Measuring Creative Quality Will Grow Sales

The Long Decline of Creative Impact Makes Sense.

A quick look at the LUMAscape will give you a clear sense of where investment has gone over the past two decades. Hint, it's all media-side. Nearly all adtech investing over the past two decades has gone towards enhancing media-side capabilities. This has had two impacts. First, as targeting got more effective, creative quality became less important. Second, businesses focused on monetizing the audience data assets that they had invested heavily in building, thus further diminishing the mental and budgetary attention on creative. These factors and others reduced the focus on creative, damaging creative quality, which ultimately resulted in lower creative impact. Frankly, given this background, it's amazing that NCS still had creative's impact on sales measured at 47% in 2017.

But change is coming. Signal loss weakened the ability to rely solely on media-side effectiveness to make up for ineffective creative. As Meta is now fond of saying, "creative is the new targeting". And from both a capability and an investment perspective, AI is coming…

We Value What We Can Measure.

If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? If creative impacts sales but no one measures it, did it happen? In the post, Bill made this point:

"So, what is the fair answer to the question of creative percentage of sales? Soon, someone will answer that question by being the first MMM and/or singlesource to utilize both the usual plus the RMT factors. Or some other data representing the creative, or several sets. This method will then become the standard."

Vidmob is doing this today with a few of the world's largest marketers, helping them understand the impact of creative quality on sales by incorporating detailed creative quality scores into their MMM analysis in partnership with their preferred providers. In this context, creative quality scores represent interval-based creative data as measured by adherence to brand guidelines, platform and audience best practices, and compared with historical performance. The early results are encouraging, if not surprising. In one case, we saw that adhering to platform, brand and audience creative quality criteria led to a 25% lift in ROI and generated over $70 million in incremental sales. We're working on a public case study about this now.

For anyone who has ever seen a great Apple product launch ad and a basic cable ad, questioning whether creative quality matters is absurd. I am convinced that the industry will look back on this a few years from now and collectively shake its head in amazement that we ever thought MMM models could be accurate without taking creative quality into account.

We are seeing tremendous interest in this pairing of creative data with other measurement products, and I am confident that simply by shining an accurate light on the impact of creative quality on sales, this will be an important factor in reversing the trend. Additionally, creative quality scores can be used as an input into media decisioning algorithms (which are trained to favor high-quality creative), thus reducing media waste on ineffective creative, increasing brand impact, and improving the overall effectiveness of each campaign.

Creative Has To Be, well… Creative.

If we're being honest as an industry, we've let creative quality decline. Should we be all that surprised when we see that this decision has led to a negative result? As channels, formats and audiences fragmented over the past decade, it meant creating dramatically more content without a dramatically increased creative budget. The promise of DCO was that it could combine different pieces of a template in such a way that every customer would get highly personalized creative. But templates are templates and randomizing the pieces of a Mr. Potato Head doesn't scream creativity. Also, if it takes a million combinations to get the perfect one, how is your sales impact with the people who saw the other 999,999 on the way to training your campaign?

GenAI tools offer a path to a truly personalized future; on-brand and not constrained by the rigidity of templates. But again, we're not there yet and we must demand true creativity. If I live in Denver, and every ad I see these days has a product shot in the foreground with a mountainous scene in the background, don't be surprised if the impact of that creative is low. Don't call that AI personalization. And please don't think it's creative. As each brand builds up their own creative data asset, they will be able to truly personalize content based on precision data in ways that are far more interesting than today's templates.

Preparing for a World of Infinities.

With AI compute advancing 20-50x faster than Moore's Law, the future is coming at us faster than any of us can imagine. Soon (e.g., not in 5 years), every marketer on the planet will be able to make anything they want, close to instantly, and for very little cost. This means we will move from the world of content scarcity we have lived our entire lives in, to a world of content infinity. If this happened to just one marketer, it would be a competitive advantage. But if it happens for everyone at once (which is what will happen), then the rules of the game will simply be different. When everyone can create anything, being able to create is no longer valuable. Knowing what to create, with precision, will be where business advantage lives. This is creative data. It is the ability to decode every decision made in every piece of creative, compare it to every behavior that matters to your company, and learn what specific things drive results for your brand.

And this, again, is where Bill was right. By combining creative data with sales measurement frameworks, it enables the closing of the loop to use AI to learn how to make creative more effective -- customized by brand, audience, geography, etc. to improve business outcomes. When we enter the world of infinity, standing out will be hard. Brand will matter more than ever. And the folks who build the creative data asset necessary to know what to create will find great power through using creative as a larger driver of sales than ever before.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.