Advertisers’ lack of visibility into their creative production lifecycle sets the industry as much as waste billions in 2024 on content that never gets used.
This is in response to a study by creative agency CreativeX, which estimated that the common F500 company might be wasting a minimum of $25 million a 12 months on unused creative assets. Across the complete industry, that translates to $100 billion on assets which might be never activated.
Advertisers wish to genAI to create more content, more quickly, but more content doesn’t necessarily mean greater impact. The lack of concrete data across the content lifecycle, from creation to activation, means marketers have limited visibility into whether and the way their core assets are localised, versioned, and repurposed across markets, brands, channels, and agencies.
Without visibility into content production, brands miss out on potential efficiencies
In the present marketing landscape, brands are under increasing pressure to drive marketing efficiencies. But they’re investing in content production without visibility as to the way it’s used, by who, and where.
This results in inefficiencies within the content production lifecycle, costing brands thousands and thousands annually. CreativeX’s evaluation demonstrated that 52% of core assets created by brands were never activated across their markets. This means paid-for creative work was never given a chance to drive business value or exposed to the patron.
As marketing budgets proceed to come back under strain, advertisers shouldn’t just look to chop costs but examine where there are opportunities to make efficiency gains of their creative lifecycle. Reallocating budget towards activities that may drive further value might mean more investment in content that is activated, or upping investment into research or media.
GenAI is set to make the content production challenge harder
While generative AI might cut production costs and time, this investment is wasted if the content is never deployed in any respect. Without the visibility to trace content from creation to activation, and guardrails in place to make sure creative quality, marketers is not going to reap the complete advantages of AI.
AI can assist provide this visibility. CreativeX’s Creative Lifecycle application is powered by AI/ML-driven asset-matching technology that unlocks a view of where and the way core assets are localised, and activated, and the extent to which they’re reused.
The application was developed in collaboration with The Brandtech Group, OLIVER and advertisers leading the way in which in digital transformation including Bayer. For Bayer’s marketing team, Creative Lifecycle has enabled unprecedented visibility into their content production process.
David Jones, founder and CEO of The Brandtech Group, which partnered with CreativeX on testing and developing the brand new technology, said: “When I hear all of the discuss artificial intelligence and the way it’s going to revolutionise marketing, my response is that it’s already here. It’s already happening, and has been for some years, not only since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene.
“It is disrupting all points of marketing. Creative Lifecycle is a implausible example of an application of AI that pushes way beyond content production, which many brands are actually doing. It gives global brands access to information they’ve never had before and our teams are ready to drive a step-change in efficiency, to really elevate the use of our clients’ best marketing assets, at scale.”
Gaining visibility into an asset’s creative lifecycle allows brands to reply other pressing questions, specifically how content is getting used and repurposed, which in turn facilitates an information-driven conversation between global and native teams.
Anastasia Leng, CEO and founder of CreativeX, said: “CreativeX has been using technology to measure inefficiencies in our content production cycle for years now, but this is probably one of probably the most wasteful patterns we’ve uncovered to-date.
“The industry dedicates much air-time to the notion that content is wearing out, but the info shows that more than 50% of ads we create never reach the patron, let alone get a probability to wear in. Our newest creative data application, fittingly named Creative Lifecycle, allows brands to trace how their content is used end-to-end, providing some much-needed transparency on our creative assets’ activation and re-usage rates.”
In the study, CreativeX’s application was used to analyse 1,284 core assets related to 422,272 posts across 50+ markets in 2023. Assuming that the working-to-non-working media spend ratio is 70:30 for the common F500 company, and using Dentsu’s predicted media spend figures for 2024.
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