Brands are continually being handed ever-more powerful lenses to scrutinize campaign impact. But while advanced measurement tools provide sharper clarity around what happens to ads after delivery, most tend to assume that statistically speaking, creative input doesn’t matter.
So far, each innovation has offered a useful additional angle on performance, from marketing mix modeling to multi-touch attribution and attention-based analysis. However, dismissing campaign creative as largely irrelevant to modeling means these tools still aren’t tracking an essential factor: the creative context and elements that actually drive a consumer response.
If brands and agencies want to fully understand the science behind how ads perform, their measurement approaches must include this last, and often overlooked, frontier.
Modern measurement: what are today’s tools missing?
Although marketing mix modeling (MMM) has its roots in the 1960s, it remains highly relevant in today’s advertising landscape, especially in light of cookie deprecation. MMM offers a comprehensive overview of marketing effectiveness without relying on third-party cookies, making it a valuable tool for modern marketers.
Most models harness varied insights — including first-party data about past sales, audience cohorts and behavior, and market trends — to map the relationship between multiple variables and core focus areas, such as purchases, revenue, and acquisition costs, typically using regression analysis. This method delivers a broad, cookie-free picture of how external factors impact marketing performance, but insights generally only run channel deep, which is where multi-touch attribution (MTA) comes in.
MTA calculates how each touchpoint consumers encounter contributes to final conversions. By capturing and modeling data in almost real-time, these solutions enable fast ad spend optimization based on the touchpoints that have the greatest effect on desired outcomes. They rely heavily on cookies to collect data and often focus on views or clicks as indicators of engagement.
Then there are attention-based measurement methods. Frequently fuelled by live data capture techniques like eye tracking, these tools monitor the reactions of real audiences and evaluate how individuals view ads. Their main benefit is determining whether ads are viewable and hold active interest. Drawbacks center around the scalability of data gathering and analysis.
Collectively these approaches contribute to providing the fabled 360-degree view of ad impact. Yet they also share the same limited goal of connecting the dots from A to B, while treating all creative as essentially the same.
Defining the right creative destination
Since the main point of ads is driving results, establishing whether they do their job matters. However, it’s essential to remember that correlation doesn’t teach us much about causation.
Most industry players are familiar with the Nielsen Catalina Solutions statistic: creative drives almost half (47%) of sales lift. But despite recognizing that creative is crucial, few brands and agencies know how it influences consumer behavior, or what it is about point A that captivates audiences and takes them to point B.
This is the missing blank that creative data fills. Every time an individual engages with a piece of creative, their response speaks volumes about how they perceive the product and brand. When the right systems are in place to capture this data, it’s then possible to assess the details of each interaction; identifying which elements spark a reaction and help ads hit their mark. In short; first-party creative data is a critical component of figuring out why ads work.
For usage to grow, brands and agencies need a firm understanding of what creative data can do for them (and their campaigns), and how to use it.
1. Decoding the formula for effective ads
Having access to granular data about the effect of each creative element on performance means creative and brand teams can pinpoint how ads should be built to better resonate with specific target audiences. This can include refining elements large and small, from background imagery and talent-product interaction to ad length, logo placement and calls to action.
Additionally, insights can improve cross-functional collaboration using hard-fact data as a shared language. For example, with visibility into how creative propels performance media specialists can work with brand teams on media planning, developing buying strategies optimized for both who they want to target and the components of their message — thereby ensuring maximum impact and minimal wastage.
2. Ensuring a seamless brand and platform fit
At the brand governance level, monitoring the adherence of ads to key guidelines has always been a challenge, as has demonstrating the critical importance of this adherence. Technologies now exist that support easy integration of creative quality scoring with existing measurement models, including MMM. This allows for simultaneous evaluation of messaging against internal best practices and media platform specifications alongside performance analysis. As an added advantage, using these two assessment methods together also improves attribution accuracy. The ability to link positive outcomes with responses to great, on-brand creative eliminates the risk that those outcomes will be automatically — and mistakenly — attributed solely to effective media decisions.
3. Steering smarter content automation
The content universe was already expanding at pace before GenAI, housing an ever-more diverse array of formats and media outlets. Following the arrival of generative tools, scaled-up content production can now pump out a near-limitless flood of creative iterations. But while these advances bring valuable time saving, they’re also at risk of producing increasingly homogenous ads that fail to capture consumer attention or differentiate brands from competitors.
Creative data is set to play an important role in addressing this challenge. By leveraging refined insights about past interactions, brands and agency teams can issue precise data-led prompts that ensure creative variations are consistently personalized, distinctive, and engaging.
The last decade has seen nearly every marketer invest heavily in building first-party customer and audience data assets, which can be activated across their supply chain. Neglecting to use creative data would be a surprisingly illogical oversight in an industry that prides itself on continuous progress and insight-driven efficiency.
As awareness of creative data grows, there’s a stronger push to integrate this crucial piece into comprehensive measurement strategies. The next big opportunity lies in enriching data stores with first-party creative insights that delve deeper into the makeup of messages instead of just their recipients, so that ads retain their edge in the age of commoditized AI.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Collmer, Founder and CEO of Vidmob
Alex Collmer is the founder and CEO of VidMob, the leading Creative Data Company. Since founding the company in 2015, he has raised more than $200M and counts many of the world’s leading brands and agencies as clients. Alex also serves as a member of the Ad Council and the MMA’s Media & Data Board of Directors.
An engineer by training, Collmer’s career has always been at the intersection of technology, design, and consumer entertainment as those sectors have evolved. Prior to founding VidMob, he was the co-founder and CEO of Autumn Games, a premier publisher of video game franchises. Under his leadership, Autumn Games developed successful partnerships with such personalities as Jimmie Johnson, the 7-time NASCAR champion and companies like Def Jam, the leading urban culture brand, as well as the award-winning fighting game franchise, Skullgirls.
Collmer received a B.S. from Cornell University’s School of Engineering and was a certified E.I.T. in the field of structural engineering in the state of New York. Collmer has sat on the boards of several technology and media companies and has been a distinguished speaker at numerous universities including MIT and Cornell. In his spare time, he coaches his two sons in little league soccer and baseball.