Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI have taken the advertising industry’s world by storm. Marketers worldwide are looking for ways to capitalise on it to enhance the way they work and to optimise campaign creative. However, as the world is focused on the opportunities inherent in AI and GenAI tools, we need to ask about the data that is being used to drive future outputs.
Content volumes in the digital sphere have exploded in recent years, both in format type and across platforms. This explosion has been further propelled by the recent rise of GenAI and its ability to deliver limitless creative variations at an incredibly fast pace, moving us towards content infinity. However, this isn’t necessarily good news for marketers, increasingly challenging their job of creating unique impactful content that stands out from the rush of generic assets and genuinely resonates with consumers. It also makes understanding data points and identifying what drives impact virtually impossible.
Creative, shown to be a key differentiator for brands, remains the greatest opportunity for marketers wanting to maximise their campaigns’ performance and set themselves apart from competitors. Yet, many media agencies are still overlooking creative analytics in their strategies, most likely because they lack the right technologies and AI to unlock creative insights. Moreover, creative is seen as a subjective field and impossible to point to impact; with hundreds of variables, creative itself can be just another data point. So how exactly are algorithms and computer power – inherently logical and lacking human nuance – meant to optimise the way we creatively communicate with consumers?
Harnessing Creative Data
The inevitable deprecation of Google’s third-party cookies has redirected brands’ focus to their first-party data, whether it be web analytics or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, to gather as much understanding of their audiences as possible ahead of a privacy-focused reality. However, creative data is a unique type of first-party data that can identify how consumers respond to brand messaging and be used to optimise campaign performance.
Creative data offers a competitive advantage to brands, by informing which creative decisions perform best in campaigns. For example, whether an ad features human talent or focuses on striking visuals, if a Call To Action (CTA) is introduced early or later on, if the product is showcased during a video, brightening the colour scheme, or taking a more low-budget approach all yield different results depending on the format and platform. Understanding how each decision influences performance enables marketers to make decisions that improve media, brand, and business outcomes.
In order to do that, the right technologies are needed to harness the potential of creative data, and AI advancements are meeting this challenge head-on, namely creative performance platforms.
The landscape of tools
As brands are creating more content than ever, exploring a wider range of creative styles and platforms, having access to tools that allow marketers to quickly, and easily, understand the performance of creative in campaigns is critical. Creative data from campaigns can be collected by AI tools and analysed by a creative performance platform to gather insights that inform production and turn post-campaign learnings into scorable brand best practices. Then, using these insights, new campaign creative can be developed and run through creative scoring to ensure every asset is meeting platform and brand best practices before their launch.
Once the creative performance is analysed, ad spending can be channelled to the highest quality creatives, which maximise ROI. Moreover, the platform makes the findings readily available across different departments and with all agencies, carrying value for every team and enabling them to work towards the same objectives. For agencies, enhancing their own ad tech stack to include some form of creative analysis into their capabilities, or partnering with ad tech vendors proficient in the field, will be a worthy investment given the impact creative execution has on consumers.
The Role of Human Reinforcement
The rise of AI, particularly generative AI, has sparked many debates around the replacement of human creatives by intelligent machines. However, generative AI’s limitations have been proven to often generate factually incorrect content that only humans can rectify.
The conversation should instead focus on how AI can support human teams. AI tools specifically developed for creative analysis can quickly analyse high volumes of creative data, extremely laborious and time-consuming for any smart person. Once this creative data is gathered, teams can perform creative analytics, interpreting the results and extracting actionable insights for brand and platform best practices, which can also inform future campaigns.
Turning creative data into analytics is a role for humans; focusing on the quality of creative assets rather than quantity allows brand teams to strategise and develop better brand messaging in campaigns, while AI tools take over the ‘bulk of the work’, performing deep analysis of large volumes of data.
Efficiency vs efficacy
Unfortunately, budget restrictions are, now more than ever, forcing brands and agencies to optimise media allocation and maximise ROI. However, prioritising short-term and cost-saving efficiencies over long-term efficacy can lead brands to lose touch with what content should be – unique and impactful. Sustainable strategies hold the most promise, especially for those gearing up for a ‘rainy day’. So how can agencies stretch ad budgets to their full potential?
Focusing on creative optimisation to drive campaign performance offers two timely benefits. Firstly, the creative performance platform can run in-flight analysis, a powerful strategy that enables continuous content optimisation based on proven insights. Secondly, creative analytics inform what content drives campaign performance. Running entire marketing portfolios through a creative performance platform offers scalable learnings from past campaigns that brands and agencies can apply to optimise future marketing endeavours.
The coming months are going to be critical for brands looking to make their mark in advertising to boost consumer engagement and create impactful, long-lasting connections with their audiences. In a world driven by content infinity, creative performance is critical to maximise ROI. Doing that requires focusing on the creative element of advertising, which demands the right tools and partnerships. In order to thrive in the future, agencies must start incorporating the right tools into their ad tech stacks, to enhance their capabilities and maximise both performance and ROI.
Robert Wollner, VP Agency Partnerships at VidMob