - But Efficiency isn’t Out of Reach
The last quarter of the year is the most crucial time of year for marketers. It accounts for more than 50% of brands’ annual revenue and makes up the highest proportion of media budget allocation, at around 30% of total annual ad spend. So many holidays falling in quick succession means buyer intent is at an all-year high, giving marketers a golden opportunity for brands to attract customers - it’s so important that they get their advertising right.
A golden opportunity… that marketers are squandering
Our research found that in the United States, brands wasted over $288 million on digitally unsuitable ads during Q4 of 2021 and 2022 - a staggering 65% of their total media spend, which is higher than the global average.
The majority of wasted spend is a result of ads which do not meet platform creative best practices - they are unbranded, sized incorrectly, too long or too short for the platform they are set to appear on, or lack appropriate subtitles.
For example, YouTube has its ABCDs (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction): creative essentials for ads to cut through the noise and reach people in the shopping mindset. A study by Kantar showed that YouTube ads which follow their ABCDs as a guide yielded 30% lift in short-term sales likelihood and 17% lift in long-term brand contribution.
Effective ads can relieve the pressure of crunch season
The holiday season puts added pressure on marketing teams to effectively deliver the hard-working campaigns they’ve been planning all year to capitalise on consumer spending. New digital channels and formats, each with different creative best practices, make the last mile of the creative process, the execution, much more challenging. Despite excellent creative ideas, the ads brands distribute on digital channels are not fit for purpose, and only waste the spend put behind them.
Marketers face this problem year-round, but the significantly higher volume of content during high pressure seasons, like the holidays, exacerbates the problem. Brands need the right measurement tools to optimise their creative ideas for the platforms on which they’re set to appear, which can support them not only during crunch-time, but year-round.
The Creative Quality Score (CQS), an industry metric which represents an ad’s digital suitability and checks for adoption of these fit-for-platform creative criteria, gives marketers the ability to run their content to make sure it is in line with digital suitability standards.
The CQS can help marketers to make their content production more efficient on a global scale, tracking thousands of ads across multiple markets and platforms as it passes through the hands of hundreds of people inside the brand. Only then can marketers rest assured they have an objective metric to set their ads up for success.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.
Mark Piesanen
Mark has been the Chief Revenue Officer at CreativeX, since July 2023 the category defining leader in Creative Data. Previously he was Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Productiv, an Enterprise SaaS management platform; Chief Commercial Officer @ Huds…
