How Danone optimizes creator-driven ads as investment surges

Ad revenue invested behind creator-generated content is predicted to top $180 billion this 12 months, up 20% for 2024, and will greater than double by 2030, per a WPP Media forecast. Yet despite the rapidly growing investment — increasingly driven by major CPG marketers — an enormous amount of creator ad spend might not be effective. About half (45%) of creator ad spend on Meta did not deliver brand impact resulting from missing logos or branding in the primary three seconds, and just 7% of creator content on TikTok is watched greater than 25% of the way in which through, per a report from CreativeX.

The discrepancy between high investment and low efficiency led CreativeX, the analytics platform that gives a “credit rating” for creative effectiveness, to launch a creator content benchmarking tool that permits marketers to check creator content against industry norms and branded content.

“Brands spend quite a lot of time perfecting the science of their very own branded promoting and desirous about what a few of the most effective practices and artistic elements that might be integrated into content to make it perform higher,” said Anastasia Leng, founder and CEO of CreativeX. “But all of the creator ads appear to be completely devoid of those self same best practices. The learnings they painfully uncovered during the last decade around what makes effective content just weren’t getting applied to creators.”

CreativeX’s latest tool enables advertisers to check creator content performance against industry benchmarks, see where media spend is delivering impact and where it’s being wasted, and gain insight into how creator content compares to their very own branded content. CPG giant Danone is an early adopter of the tool.

“Creators are assuming a more central role in how we create and deliver content at Danone,” said Christophe Mazel, global culture, PR and influence director at Danone, in emailed comments. “As our investment on this space scales, ensuring we have now the fitting solutions in place to maximise our brand impact becomes paramount.”

Breaking a false dichotomy

CreativeX’s development of the creator content benchmarking tool grew from its findings across the kind of ads it tracks and measures for major advertisers including Bayer, Mars, Heineken and Unilever. The company found that the prevailing wisdom amongst brands was that creator content mustn’t seem like an ad, even when it might eventually be boosted with paid media.

“The established order for a lot of stays the idea that ‘creators know best, we should always leave them to it.’ However, we’re moving toward a technique of co-creation between our brands and the creators, ensuring that brand guidelines and effectiveness principles are accurately reflected in the ultimate content,” said Mazel.

CreativeX got down to test whether creator ads which can be tailored to a selected platform perform in a different way than creator ads that are not. It analyzed best practices like audio and visual branding in the primary few seconds, adherence to platform “protected zones,” presence of a call to motion, video length and use of additional elements like sound and subtitles. CreativeX then looked to isolate those variables to find out how they affected performance in metrics like view-through and click-through rates. The findings were clear.

“There isn’t any justifiable reason why creator ads, once they change into a chunk of promoting, mustn’t play by the identical rules of the sport that traditional brands have established,” Leng said. “We need to interrupt this false dichotomy between authenticity and effectiveness and help people begin to take into consideration, how they will have the most effective of each worlds.”

Using CreativeX’s latest tool — which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning — is consistent with Danone’s other work with AI. The company uses the tech to shorten the creative development process and has a partnership with Microsoft to bring AI to its supply chain, Danone North America CMO Linda Bethea previously told Marketing Dive.