It may seem self-evident to those in the creative department, but too often people neglect the importance of their message and their creative, writes Daniel Wilkinson
Over the preceding sixty years or so, a myriad tools and methods have been created to assess advertising concepts and ascertain their likely impact. Many agencies and brands have even formed a standard way of measuring potential ad performance before producing or displaying them. Why?
In his book, The Case for Creativity: Three Decades Evidence of the Link Between Imaginative Marketing and Commercial Success, James Hurman explains that creatively-awarded campaigns deliver 11 times the return on investment of non-creatively awarded campaigns.
Advertisers do need to make sure they’re not pursuing creativity for awards or at the expense of effectiveness, but there is clear evidence that seeking novel ideas that capture an audience’s imagination deliver better results.
One significant hurdle, however, is that effectiveness is a function of both the creative and the digital channel working together to reach a potential customer. Too often the measurement of creative happens in a “lab” and not in the “wild” of the digital ecosystem.
If pre-testing implies a promotional campaign or ad should be impactful, but it doesn’t produce the anticipated outcomes we almost always blame the ads. It is like when one goes fishing. We know the fish are there but when they fail to bite we blame the bait (or, from time-to-time, the fish).
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But, the fact is that an effective campaign hinges on our ability to get the right ad into the right channel at the right time. The fish may not be hungry right now, or they may be looking for something different in this part of the lake. The bait may work great at a different place or time.
Even more important, a deeper understanding of how messages interact across digital marketing channels can create a more accurate roadmap to help you guide potential customers to your client’s front door. For example, a customer may watch a YouTube video on their smart TV, search on their tablet, read another user’s review online, and finally, get directions to a store on their mobile phone.
Agencies who can create this unified picture for their clients can optimise a customer’s journey to deliver the best creative message in the best channel at the best time for every customer’s path to buy, prompting exponential performance over what would be possible in a single channel.
To efficiently develop high-performing creative and drive higher performance agencies should work with clients to develop and run various messages in multiple channels at the earliest parts of a campaign.
By mapping the impact of each, separately and in combination, and optimising across channels while the campaign is live, lower performers are eliminated and focus shifts to unlocking the full potential of combinations that drive higher potential response.
This approach gives agencies and their clients the mutual benefit of strategic insight and tactical decision-making: it can help guide advertising investments in different digital channels and better match creative, copy, and messaging across every channel.
Agencies who adopt this approach can quickly realise a competitive advantage for their clients in an ever increasingly complex marketplace. And happy clients are better than awards any day of the week.
Daniel Wilkinson is global head of paid media, Jellyfish
