Creative testing – The key to success!

Blog Sim Dehra – Senior Client Consultant

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative”, probably one of the most famous quotes from the ‘father of advertising’ himself, David Ogilvy. A quote dating far back into the twentieth century, but still very relevant today! Ogilvy believed that you couldn’t achieve the best results without researching the market and testing your advertising. Which led to another iconic quote: “I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.” So, why is it that 75 years + later, there is still a lack of creative testing?

DVJ’s annual Brand Growth Study in Europe revealed that over 50% of marketers don’t test their ads before launch and rely on “gut feel” instead. Given advertisers spend so much money on tracking their brand and advertising KPIs to better understand the brand positioning element, surely, they must want to test the creatives that represent the brand itself?

hesitation

Firstly, it is important to look at what point in the process creatives are tested, if tested at all. There seems to be a significant amount of qualitative testing, at the initial idea generation stage (57% of marketeers typically use research at this stage), but the percentage of brands which end up testing the final creative theme/ executions are still quite low (only 35%). Our Brand Growth study reveals that companies that focus on getting feedback in the final stages of development are far more successful than the companies that solely rely on gut feeling and experience.

Having worked with various methodologies, my experience has been that there is a lot of mileage in testing different iterations of the same creative theme, to find the “winning ad” (in most cases with little optimisation) this will not only deliver the message more successfully but also make GRPs go much further. In addition, when it comes to testing multi-country campaigns, I see a large proportion of advertisers overlooking the importance of adjusting their creatives to local audiences. Over the years, I have seen that if a multi-country campaign is slightly adjusted to local nuances, very much keeping the ethos of the brand at centre stage, and measuring against the key Brand and Campaign KPIs – it can have a huge impact on the success of the campaign. For instance, the way advertising works in Argentina, versus the Middle East is completely different, hence different markets can benefit hugely with slightly different versions of the creative theme, saving GRPs in the long-term.

 better advertising

During our recent Brand Growth Event, Mark Ritson ranked his top 10 most important factors for Marketing Effectiveness – Creative was ranked second, right after Brand size! When it comes to creative, he shared that the impact of ads is mostly determined by its creative quality. If you want to sell more, you must make better advertising!

At the same event, Les Binet explained that creatives work best when they are given long-term commitment and budget. He shared three key dimensions to effectiveness – You need creativity, and you need to commit to that creativity with budget, media, and commitment over time. If you do that, you stand a much higher chance of winning.

One of the most important factors to building brands successfully is using a combination of brand building and sales activation within your creatives. We have all heard that but Les raised an important point that by adding creativity, brands can achieve a higher “share of mind”. He added, there are 2 ingredients which should go into advertising – messaging and emotion. If you are trying to get a short-term response, you should move in favour of rational messaging. If you want to build a brand, and realise long-term growth, you are better off moving towards emotion and entertainment. He concluded, “creativity turbo-charges the efficiency of advertising”.

We also investigated COVID related ads and saw that a large proportion of brands were creating new ads, trying to re-invent the wheel to make an emotional connection.  When looking at a meta-analysis from all COVID best/ worst performing ads, we had measured, it was evident that:

1. It is extremely important for the ad to stand out with a strong creative
2. Brands must build upon the existing memory structures that consumers already have of their brand and campaign and failing to do so, leads to a waste of media budget with little or no impact.

This ties in nicely with one of Byron Sharp’s rules for brand growth: refresh and rebuild memory structures.

making grps work harder

So, shouldn’t we change the way we think about pre-testing creatives? With some of our clients, we learned that a disciplined approach towards pre-testing can lead to savings of 150-200 GRPs per campaign. We conducted a meta-analysis on years of pre-testing and tracking data, which revealed that the average ad needs 150 to 200 GRPs to realise the same effects as a top 20% performing ad. In addition, an empirical study conducted on the effectiveness of advertising and the role of creative execution, showed that the creative was the most important component for success.

So, what do we deem as success? And what puts an ad in the top 20% bracket? Well, I think the answer is one you have probably heard before – it all depends on the brand, category, brand size, target audience and many other factors.

However, there are some common variables:

• Ad Recognition: Creating ads which are striking, fun and use distinctive brand assets in a clever way are likely to attract more attention and higher recognition.
• Brand fit: making ads that consumers can relate to existing memory structures, will help with brand fit.
• GRP: The determining role of the creative dimensions in the return of each GRP, is significant. In effect, a better ad will make the same GRPs worth more!

To summarise, all the evidence from the marketing gurus, academics, Brand Growth study and certainly my previous experience seems to be in favour of testing creatives, in the path to success!