Marketing Inspiration #28 - Using automation to improve media performance, embracing TikTok marketing, and new kid currencies
Your monthly dose of data-driven marketing insights
Don’t Miss An Opportunity to Understand Just How Many Ads Will Make Your Brand Stand Out
We get it. Everyone needs a little guidance once in a while. But at AC, we’re not just looking for ways to get you to the same level as everyone else. We want to drive results that go beyond the competition, and then some.
Platform guidance from Meta often guides brands towards a range of 2-8 creatives in the market to allow for optimization. But after analysing over 6bn media impressions we’ve found that it takes, on average, 36.49 ads to get an improvement in Awareness and 14.81 ads for Conversions - so why are we letting guidelines hold us back?
So many marketers just push out a few (or just one!) big creative bets and hope for the best with their campaigns, but we know how to make your budget work harder - on average over +17% harder! - putting media dollars back into your campaign thanks to live creative optimisation.
Our next webinar “Why Do We Need So Many Ads? An Introduction to Live Creative Optimisation” will show you exactly why and how. Join us on Thursday, 25th January 2024, at 5pm GMT.
Sign up now:
Top Tip from the Shiny New Object Podcast
On the Shiny New Object podcast, senior brand leaders share their vision for the future of data-driven marketing and their best tips to improve creative effectiveness.
“The average person doesn’t care about you and your brand” - Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director, Marketing Effectiveness at Mars
Marketers tend to become too brand-centric in their views, according to Sorin. In reality, people on the street don’t spend any time thinking about their brand, so their challenge is to capture that attention, but also to treat the whole process with humility.
“We’re not here to save the world,” so don’t give your job too much importance and strive to get out of the advertising and marketing bubble. Look for consumers’ viewpoints, understand how they consume your product, and put yourself in their shoes to give your work perspective and relevance.
For Sorin, this starts with taking learnings from neuroscience into data driven marketing. He is fascinated by neuro marketing - the application of what we know about how the brain works to how people make buying decisions off the back of ads. From lab studies to KPIs such as facial cues, find out how Mars are using neuroscience in marketing in the full podcast episode.
How Can Automation Help Marketers Make the Most of Their Media Budget?
“We’re not just 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 [your desired] outcome.“
AC Founder Tom Ollerton spoke to Conor Byrne about how marketers can optimise the effectiveness of their media, on the “That’s What I Call Marketing” podcast.
While many marketers feel they don’t have the tools or the knowledge to use live creative optimisation, there are only a few steps to getting started. Coming up with creative hypotheses and testing these at a small scale can teach you a lot about your audience and help you maximise the effectiveness of your advertising budget.
Read a quick summary of this chat on our blog.
Automated Creative Case Study - Brown Forman and Jack Daniel’s Flavours
It’s not easy to find someone who hasn’t heard about Jack Daniel’s - so it’s not easy for the brand to make a change from the image everyone’s associated with it, either. Working with Brown-Forman , AC helped them launch Flavours, a twist on the traditional JD brand and a challenge in advertising effectiveness.
Find out how Brown-Forman changed their ways of working to include a live feedback loop and optimise their return on ad spend here.
This Month’s ‘Best Data Driven Marketing Tip’
"TikTok is king… the ultimate marketing tool" - Grettel Clark, Senior Performance Marketing Specialist, Ottobock
From a place where consumers can discover your brand to a platform where you can get reviews, case studies, and online shopping all in one, TikTok is becoming the ultimate end-to-end marketing tool. Grettel explains that its merits lie in its reach (how many views you have prove how interesting your content is and you can reach very niche audiences more easily than on other platforms), its community power (TikTok opens up conversations between consumers and between them and brands, even if not in real time), and its ability to transcend the single platform (every other social network seems to be trying to copy or adapt the TikTok style).
Learn about how marketers can make best use of TikTok for their brands on the podcast.
And there is more Marketing Inspiration this past month on Advertisers Watching Ads - our show where brands watch other brands’ ads and discuss their merits and failings, in partnership with Contagious.
In recent episodes, we discussed the merits of alternative currencies for children around Mother’s Day
But also looked at more serious matters like planning ahead for one’s own funeral
And how big brands are taking sustainability and environmental impact more seriously than ever:
Before delving into a different type of brand to audience interaction with this cheeky ad series from IKEA:
Many thanks to all of our guests:
Laura McNally MBA (Marketing Director at Auto Trader UK), Conor Byrne (Host of the Podcast “That’s What I Call Marketing”), Julie Pender (Senior Marketer and Strategist), Hayley Krasnow (Associate Brand Manager), Nick Telson-Sillett (Co-founder of trumpet and Horseplay Ventures), Scott Morrison FRSA (Founder of The Boom!), Emma Roffey (Former VP Marketing EMEAR at Cisco), Priyanka Dasgupta (Field Marketing Manager at Kyndryl), Tejal Patel (Senior Director, Global Digital Media at Cisco), and Via Perkins (Freelance Copywriter).
Do you want to share your thoughts about these ads or suggest a new one for us to debate? Email us on hello@automatedcreative.net.
How to Make it in Marketing
After hundreds of interviews with the best and brightest leaders of the advertising and marketing world, Automated Creative distilled their top tips for newcomers into the book, "How to Make it in Marketing Vol. 1."
Here is one of the brilliant tips you can find inside:
"Broaden your skills as early as possible" - Martin Leguay, CMO, Touchnote (formerly VP of Marketing at PeoplePerHour)
Many people like to focus on specialising in their field, but marketing is too broad of an industry to do that, according to Martin. If you want to experience all aspects of marketing, you should start your career by broadening your skills as much and as early as possible. Ultimately, the CMOs of this world have to understand from 5 to 15 channels, platforms, or verticals. So, the more you’re capable of knowing a little about a lot, the better you will fare.
This is just one tip among the 45 different pieces of advice waiting for you in our FREE e-book. Download it here now.
Finally, here are some ads you should have seen - via our friends at Contagious: