Making the Most of Your Media: Optimising Creative & Finding Out Why Your Ads Work - A Guest Appearance on “That’s What I Call Marketing” Podcast
AC Founder Tom Ollerton was a guest on the “That’s What I Call Marketing” podcast, talking about the importance of live creative optimisation and the benefits businesses stand to gain from it. Here’s what we’ve learnt.
At Automated Creative, we use AI driven creative and social insight to optimise ad performance and to tell brands exactly why their ads work. In Q4 2023, we launched a white paper highlighting the benefits of live optimisation, as well as drawing marketers’ attention to how their strategy could be hurting if they don’t take this approach.
The end of a marketing year is charged with pressure - on budgets and on media spend. But our research showed that most marketers’ campaigns and strategies would have been set a long while back. What’s the reason that nearly a third of marketers don’t optimise their campaigns once they go live?
Apathy - the ease of continuing to do what’s always been done. However, AI and automation give us a new way of working that can drive massive improvements in value;
Tension between creative and media teams and their respective outputs - this comes down to how brands are not scoping their creative and media teams to be agile and to optimise in-flight. As a result, marketers don’t have the tools to conduct live optimisation, or the teams to do it with.
When it comes to how creative and media agencies’ roles can be optimised, a key challenge is information - it’s either lacking or not good enough. Our survey discovered that 71% of marketers consider the communication between creative and media agencies to be bad. Tom explained that there is often no proper feedback loop between the two: creative agencies deliver their work to media agencies. Then, these optimise the audience but fail to send meaningful data back to the brands to tell them why their ads are or are not working. Without a multi-directional exchange where creative work evolves throughout a campaign, while brands gather insights from their ads, marketers are left without the tools to make impactful decisions for their companies’ bottom line.
But lots of marketers may feel overwhelmed and like they’re being pulled in too many different directions, having to add yet another thing to monitor to their list. According to Tom, however, that’s not their job - a marketer’s job, ultimately, is to deliver as much value as possible from their media budget. So, if there was a way to gain 17% more value out of your budget, how could you pass on it?
Now, while marketers may buy into the ad optimisation game, is there a reason for them to be wary of flooding the market with simply too many ads? Not as long as you focus on optimisation and not just automation. Tom says, “we’re not looking for scale, we’re looking for optimal… [starting with] the objective of the media plan, the purpose of that media and then understanding how many variants are the perfect amount for that outcome.”
Moreover, it’s not enough to simply create lots of ad variants and send them out into the world. As we’ve said above, getting the insights is crucial to decision-making, so ads can continue to be optimised to deliver against your media plan objectives. To get this information, you need to have visibility of the insights in a clear, understandable dashboard - one that enables you to react in real time. Our research shows that only ⅓ of marketers have some form of dashboard for data visualisation. How can you get meaningful insights if you have no way of seeing them?
At Automated Creative, we offer a dashboard that can show how every ad is performing, in all its variants, in all markets and on all platforms. This is a big time and budget saving: you can allocate a small spend on a small platform, test out an idea, and see how it’s performing, without using up lots of your budget.
This allows smaller brands to benefit from live optimisation when they’re working with a smaller budget - especially if they focus on their priorities. Even with a small budget, you can create hypotheses and test multiple ad variants - learning from them and optimising your returns.
This isn’t the only example of using small budgets to win big. For brands who have “big bets” coming up in their marketing plan, like a high-spend TV ad, for example, testing hypotheses with low-cost digital ads can give them a way to hone their message and ensure that one piece of expensive media is as effective as possible. Working with PensionBee, AC achieved exactly that: testing a multitude of visual cues, we discovered that the best performing ads were the ones that showed customers using an app. As a result, the TV ad featured the app all the way through. Similarly, after discovering what verbal cues had the most impact in the digital campaign, PensionBee chose to re-record the voice-over for their TV ad to reflect these.
Watch PensionBee’s CMO Jasper Martens talk about the brand’s work on creative effectiveness with Automated Creative
How do you even get started with live optimisation?
Begin with your questions: what do you want to learn about your audience? List out your questions and turn them into hypotheses, then identify all the variables that you can play with in your ads.
When you move to the ads themselves, you’ll need to first isolate a variable. Limit your analysis to testing one element at a time - for example, keep all your images the same, but vary the text. Run this through all your audiences and platforms, learn what works well, and then move on to a new variable. You will then be able to work with permutations of the well-performing text and visuals, and so on.
Finally, remember to optimise for attention: you cannot have great long-form content that brings in leads and improves brand loyalty if viewers scroll past it. At AC, we look at how to make the right video for a non-skippable format. If a brand wants to keep the attention of viewers for their content, they need to know exactly the type of messaging that retains from the first 2-3 seconds. To do this, they need a feedback loop that shows which creative is driving what level of attention and engagement.
You can read the entire white paper here and listen to the episode here.