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Creativity & Creative Effectiveness

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How can a brand optimize its creative output, and what is its worth?

 


Enhancing and optimizing creativity and creative effectiveness can be difficult as perfecting the right balance between all the strategic facets in developing campaigns and ads, as well as the strategies that go behind partnerships and distribution, is no easy task.

While conducting A/B testing and prioritizing measurement is necessary to build personas and conduct consumer research, which informs creative, ignoring the role of creative with outcomes can be detrimental. Thus, it's key to connect creative to ROI to illustrate properly its benefits. For instance, VidMob found that "85 percent of advertisers believe that creative influences sales uplift."

In this vein, Marissa Jarratt, EVP and chief marketing and sustainability officer at 7-Eleven, Inc., stressed how important metrics are to creative effectiveness, stating at an ANA event that 7-Eleven looks "at our business results. We look at financial performance and we also look at brand performance, brand equity. We look at our results on a strategic, tactical, leading, and lagging basis. We're constantly calibrating the work that we're doing against those different metrics."

Jarratt went on to say that "sometimes the senior team might not fully buy in. But the reality is that part of our jobs as marketers is to serve our customers or consumers. Helping the internal organization understand why this work is going to achieve our goals because it's going to be relevant to those consumers is part of the job. When we do that well, we see disproportionately faster growth against the metrics I mentioned."

There are several ways that marketers can optimize output and measure it successfully, including leveraging AI (such conducting competitor analysis quickly), garnering user-generated content that resonates with consumers, and creating memorable moments through activations and/or emotional reactions (like utilizing humor).

Stein IAS, for example, harnessed events (such as ANA's Masters of B2B Marketing) to spread awareness around B2B's need to commit to better creative. In addition, KPMG created fun content that created spoof offerings in an omnichannel campaign, illustrating the power of humor and wit.

Sumit Virmani, EVP and global CMO at Infosys, discussed how crucial partnerships are at ANA's Masters of Marketing Conference, stating, "It's extremely important that the partnership is strategic. We don't like just spending money to put our name out there. We want partnerships that are truly strategic. So therefore, they have to be credible. And for them to be credible, you cannot be speaking to the marketing team or department. You have to speak to the business organization. When they commit at both ends, credibility and innovation get real results."

Further, Virmani noted that for "marketing to be relevant, marketing has to have a seat at the table in the boardroom. And the only way to get a seat in the boardroom is to deliver on growth and profitability. For marketers like me, that means pipeline and brand premium."

Below are helpful best practices, examples, and trends. Don't forget to check out ANA's guide on Content Marketing.


Best Practices and Trends

  • Building a Culture of Creative Effectiveness. ANA/WARC, October 2023.
    The WARC white paper Building a Culture of Creative Effectiveness outlines a newly developed framework for brand organizations wanting to develop a culture of creative effectiveness. It identifies not only the broad framework for brands to build on, but also dives down deeper to understand the specific steps that brands need to take and offers examples of measures from brands who are farthest along on this journey.

    An extensive research and analysis process has led to the development of this framework, leveraging WARC's unique Rankings database and including in-depth interviews with a broad range of leading brands, many of which have successfully delivered campaigns that were judged to be both creatively excellent and highly effective.

    This framework is the first phase of a multi-phase initiative from WARC, LIONS and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to support the development of a culture of creative effectiveness across brands. Future phases will look to develop beyond the basic framework into tools that can help measure and analyze a brand's performance in its journey toward creative effectiveness. See also a press release describing the next phase: Establishing a Culture of Creative Excellence Drives Greater Impact for Brands.
  • Executive Forum: Achieving Gold Standards in Brand-Building and Creative Effectiveness. ANA, August 2024.
    This forum, conducted during the Global CMO Growth Council Leadership Assembly in Cannes, 2024, was dedicated to delegates connecting, learning, sharing, and challenging each other to raise the industry's collective creative game. Informed by some of the world's leading authorities on creativity and effectiveness from Cannes LIONS, WARC, Bloomberg Media, ANA, and McKinsey, discussion led to a consensus around how to create a greater culture of creativity to drive business growth.

  • The State of Creative Effectiveness. Zappi, August 2024.
    Zappi has released an annual report aimed at educating brands about the art and science behind creative effectiveness. The report delves into how advertising has evolved in response to global trends and consumer behavior, providing actionable insights for brands to create impactful campaigns. From Zappi's research, they found three main trends and one major observation.
  • Creativity: What Brands Need to Know. ANA, April 2024.
    A panel of experts discussed key takeaways and insights from recent ANA research on the top creativity enablers and roadblocks. This research was powered by a survey of more than 700 ANA Award jury members, some of the industry's foremost authorities on what makes powerful and effective creative work.

  • Overcoming the Obvious: Sparking Creativity Against Marketing Woes. ANA/Inspira, February 2024.
    Traditional marketing campaigns may feel reliable, but it's unexpected ideas that capture audiences. From innovative social media campaigns to interactive experiences, Inspira Marketing is examining successful out-of-the-box marketing strategies and how they can solve extremely common marketing and brand problems. Inspira explores why daring to be different may be risky, and how it's a necessity. As William Faulkner said, "You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."
  • Elevating Creativity for Impact. ANA, November 2023.
    During the 2023 ANA Global CMO Growth Summit, Spencer Fox, SVP, Global Business Lead at LIONS Advisory, shared how to adopt global gold standards from the top winners of the 2023 Cannes Lions Awards. Spencer introduced the Align, Build, and Embed (ABE) framework to drive a culture of creative effectiveness. This framework, launched by WARC, LIONS and ANA, identifies the three levels a brand organization, regardless of sector or size, needs to develop to deliver a culture of creative effectiveness.
  • Nielsen finds that 56 percent of sales lift comes from creative digital ads, Kantar says it is 49 percent, and Google says it is 70 percent.
  • 80 percent of marketers deem creative quality key to marketing effectiveness, according to this survey.
  • 80 percent of marketers deem creative quality key to marketing effectiveness.
  • Marketing Week's Language of Effectiveness survey, supported by Kantar states 33.2 percent of marketers don't have any method of tracking creative effectiveness at all.
  • From the same survey, those who say they can measure effectiveness are down from last year at 58.5 percent.

No matter where you look, creativity is proven to be the biggest driver of ROI. Marketers know this, but even as creative drives half of ROI, many marketers seem unable to measure and fix it. This "creative conundrum" is holding brands back from higher campaign effectiveness. The reasons behind the conundrum are numerous, but luckily, there are solutions available today that smart advertisers are using to drive major improvements.

  • Filling the Creative Data Gap to Counter Rising CPMs. Advertising Week, October 2023.
    Study after study shows that creative effectiveness is responsible for the lion's share of sales lift – far greater than media decisions. Nielsen found that strong creative was responsible for 86 percent of sales lift in digital ads and that across all creative, the quality of the creative contributed to 65 percent of digital ad sales lift. The recent MAGNA Media Study says that creative quality drives 56 percent of the impact on purchase intent, while Google says 70 percent. Solving for creative effectiveness is without a doubt the most impactful way to combat the rising costs of media, and 80 percent of marketers deem creative quality key to marketing effectiveness.

    Successful ads should capture viewers' attention, foster engagement and, ultimately, generate purchase intent. Quality of content is crucial to achieving these goals, and in turn, accurate performance insights are vital to ensuring ads contain the key hallmarks of quality. Up to now, data was only used to enhance efficiency not the efficacy of the campaign. However, with the increasing requirement for large-scale campaigns, many marketers are focusing only on scale and efficiency metrics and overlooking the need for data on effectiveness to identify how to develop quality campaigns that have the right impact; more specifically, creative data.
  • Beyond Viewability: The Role of Attention in Creative Effectiveness. Kantar, November 2023.
    Attention is not just a yes or no matter. Beyond whether consumers are paying any attention, it is important to understand how long they are paying attention for, the depth of their attention, and what precisely they are paying attention to. This helps advertisers to make educated decisions on maximizing creative attention, tailoring to context and ad placement to help optimize the impact of campaigns.

    Data from one of Kantar's attention measurement partners, Realeyes, highlights that attention profiles are different in each environment. The average time participants pay attention to ads, indicated by the passive attention measure, diminishes more quickly in short formats (Instagram and Facebook stories and TikTok) and feed formats (Facebook and Instagram), emphasizing the need for clear brand presentation within the initial seconds of these ads. Conversely, in stream formats we see lower attention during the initial seconds, however with a less dramatic drop in attention as the ad plays.

  • 80 Percent of Marketers Deem Creative Quality Key to Marketing Effectiveness. Marketing Week, July 2023.
    Marketers are putting more focus on the quality of their creativity in a tough economic environment where standing out has never been more important. Four-fifths (80.5 percent) of the 1,300 brand-side marketers surveyed for Marketing Week's Language of Effectiveness survey, supported by Kantar, believe that creative effectiveness is one of the most influential factors in the overall success of a campaign, with 14.2 percent singling it out as the most important factor. Just 3.2 percent believe it has no influence at all. The importance marketers put on the quality of creative is also rising. Nearly two-thirds (60.8 percent) have increased their focus on creative in the past year, with 19.5 percent saying it has increased substantially. Only 8.9 percent say their focus on the quality of their creative has decreased in the last year.

  • Redefine Your ROI: Measure Creative Effectiveness. VidMob, August 2023.
    For years, marketers have had to rely on driving media efficiencies instead of creative effectiveness, but with today's technological advances in AI, that is a costly mistake. As we move into a more challenging era of privacy changes and an even more cluttered advertising environment, creative effectiveness is the answer, and it's speaking louder than ever. Google has hinted at this for years, stating that media is only about 30 percent of the equation for successful brand campaigns – and the other 70 percent of success is driven by creative.

    An investment in creative measurement will allow you to pinpoint what's working and what's not. The key is to gain insight to make data-driven decisions that can help you reduce your spending in ad placement and creative production, optimize your campaign performance, and ultimately turn up your ROI.
  • AI for Marketing Strategy: Unleashing Creativity and Efficiency. ANA, September 2024.
    In today's fast-paced marketing landscape AI is no longer just a buzzword — it's a powerful tool that can revolutionize your marketing strategies. Many marketers only utilize AI for more downstream marketing work like content creation and data analysis. While this can and should be used for this work, there are numerous opportunities further upstream that marketers are not utilizing AI to its fullest. This article explores how marketers can leverage AI, specifically large language models like ChatGPT or Claude, to enhance their strategic thinking and brainstorming processes with several prompts you can begin using today.

Examples

  • Creativity and Human-First Approach to Becoming a Top 100 Brand. ANA, October 2024.
    Sumit Virmani, EVP and global CMO at Infosys, discussed how his B2B company is leading with creativity and driving positive social impact through its business. In this Q&A recap, he discussed what he believes is driving growth for his company, how culture has contributed to that success, how B2B and B2C strategies are alike and different, and more.
  • Creating Resilient Brands Through Creativity. ANA, September 2024.
    Mark Miller from Team One and Mikaila Ulmer from Me & the Bees Lemonade explored strategies for building long-lasting brands in a rapidly changing business environment, emphasizing the importance of creativity and forward-thinking approaches.
  • Driving Ballet Ticket Sales with Innovative Creative. ANA, July 2024.
    The San Francisco Ballet was facing a unique challenge: Its primary audience was getting older, which meant the organization was starting to see lower ticket sales and donations — two key components of funding for the nonprofit. Additionally, modern entertainment options were cutting into people's leisure time and making ballet a less appealing choice for younger audiences. Lisa Poppen, CMO at San Francisco Ballet, and Mark Hillman, executive creative director at The Shipyard, shared how the Ballet leveraged standout creative — some of which was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) — and breakthrough tactics to engage a new generation of customers.

  • How KPMG Used Spoof Products to Show It Understood Its Target Audience. ANA, June 2024.
    To promote its Consumer Consulting division and show retailers that it understood them, KPMG designed a series of spoof products, based on a grocery store "own brand" range, each meant to represent one of the Consumer Consulting division's offerings. These fun visuals were then used to power the creative behind an omnichannel media campaign.

 


Webinars and Podcasts

  • AI-Driven Creative Effectiveness: Unlocking the Power of the Flywheel. ANA, October 2024.
    AI is transforming how marketers drive creative effectiveness. Statista research reveals critical gaps in the adoption of AI-driven creative strategies, but more importantly, it highlights opportunities for marketers to harness these advanced models to improve insight accessibility and amplify the impact of every asset. Enter the Creative Effectiveness Flywheel — a new approach that puts AI at the center of a dynamic process, enabling agile teams to create, analyze, and optimize content with greater speed and effectiveness. In this session, you'll learn how to:
    • Overcome barriers to integrating AI-powered creative effectiveness
    • Empower your creative teams with AI-driven insights for faster, smarter content
    • Maximize the impact of every asset with optimized, data-backed creative strategies

  • The Future Is Creative: Analytical Approaches to Maximizing Creative Impact. ANA, February 2024.
    As various technical and policy limitations further restrict the ability for digital marketing to have cross-channel, high-resolution identity solutions, the subsequent loss in efficiency must be counterbalanced by a gain in effectiveness — specifically, creative effectiveness. In this webinar, learn about the various ways to plan, experiment, and effectively measure the impact of ads' creative on digital platforms to drive greater value for your organization.

  • A New Framework for Selling Creative Effectiveness. ANA, January 2024.
    WARC developed a white paper titled Building a Culture of Creative Effectiveness. The study provides marketers with a framework for demonstrating their value and establishing a common language and a common set of metrics so they're more in sync with upper management and there's less mystery surrounding the benefits of marketing.

    Ann Marie Kerwin, Americas Editor at WARC, joined host Matthew Schwartz to talk about the study, which features a new model for how to embed marketing's value throughout the organization. Kerwin also provides a mini case study on how Joan Colletta, senior director, global brand leadership team at McDonald's, convinced the C-suite that branding correlates to profitability.



The Marketing Knowledge Center actively connects ANA members to the resources they need to be successful. You can visit the ANA website to engage with the MKC in three ways.

  • Explore content to access best practices, case studies, and marketing tools. Our proprietary content includes Event Recaps, which share actionable insights from conference and committee presentations.
  • Connect with our ASK Research Service in real time for customized answers to your specific marketing challenges.
  • Stay on top of trends with Pulse issues, which explore how new technologies and innovations will affect marketers and consumers alike. 
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"Creativity & Creative Effectiveness ." ANA, 2024.

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