As part of developing a successful campaign, there some key drivers at the outset which can help to influence effectiveness, from the quality of the creative and understanding what works to targeting the right audience in the right channel. This section will explore the importance of creative effectiveness and the role that it plays in the success of a campaign as well as targeting approaches.
Using creativity to drive effectiveness
It is widely recognised that creativity places a key role in driving the effectiveness of a campaign, with claims that good creative content can enhance conversion rates by up to 50% and profitability by as much as four times.[1]
The power of creativity was supported in the findings from Marketing Week’s Language of Effectiveness survey with Kantar.[2] The research highlighted how marketers are putting more focus on the quality of their creative in a tough economic environment, where standing out has never been more important. According to the survey, 80% of brand-side marketers believe that creative effectiveness is one of the most influential factors in the overall success of a campaign. The importance marketers put on the quality of creative is also rising. Nearly two-thirds (61%) of respondents claim they have increased their focus on creative in the past year, with close to a quarter saying it has increased substantially.
Advances in technology are opening up a number of opportunities and enabling brands to ensure at the outset that they are optimising their creative to deliver more effective campaigns. As Marina Peluffo, Head of Business Intelligence at Prima, observes: “I see a rising trend which is around creatives and advancing the idea of creative data. Brands are well-familiarised in how data can help to better target their audiences at the placement level, but that same practice is coming to the creative process in terms of striking the right balance between the level of personalisation, performance optimisation and maximising ROI.”
Used effectively, good creative can also help shorten the customer journey towards driving conversions. A good example of this is from Hyundai Motor UK.
Hyundai Motor UK wanted to increase test drive bookings in order to meet the growing consumer demand for electric vehicles. Their strategy was to drive conversions at the moment of consumer awareness and intent, in a contextually relevant environment. The aim was to make the user journey more seamless to encourage test drive bookings while users were at the top of the funnel.
Hyundai Motor UK worked with an operating system that enabled in-advert transactions with no redirects. Lead validation software was integrated, to capture first-party data in real-time, which enabled Hyundai to carry out live customer, performance and behavioural data analysis and campaign optimisation.
Data was then used for follow-up confirmation emails and retargeting. Consumers were targeted with ads placed in relevant news, lifestyle and automotive content in national media channels. Each ad took the reader through five booking steps. Tracking was added to each stage, to monitor awareness and engagement at each stage.
The impact of the approach was an 18% increase in conversion rate, which was nine times higher than that achieved via their website.
Econsultancy | Case Study Library
Creativity plays a powerful role in driving effectiveness and it is important for marketers to understand how it can be incorporated into their strategy and the way they work to deliver campaigns.
The creative effectiveness ladder
The importance of creative effectiveness has been studied by James Hurman, Founder of Previously Unavailable, and fellow effectiveness expert Peter Field. Together they developed ‘The Effectiveness Code’ by analysing 4,863 effectiveness award entrants and winners submitted between 2011 and 2019 (from the IPA Databank, the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions database and WARC) to try and understand the underlying markers of effectiveness. A key output from this analysis was ‘the creative effectiveness ladder’.
The ladder identifies the six main types of effects that creative marketing produces, from least to most commercially impactful. The ladder begins with the ‘influential idea’, which leads to ‘behaviour breakthrough’, ‘sales spike’, ‘brand builder’, ‘commercial triumph’ and finally the ‘enduring icon’.
Figure 15: The creative effectiveness ladder lays out six stages of brand impact
Source: WARC
While analysing the case studies, the authors found the campaigns that were the most effective had some common features. Field and Hurman called these features ‘Creative Commitment’.
Creative Commitment is a composite measure of three specific campaign elements: media spend, campaign duration and breadth of channels used. The analysis revealed that high Creative Commitment scores correlated very tightly with effectiveness – i.e. as Creative Commitment increases, so does effectiveness.
The analysis of the effectiveness case studies strongly indicated that campaigns which were most effective shared these characteristics: high levels of spend; a long period of campaign duration and a wider breadth of media channels utilised within the campaign.
WARC[3]
Discussing the research, Hurman said: “The message here is not that creative-award-worthy work is automatically effective. Rather that, if we have a well-planned and insightful strategy, we can magnify and supercharge the effectiveness of that strategic thinking with work that has creative-award-winning qualities.”[4]
By assessing which level of the creative effectiveness ladder a company’s work has reached, marketers can then see which further rungs on the ladder need be achieved in order to eventually reach the goal of ‘enduring icon’. This approach creates a useful framework to help agencies and advertisers improve creative effectiveness and optimise campaign levers around media spend, duration and breadth of channels used.
Testing and optimising creative
The importance of adopting a test and learn approach was explored in the chapter on Driving Digital Marketing Effectiveness. The value of testing is also key to optimising a brand’s creative and a number of options exist to support companies with this.
“We can run a preflight brand study with the likes of Meta, where you run about a million impressions in a week and the ad is served to real consumers. This enables you to test your ads, creatives and get a quick turnaround. Results can be seen in three to seven days, enabling us to make some changes to creative or claims ahead of our actual campaign.”
James Sharman, Northern Europe Digital Acceleration Lead, Haleon
The importance of understanding the value that creative plays in driving effectiveness and incorporating this into measurement and testing solutions was raised by Steven Silvers, EVP of Global Creative and Media Solutions at Kantar. He described how he sees a lot of opportunities around creative testing and that this is an underdeveloped portion of media effectiveness.
“If you look at studies that have been done, anywhere between 40 and 60% of the effectiveness of a campaign is dictated by the creative, but most measurement solutions don’t consider it. What we’re starting to do is think of the quality of the creative as not just a measure of how good your creative is, but as a prediction of how the media will perform. If we’re doing a test of your ad and how it looks on, say, TikTok, and we’re getting consumers to tell you whether or not it worked, that’s a good prediction of how that ad will work when it runs on TikTok.
“We have built predictive machine learning models to help brands make decisions, such as our creative testing product called Link AI, which can in 15 minutes take a video and predict what a panel of people would say about it. It is built on the Link database, from over 250,000 tests, more than 10 years of data, and over 35 million human interactions. Scores in Link AI predictions include Short Term Sales Likelihood and Power (long-term equity), as well as diagnostic metrics such as Impact, Branding and Enjoyment, as shown below. For digital ads, we can also predict brand lift on awareness, consideration and purchase intent.
Major global advertisers, agencies and publishers such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, Whirlpool and Google use Link AI in a variety of ways to dramatically extend their creative effectiveness testing beyond survey research. For instance, they use it to extend their testing programmes to cover multiple digital ads and smaller campaigns, to unearth and validate creative best practice, to test competitor ads, and to iteratively test and optimise ads throughout the creative development process.”
Figure 15: Link AI’s behavioural KPI scores for a video ad
Source: Kantar[5]
Steven Silvers, EVP, Global Creative and Media Solutions, Kantar
With developments in technology, and particularly AI tools, brands can now get a better understanding of what has worked well in previous campaigns and apply a creative quality metric to future campaigns to ensure they are optimising as best they can. Tools such as Kantar’s Link AI product, as well as other solutions such as CreativeX, are helping companies to do this.
Nestlé used CreativeX, a company that builds data platforms for brands, to analyse thousands of historic campaigns using AI to define the ‘rules’ for effective creative assets. The analysis identified nine ‘creative hygiene’ best practices based on commonalities among the top performing ads. A new metric called a ‘creative quality score’ was assigned to each ad based on how well it complied with the hygiene factors. Nestlé ads with a higher creative quality score achieved 66% higher return on ad spend.[6]
In a video interview for CreativeX, a spokesperson for pharmaceuticals company Bayer, talked about how the multinational focuses on communicating what its brands can do to improve people’s lives.[7] However, they highlighted what the company missed in the past is how it should measure creative excellence, not just optimisation or ROI alone.
Bayer, working with CreativeX, developed a creative quality score, which provides one consistent conversation and better use of their investments. For Bayer, having a creative quality score gives the company speed and scale, and they have it implemented across 40 countries and 50 brands.
At a result of using the score, with Google they saw an uplift of triple digital +107% improvement in brand lift in YouTube ad recall and awareness, as well as better usage of media funds.
CreativeX | Case Studies[8]
Testing can be carried out at scale using AI tools, and Generative AI is opening up even more possibilities for marketers.
“A company might be trying to make a prediction of what the attention is going to be for an ad, or the memorability, and understand how the different elements are being weighted from a viewer’s point of view. This is a very interesting trend, because then a company can tie it in with the generative AI solutions that are out there, and they can start to test how creative links to different emotions and a brand’s identity.
“Rather than having a focus on the best placement of the creative, a company could explore what would they change in an ad if they want to improve a brand metric such as awareness. The tool can them provide options which can be A/B tested based on that.
“Right now there are all these generic algorithms that will predict memorability or attention, but I am seeing a layer of customisation by the brands, where you can say, ‘If I’m going to target this type of audience, what kind of branding should I consider and what kind of creative elements should be present?’”
Marina Peluffo, Head of Business Intelligence, Prima
Amazon has already seen the potential in offering GenAI capability to support marketers in this area. Through Amazon Ads, it is offering marketers a first look at its new GenAI capability, designed to help spruce up dull ads. Amazon’s survey results found that nearly 75% of advertisers who were unable to build successful campaigns cited choosing a creative format and building ad creatives as their biggest challenges.[9]
- Creativity is playing an increasingly important role in driving effectiveness, credited with boosting key performance indicators such as conversion rates and profitability.
- To maximise the potential of creativity, leverage creative data to strike the right balance between personalisation, performance optimisation and maximising ROI.
- Use the creative effectiveness ladder to gain a deeper understanding of the six stages of brand impact and how they work to achieve commercial impact.
- Consider the growing role generative AI has to play in optimising creative and explore how it can enhance specific brand metrics.
- Taking a test-and-learn approach is essential and can help marketers to predict the effectiveness of a campaign’s creative, enabling creative to be tweaked in real-time.
This guide is based on primary research which involved exploring findings from two reports:
- Econsultancy’s 2023 Future of Marketing report, which was based on a survey of 835 client, vendor and agency-side marketers. The survey was fielded to Econsultancy and Marketing Week’s audiences between 9 June and 3 July 2023.
- The Language of Effectiveness 2023 report has been produced using responses to an online survey of 1,369 qualifying marketers conducted by Econsultancy’s sister brand Marketing Week between 27 March and 28 April 2023.
In-depth interviews were carried out with industry experts. Econsultancy would like to thank the following interviewees for their invaluable contribution of time and expertise to this guide:
- Kumar Amrendra, Head of Digital Marketing, Sky UK Ltd
- Amy Blasco, Partner, Enterprise Data, Experience and Marketing Lead, IBM
- Laura Chaibi, Director, International Ad Marketing and Insights, Roku Inc
- Sebastian Cruz, Regional Digital Marketing and Media Director, Shiseido, Asia Pacific
- Gary Danks, General Manager, AIM, Kochava
- Mauricio Ferreira, Marketing Effectiveness Lead, Confused.com
- James Hurman, Founding Partner, Previously Unavailable
- Gabriel Hughes, CEO and Founder, Metageni
- Dr Grace Kite, Economist and Founder, Magic Numbers
- Chloe Nicholls, Head of Ad Tech, IAB UK
- Roxane Panopoulos, Group Manager, Regional Measurement & Insights – Netherlands and Nordics, Snap Inc
- Marina Peluffo, Head of Business Intelligence, Prima (speaking as industry expert)
- James Sharman, Northern Europe Digital Acceleration Lead, Haleon
- Steven Silvers, EVP, Global Creative and Media Solutions, Kantar
Lynette Saunders is a Senior Analyst at Econsultancy, where
she works on delivering industry-leading research, briefings and
reports for the digital marketing industry and speaks at a number
of external conferences.
Lynette’s previous experience includes delivering web analytics, measurements and insights, as well as leading usability and
customer experience programmes focusing on improving the
overall online customer experience for Cancer Research UK
and the Royal Mail Group.
