Get off the hamster wheel and build a system of effectiveness

Opinion

Signals promising to optimise creative are mostly noise, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil. You’re being pitched a flywheel, but you’re being sold a hamster wheel, says CreativeX’s Paul Brown.

It’s both an exciting and terrifying time to be a marketer.

We’ve never had this many channels to reach consumers, and this many tools to tell us how to do it.

This is a double-edged sword for marketers under increasing pressure to justify their roles in a shrinking market and to show how they are using ‘the latest shiny thing’ in their businesses.

I’m here to tell you that my part of the industry – creative insights and analytics – is part of the problem.

We’ve sold an idea that there is a wealth of insight to unlock from the “black box” of creativity. A deep, unending pool of signals that, if you just had our tools, could help you optimise every single creative down to the message, casting, and even colour palette. We promise to deliver thousands of signals at a speed and scale that are completely game-changing.

In reality, most of these signals are noise, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil. You’re being pitched a flywheel, but you’re being sold a hamster wheel.

Tweak here. Tweak there. Change this. Optimise that. Incremental gains validated by vanity metrics. We are told there’s a new way to create content and reach customers, that the rules no longer apply, and that we must start from scratch because more “insights” are needed.

Now, agencies are getting in on the action. I recently watched a case study video about an agency using a tool to extract creative insights for a soft drinks brand. The snazzy video, complete with fast cuts, nice-looking charts, and zoom-ins of creative attributes surfacing in a slick UI, boasted the groundbreaking discovery that messaging about barbecue resonated well with audiences in a South American market.

I may be wrong, but telling a maker of fizzy drinks that associating themselves with barbecue in the home of carne asada will make people pay attention is about as insightful as telling a maker of life jackets that drowning sailors really value their product. It’s not an insight; it’s common sense masquerading as one. 

In another example, a marketer received a series of insights on how to optimise their creative strategy, which would have been supported by thousands of dollars in spend. This marketer had the sense to ask how many ads the finding was based on. The response? Around 25 ads for an advertiser that launches 10,000 ads a month, supported by $10M in digital media. This is beyond insignificant.

I call these “hamster wheel Insights”. The marketer looks and feels busy, but they aren’t going anywhere.

Telltale signs you’re in the hamster wheel

You’re drowning in insights that seem to keep changing. Hamsterwheel insights are high-volume, noisy, and perishable. Audience reach, buying strategy, objective set — hell, even a change in the weather can make a hamster wheel insight irrelevant tomorrow. 

You’re “fixing in the mix.” Up-front thinking has been replaced by “in-flight optimisation”, wasting media dollars on discovering what should have been figured out in planning. This is part of what Mark Ritson calls “The Tactification of Marketing”.

You’re over-reliant on short-term metrics. CTR, VTR, and CPM are useful early indicators, but over-valuing these metrics can damage long-term growth (see the Creative Effectiveness Ladder from WARC for more on this).

And, you’re encoding your own biases, which means we’re often trying to use data to confirm what we already think. A classic claim is that early branding harms engagement, yet every study with reliable methodology shows this simply isn’t the case.

A “Systems-thinking approach” forces the marketer to consider how they can systemise the learnings they already have.

Too often, a presentation is delivered by the insights team, everyone nods along, and it’s forgotten two weeks later. Nothing changes; the opportunity is missed. 

To actually move the business, you need to systemise

Flawless execution: Designing creative specifically for the consumption point of the consumer—not once, not by accident, but consistently and with intention.

Unified measurement: Aligning all measurements across creative, media, and sales so that systems are actually coordinated.

Distinctiveness: Ensuring that every time you pay for someone to see your content, they notice and remember who paid for it. When they reach a buying moment (like buying soft drinks for a barbecue), yours is the product they remember.

Building platforms: Not trend-chasing, but building enduring creative platforms that are coherently executed over a long period. As Tom Roach and Grace Kite call it, “building bigs from lots of littles.”

In a world where you have less direct control over content production and distribution, with machines, agencies, and independent creators all producing and sharing content, systems will become increasingly important.

So don’t get stuck in the hamster wheel. Start building a system of effectiveness.

Paul Brown is the global client partner at CreativeX