Creativity Adtech B2B Marketing

How artificial intelligence is helping to measure creative effectiveness in marketing

Meta

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Opinion article

June 1, 2022 | 8 min read

In marketing, 'creative impact' was once too subjective to measure. But with modern AI solutions, creative efforts can now be effectively analyzed. As part of The Drum's Creativity in Focus Deep Dive, Meta's Maria Pavlova (marketing science partner), Karen Chui (creative partner manager, EMEA) and Safia Dawood (marketing science partner) look at how AI tools can help marketing professionals develop more effective advertising strategies through creative effectiveness insights.

Multiple AI machines

Data-driven optimization is widely adopted in digital advertising. Today’s marketing professionals have perfected audience profiles and campaign logistics. Yet, the uncomfortable truth is that creative effectiveness is often overlooked despite being the most important campaign element. Creative quality accounts for 70% of an ad’s success, eclipsing procedural elements like flighting or platform choice.

Audiences want to be dazzled and amazed, so it’s important to offer them exciting content. Unfortunately, only 60% of advertisers measure creative effectiveness. Of those, the majority collect feedback using post-campaign focus groups or surveys, making the data somewhat unreliable.

At first glance, ‘creative effectiveness’ appears too subjective to measure. However, today’s AI (artificial intelligence) solutions can effectively analyze your creative impact and are becoming increasingly accessible to marketers.

Solutions from Meta are optimizing campaigns’ creative prowess and advancing AI-enabled creative workflows. Read on to learn how, and discover case studies on brands that gained sales using creative effectiveness insights.

Creative AI: Where art and (data) science meet

Cutting-edge marketers already use AI to maximize the potential within their advertising strategy. AI simplifies the creative process by helping to produce new creative assets and adjust existing ones at scale.

For example, automated software can translate content across languages, crop images to frame subjects better and generate image descriptions to make visual assets more accessible. As a result, marketing professionals are uncovering new artistic heights and reimagining how to convey messages across mediums.

However, AI is able to take an even larger role within the advertising life cycle and assist marketing teams in planning and optimizing content like never before.

AI tools can help marketing professionals develop more effective advertising strategies based on audience interaction data. This continuous approach to ad optimization is the future of marketing and will help brands lead with content that audiences love.

How can AI measure creative effectiveness? Performance prediction

Measuring creative effectiveness begins with Illumination, which provides initial insights and builds a model to predict future campaign performance. The results help uncover your next big campaign idea and guide your creative process in later stages.

Algorithms begin by analyzing anonymized and aggregated historical data on consumer behavior and identifying which creative elements are most common among your highest-performing ads.

The result is a framework that helps marketers compare different advertising approaches and discover the most effective one before the campaign begins. In turn, marketing professionals can generate new creative assets with more confidence and exceed audience expectations more effectively.

Continuous optimization

AI can also help steer the ongoing creative strategy once your campaign begins.

Changes within the digital ecosystem mean advertisers must adopt a new playbook. By leveraging continuous optimization through a test-and-learn process, marketers can focus on what audiences like rather than who they are, and avoid privacy concerns from targeted advertising.

Performance evaluation using machine learning can highlight the potential of each creative element within your existing assets. Automated testing solutions can also enable brands to experiment with dynamic business outcomes more efficiently. As a result, creative teams can devise more effective strategic approaches while campaigns are in flight.

Brand governance

Businesses with multiple locations often have to balance variations in brand guidelines to connect with local audiences effectively. Consistent color palettes and tones of voice help brands feel unified and cultivate a consistent public image.

Yet, these variations present a challenge to marketers as communication must be consistent over time.

Today’s AI tools measure how creative assets and copy fit within existing brand guidelines and identify areas for improvement. These insights help brands stay true to their guidelines, both between and within sub-brands, and ensure that public-facing communications are curated and consistent.

Which brands have benefited from Creative AI?

Heineken

As a leading beer brand, Heineken needed a way to assess its creative effectiveness across its 300+ sub-brands. By partnering with Meta and CreativeX, a creative analytics company, Heineken uncovered new insights into its creative effectiveness and strategic potential.

“[The] creative elements we measured are foundational to driving effectiveness in the Metaecosystem without restricting the creative process and flow,” says Sander Bosch, global CMI manager communication effectiveness at Heineken.

Domino’s

Domino’s Pizza is one of the world’s most recognized pizza brands, offering a seemingly infinite number of combinations of toppings and crust fillings.

Dominos wanted to improve their video creative using technology and AI and turned to Spirable’s creative intelligence suite. The two worked together to create three unique ad variants for a multi-cell split test on Facebook and Instagram across a four-week period.

Spirable determined that while motion was beneficial, moving the pizza out of the frame was not.

By utilizing these new insights in future ads, Dominoes increased return on ad spend by 20%, click-through rate by 6%, and reduced cost per result by 9%.

Lead with fresh content and gain new creative insights today

Have you considered how to measure your creative effectiveness?

Creative effectiveness is just the solution to help marketers measure campaign performance and brand recognition in the transition away from targeted online advertising. AI tools from Meta, CreativeX, Spirable, and others are available today and can elevate your creative effectiveness and remove the guesswork from future ad strategies.

By maximizing your creative effectiveness, you can mitigate signal loss and deliver high-impact content to followers at the same time. You can also establish creative best practices for future campaigns and curate your brand portfolio more effectively.

Moreover, automating routine creative tasks using AI allows you to focus on your campaign’s long-term health and ensure ad budgets go further.

Discover tools that can help your business improve creative effectiveness with key insights from Meta Foresights.

Creativity Adtech B2B Marketing

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