When measuring the impact of creatives, marketers typically rely on circumstantial evidence. Brand awareness and sales trends are important and provide useful KPI numbers, but they reflect the entire campaign.
They don’t tell you what part of the creative is connecting with people. Is it the copy, the images, the audio? And while A/B testing can shed some light, it doesn’t get to a granular level. It doesn’t tell you if some parts are more effective than others.
This explains why only 36% of marketers in a recent survey said they are ‘very confident’ in their ability to track creative performance effectively. The survey, from Plus Company, gathered information from 350 senior marketing professionals at B2B and B2C organizations in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Germany with more than 1,500 employees.
Sixty-eight percent said difficulties in assessing creatives lead to inefficient resource allocation, and 44% said they missed opportunities for growth because of it.
Fortunately, there is now a tool that is seemingly designed for measuring creative impact: artificial intelligence.
“AI is good at breaking something into its component parts,” said Michael Cohen, chief data & analytics officer for Plus Company and the study’s co-author. “In the classic image recognition problem, it’s fundamentally breaking it down to be able to answer the question.”
Multiple data sources
The ability to do that makes it possible to tag aspects of the creatives. The AI can then find the common elements in the highest-performing campaigns. That information can be used in campaign iterations.
The data can be enriched with information about individual reactions to the creative that lead to successful interactions.
“You have the knowledge about who is seeing a particular creative in a particular configuration and who is not,” said Cohen. “So you learn how effective that creative was in a particular communication moment for a particular individual.”
Dig deeper: How AI and ML bridge the attribution disconnect across marketing channels
This would be a huge step up from how marketers are currently gathering information to improve their campaigns. Three-quarters of those in the Plus Company survey say that still rely on methods like lift studies, media mix and attribution modeling, and incrementality testings.
These time and labor-intensive approaches mean missed opportunities and reduced competitiveness in an increasingly fast-paced market. This gap in real-time access can seriously impact a brand’s ability to stay relevant. Something marketers are keenly aware of:
58% of those surveyed cited a lack of real-time data and insights as hindering their ability to adapt creative strategies on the fly.
A new power of connection
“It comes down to AI unlocking this new power of connection that has been a really broken part of our category for a pretty long time,” said Crystalyn Stuart-Loayza, the study’s other co-author and chief digital officer for two of Plus Company’s agencies. “Historically, experiments have been done in silos as opposed to really integrated, fulsome motions that let us test and experiment with all facets of a program and have real-time learnings.”
Marketers seeking to use AI to measure creative impact are going to face non-technological hurdles. Even though 88% of marketers say AI is valuable for generating responsive content, only 52% have fully integrated it into workflows.
A common barrier? Resistance to change, 45% of marketers say is a significant problem, a figure that rises to 71% in smaller companies. This reluctance to adopt new technologies combines with less interest in AI at higher levels of organizations. Mid-level marketing professionals are the most enthusiastic about AI, with 57% calling it“very helpful.” However, at the VP level, that enthusiasm drops to 49%, largely due to very reasonable concerns about costs.
The full survey can be found here (no registration required).