Why CMOs must prioritise creative excellence

The impact of strong cre­atives is well doc­u­ment­ed; com­pa­nies that demon­strate high cre­ative per­for­mance in their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ben­e­fit from up to 46% more prof­itabil­i­ty, accord­ing to the IPA.

Each plat­form defines cre­ative qual­i­ty dif­fer­ent­ly: Google Ads, for exam­ple, uses its qual­i­ty score met­ric, while Face­book mea­sures con­tent against a rel­e­vance score.

“The rise of plat­forms like YouTube, Tik­Tok, Insta­gram and Pin­ter­est, cou­pled with an increase in dig­i­tal ban­ner ads, means brand com­mu­ni­ca­tions are more visu­al than ever,” explains Anas­ta­sia Leng, founder of Cre­ativeX.

She says in some cas­es the amount of cre­ative con­tent brands are putting out has “quadru­pled” year on year, lead­ing to issues around con­trol, trans­paren­cy and qual­i­ty.

Data from Cre­ativeX, which helps clients like Unilever and Heineken mea­sure and improve cre­ative effi­cien­cy, con­sis­ten­cy and effec­tive­ness glob­al­ly, recent­ly analysed more than half a mil­lion ads and found on aver­age just 20% of cre­ative assets meet a brand’s own min­i­mum stan­dards of qual­i­ty.

The rise of creative excellence teams

Brands are tack­ling these issues by ded­i­cat­ing teams to defin­ing guide­lines around cre­ative excel­lence with the likes of L’Oréal, 3M, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestlé, Dia­geo, J&J and Pep­si set­ting up inter­nal cre­ative excel­lence teams.

Lead­ing brands have gone fur­ther, employ­ing AI-dri­ven tech­nol­o­gy to help them auto­mate cre­ative qual­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy detec­tion. For exam­ple, Cre­ativeX allows brands to analyse the imagery and video used in their cam­paigns, offer­ing brands a ‘bird’s eye view’ of all cre­ative per­for­mance. This arms their teams and agen­cies with pre­ven­ta­tive tools that safe­guard off-brand con­tent from eat­ing up media bud­gets.

Nan­dus du Plessis, pre­vi­ous­ly head of con­tent excel­lence at AB InBev, used Cre­ativeX to analyse their glob­al cre­ative foot­print. He says: “In the past, our brand man­agers judged con­tent based on emo­tion and opin­ion. Now we have the data to show what’s work­ing. When you have data and opin­ion, then you can cre­ate great work.”

So, what tools do CMOs need to unlock their creative potential?

Devel­op guide­lines for cre­ative excel­lence in addi­tion to your own brand guide­lines. This means imple­ment­ing a set of objec­tive rules against a bar of cre­ative excel­lence that all ads can be mea­sured against. Such KPIs could include chan­nel opti­mi­sa­tion or use of dis­tinc­tive brand assets.

Next, look to track which of your cre­atives are meet­ing these guide­lines to get a tru­ly glob­al pic­ture of cre­ative and media effi­cien­cy. This is where you can find action­able insights such as what share of mar­ket­ing spend has been spent on ‘excel­lent’ ads.

Looking to the future

Once brands can track cre­ative qual­i­ty and brand con­sis­ten­cy, they can inno­vate into oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties in the cre­ative excel­lence space.

Try incor­po­rat­ing com­pli­ance reg­u­la­tions with­in these guide­lines to help make sure ads are in line with the cat­e­go­ry reg­u­la­tions in each mar­ket. Automat­ing this through tech­nol­o­gy could dras­ti­cal­ly min­imise the risk of fines and bad pub­lic­i­ty while increas­ing the speed of cam­paigns to mar­ket espe­cial­ly in reg­u­lat­ed indus­tries like alco­hol, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, finan­cial ser­vices and gam­bling.

Exceed com­pa­ny pri­or­i­ties around diver­si­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives, such as Unilever’s ‘Unstereo­type’ ini­tia­tive or the new rep­re­sen­ta­tion frame­work from the World Fed­er­a­tion of Adver­tis­ers, through track­ing tal­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tion across cre­ative world­wide. For exam­ple, set a glob­al goal on what share of your con­tent will fea­ture pro­gres­sive por­tray­als of peo­ple by end of 2022.

Leng from Cre­ativeX says cre­atives need to be not only opti­mised for plat­form-spe­cif­ic con­sump­tion but also con­sis­tent with the brand, com­pli­ant with reg­u­la­tion, and rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a brand’s audi­ence.

“Cre­ative excel­lence is not a new con­cept. From the begin­ning of time, mar­keters have sought to make con­tent that res­onates and cuts through with their audi­ence,” Leng con­cludes. “But mea­sur­ing and improv­ing this on a glob­al scale? That is cre­ative excel­lence 2.0.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it creativex.com

Pro­mot­ed by Cre­ativeX