How Data Is Changing Ad Creative For The Better

Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Alex Song is the CEO and founder of Proxima , a data science company that helps brands better reach consumers across all major platforms. getty The advertising industry is widely known for its creativity. It combines innovative thinking, stunning art and powerful language that creates strong bonds with its audiences.

Not surprisingly, it's one of the only fields where "creative" is its own job title. However, as the world becomes increasingly data-driven, creative strategists will need to get much more comfortable using data to enhance the quality and impact of their work. Of course, data has long powered nearly every aspect of performance and brand marketing.



It enables precise targeting, real-time optimization and comprehensive attribution in performance marketing while offering deep insights into consumer perceptions, content preferences and brand health in brand marketing. An Invesp report noted that "businesses that employ data-driven personalization delivered five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend" as businesses that don't. Measuring the success of creative has traditionally been subjective.

For decades, creative strategists relied on gut instincts and assumptions about how their ads would perform, largely because data was not available to them like it is today. In most cases, it was virtually impossible to prove any tangible link between ad campaigns and revenue increases. Even today, most growth marketers have what's known as a "swipe file"—a collection of ads, imagery and headlines that strike a chord with them as they're swiping.

They save them because they like them or think they will serve as future inspiration. Again, however, there is no hard data associated with them; beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. MORE FOR YOU Hackers Force Chrome Users To Hand Over Google Passwords, Here’s How Google Chrome Deadline—You Have 72 Hours To Update Your Browser Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Monday, September 16th Slowing Down The Creative Hamster Wheel It used to be that ad campaigns were all about beautiful art, memorability and feeling—but that was before the age of social media.

To keep pace with the incessant swiping and the increasing numbers of eyeballs looking at ads, creatives have no choice but to constantly iterate and develop new assets. It's become a volume game, not an aesthetic one, and creatives are feeling the burn. On top of that, as creative fatigue sets in and audiences become desensitized or apathetic toward carefully crafted ads, creatives must work even harder to churn out a steady stream of high-quality and engaging content.

It's a hamster wheel of creative iteration, and it's exhausting. function loadConnatixScript(document) { if (!window.cnxel) { window.

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That means 85% of content is being wasted, not to mention the time and effort that goes into its creation. This is simply unsustainable. Data Needs To Be The Loudest Voice In The Room To make the creative process less daunting and more impactful, the time has come to make an artistic-driven process more data-driven.

Creative can still be fresh and innovative, but strong aesthetics are no longer enough. For creative to perform in the way it's expected to, data needs to serve as the connective tissue across the growth engine for the entire digital marketing team, including creative strategists. In other words, data needs to be the loudest voice in the room, helping to improve the 15% success rate by providing creatives with information and insights that will actually help them improve their creative production.

Interestingly, there is now technology available that removes the subjectivity of ad campaigns, so creative strategists can understand what type of creative is going to be most engaging to its target customer. Using competitive benchmarking, AI, machine learning and proprietary data, digital marketers can access aggregated data to provide insights about what creative will perform best—something that individual ad account data is not equipped to do. Creative strategists and designers must get accustomed to leveraging data to guide their decision making.

This starts with accessing data you can trust. Begin by examining the historical performance data of your own creative assets and breaking them into asset types. Segment them into lo-fi and high-fi content to understand how much value extra production and polish are driving.

You should also segment them into static and motion advertisements to understand how each style of content is driving performance. Next, identify large pools of network data against which you can benchmark your creative asset performance. The scale and magnitude of these datasets you're reviewing are key to ensuring you're finding relative performance and guidance on what to design and test.

Finally, continue testing by prioritizing higher-potential performance based on the insights you've gained from your analysis. There will always be the desire to just throw things at the wall and see what sticks, but a data-driven approach can make you more accurate and effective in leveraging your precious resources and time. This is not to say AI will (or should) replace creative thinkers.

I strongly believe creatives will always be an instrumental part of every marketing team. However, the right data can help simplify the process of developing effective ad campaigns. It can amplify the quality and impact of creative while simultaneously adding much-needed efficiencies that reduce the "hamster wheel" experience.

In turn, marketing teams can be as intentional as possible about what kind of creative they want to invest in building. The explosion of social media and the proliferation of data have permanently changed the creative process. Rather than resisting the new rules of the game, creative strategists can embrace data as a welcome addition to their process.

When they do that, they can ensure their ads aren't just visually appealing but that they perform at the highest levels, connecting with the right people at the right time. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?.