When measuring the impact of creatives, marketers typically depend on circumstantial evidence. Brand awareness and sales trends are vital and supply useful KPI numbers, but they reflect your complete campaign.
They don’t let you know what a part of the creative is connecting with people. Is it the copy, the pictures, the audio? And while A/B testing can shed some light, it doesn’t get to a granular level. It doesn’t let you know if some parts are more practical than others.
This explains why only 36% of marketers in a recent survey said they’re ‘very confident’ of their ability to trace creative performance effectively. The survey, from Plus Company, gathered information from 350 senior marketing professionals at B2B and B2C organizations within the U.S., U.K., Canada and Germany with greater than 1,500 employees.
Sixty-eight percent said difficulties in assessing creatives result in inefficient resource allocation, and 44% said they missed opportunities for growth due to it.
Fortunately, there’s now a tool that’s seemingly designed for measuring creative impact: artificial intelligence.
“AI is sweet 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 all the way down to give you the option to reply the query.”
Multiple data sources
The ability to try this makes it possible to tag facets of the creatives. The AI can then find the common elements within the highest-performing campaigns. That information can be utilized in campaign iterations.
The data can be enriched with details about individual reactions to the creative that result in successful interactions.
“You have the knowledge about who’s seeing a selected creative in a selected configuration and who is just not,” said Cohen. “So you find out how effective that creative was in a selected communication moment for a selected individual.”
Dig deeper: How AI and ML bridge the attribution disconnect across marketing channels
This could be an enormous step up from how marketers are currently gathering information to enhance their campaigns. Three-quarters of those within the Plus Company survey say that also depend 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 remain relevant. Something marketers are keenly aware of:
58% of those surveyed cited an absence of real-time data and insights as hindering their ability to adapt creative strategies on the fly.
A brand new power of connection
“It comes all the way down to AI unlocking this recent power of connection that has been a extremely broken a part of our category for a reasonably very long time,” said Crystalyn Stuart-Loayza, the study’s other co-author and chief digital officer for 2 of Plus Company’s agencies. “Historically, experiments have been done in silos as opposed to essentially integrated, fulsome motions that allow us test and experiment with all facets of a program and have real-time learnings.”
Marketers in search of to make use of AI to measure creative impact are going to face non-technological hurdles. Even though 88% of marketers say AI is invaluable for generating responsive content, only 52% have fully integrated it into workflows.
A standard barrier? Resistance to alter, 45% of marketers say is a major problem, a figure that rises to 71% in smaller corporations. This reluctance to adopt recent technologies combines with less interest in AI at higher levels of organizations. Mid-level marketing professionals are essentially the most smitten by AI, with 57% calling it“very helpful.” However, on the VP level, that enthusiasm drops to 49%, largely resulting from very reasonable concerns about costs.
The full survey can be found here (no registration required).
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