Bridging Gaps Between Big and Scaling Brands: How to Improve Media & Creative Effectiveness
Speaking to Big Black Door’s Gareth Turner, AC Founder Tom Ollerton reflected on how big brands can learn from scaling businesses and vice versa, in the context of improving media and creative effectiveness.
Through our research working with brands at both ends of the spectrum, we’ve looked at over 6 billion ad impressions and discovered that live creative optimisation can improve the effectiveness of media budgets by c. 17% on average. But, there are more changes and improvements that brands can learn from each other, based on our experience.
Teaching Small Brands “Big Brand” Secrets
When we work with large brands like Reckitt, we use our technology to gather insights on what their consumers actually act upon - as opposed to claimed behaviour from focus groups. When we talk about “putting the customer first” it feels like a hollow and obvious statement. Of course, brands need to think of the end consumer, but there are different ways to do this. And focus groups are not it - whereas in the case of AC technology, “big brands are employing us to give them data on what people actually do, not what they say,” says Tom.
Optimise your marketing budget by utilising testing and in-flight optimisation over expensive consumer panels. A good example of how optimising ads has given us invaluable research data is our work with Reckitt. We tested loads of visuals for ads about infant formula and discovered that the best performing ad when targeting mums… is to show dads! This led to a dramatic increase in performance and it’s safe to say it’s not the most obvious hypothesis a marketer can make in that space.
The second lesson linked to this is that brands should not follow the famous “best practice” because, ultimately, that just leads to everyone copying each other. As Tom puts it: “So, if all Infant formula brands are following best practice, aka copying what everyone else is doing, it would be to have a mother and a baby right? So if that’s in every ad and everyone's following best practice, and you've got a brand who then has a dad and a baby, well then there is cut through for that ad. What a small brand should be doing, is using their paid media budget to give them insights about what people really respond to, as opposed to what they say they're going to respond to.”
Big Brands Taking Lessons from Scaling Challengers
Is there anything in the automation and optimisation game that big brands can learn from challengers? In their conversation, Tom and Gareth turned to the example of our work with PensionBee and their agile, quick-to-implement approach to changes.
Using our approach to make an ad with live data and insights reduced the cost per acquisition of new customers for a pension by 20%. In their case, CMO Jasper Martens was able to sign off, deploy assets, and start learning from testing right away. With larger organisations, we have the hurdle of silos and difficult sign-offs.
One of the AC solutions is a platform that can give shared visibility of a single view to all relevant stakeholders. This includes the strategy, creative copy, generative AI, media performance, all in one place. For example, if we have three pieces in each market and we've got four platforms in many different languages, all with different outcomes, we can create all those assets in one place. Then all media trafficking information goes in there and it's all signed off and all completely visible. All of those ads arrive on different ad servers and go live and start pulling in data. So our solution is to bring everything into one place. Just as if you were a smaller organisation!
Read the whole conversation, including some top tips from Shiny New Object podcast guests over the past years, here.
Thinking live creative optimisation might be for you but don’t know where to start or don’t think you have the budget for a big investment? Watch our webinar to find out how to take the first steps, without breaking the bank.