QN#10 Incorporating creative impact into MMM
Welcome to our 10th edition. This time we’ll talk about the impact of creative in effectiveness. We hope you enjoy it while having a great summer!
Importance of the creative
The creative impact is a big part of the ROI drivers of a campaign. How much? Specifics are not important, but understanding the order-of-magnitude helps. A Nielsen project from 2006 gave creative around 2/3 of the contribution towards ROI. A more recent study, again from Nielsen, gives around 50%. This decrease would reflect the more complex media landscape. Still, creative would be the single most important element driving incremental revenues of a campaign.
These figures are consistent with our own personal experience on running MMM. Among all the business recommendations that come up after running an MMM, when creative is properly measured, creative-related optimizations have most often the biggest associated uplifts.
It’s important to take into account that “creative” it’s not only about the effective communication: the right choice in advertising also comes to what to advertise. Very often, in our experience, that has the biggest impact. Which product should be heroed in the creative piece? The most selling product? The latest launch? The overall assortment? The mother brand? Those decisions do make a huge difference and are key factors to incorporate as input or diagnosis. Focusing solely on the “creative” element is not enough.
Approaches to incorporating creative impact
There are two families of possibilities:
Incorporate as explanatory/diagnostic information. In this case the creative elements are not part of the model themselves, but they are captured during the project and are used to give context to the results.
Include as input. This means incorporating, one way or another, creative-related metrics into the model to improve the fit and assign a quantitative value to the creative impact. To our knowledge, plenty of variation and lack of consensus on how to perform this.
The 2nd strategy is not necessarily superior to the 1st one. What’s not OK is to have none.
Among the sources of data to be collected we can cite:
Pre-evaluation results (Kantar Link, Ipsos…).
Post-evaluation (BrandLift provided by the media platforms, reseach by 3P companies…).
Creation of scoring metrics using frameworks such as YouTube’s ABCD or other equivalents. This could also involve automatic tagging of the video pieces using Machine Learning/AI, but that’s not enough unless tweaked significantly. For a marketer, it is not really interesting to know if “baby faces” are more or less effective than “having a dog on a screen”, that’s extremely tactical. More complex elements need to be incorporated if we want to transform creativity into numbers.
How it looks like in a real MMM
So, what to do when running a project? This is a suggested list, from very basic and absolutely “must” action, to more complex ones.
Absolute must. If you are not doing this, you are doing MMM wrong.
Everyone involved in the project, both front and backend, should watch the biggest pieces of advertising aired during the modeled period (most typically audiovisual pieces).
Incorporate explanatory info on the creativity in the result reports. This can be links to the actual advertising, pre or post evaluation reports, indications of what product was advertised… Anything that helps the reader to understand what kind of piece the consumer actually was exposed to.
Nice to have. This enriches your business acumen and gets you to a better piece:
Have a “brand immersion session” as part of the kick off, where whoever is in charge of the brand explains the brand strategy and how it was executed on the different creative pieces that are part of the modeled period. This should also help to collect the Key Business Questions related to creativity.
Store visits or mystery shopping workshop by the team in charge of the MMM. If it’s a project for a bank, visit their website, visit their offices. If it’s for a shampoo, there’s no excuse for not visiting a couple supermarkets and seeing how the shelf looks like.
Make the creative agency part of the MMM process, just as you should already be doing with the media agency.
These are some examples of how to incorporate the creative input in an MMM. Let us know how you are doing it in the comments!
Industry updates and upcoming events
Third Party Cookies are not fully going away soon
Google’s Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez has recently announced that instead of removing third party cookies, Chrome will give users the choice. Learnings from the testing suggests that Privacy Sandbox APIs, which are meant to substitute third party cookies use cases, require longer testing and a wider adoption.
Google Ad Manager reported how Privacy Sandbox APIs help publishers mitigate the revenue losses from removing third party cookies, with a positive trend and expecting more improvements as ad tech participation and traffic without third party cookies expands in the future.
Google Ads also reported very high numbers of spend and conversion measurement recovery using Privacy Sandbox APIs, however remarketing would be more impacted if third party cookies go away today.
Lots of news which can be hidden under headlines such as “Google U-turn on cookies” or “Google gives up on third party cookie deprecation”. As an advertiser, the best performing marketing teams have already moved on. As a publisher, there is still some time to milk the cookie cow. Third party cookies will remain for some users in Chrome but they fail to be a reliable source of user identification with the limitations we have today. Therefore, it is not a comprehensive solution for measurement or targeting. While you may have more time, the benefits are already there for those complementing with alternative solutions.
Trying to measure the impact of your marketing using just the cookies of your attribution model is not a valid strategy anymore. Those who believe this announcement sets the scene as it was when Privacy Sandbox was launched in 2019 are completely wrong. The push for privacy in the marketing ecosystem is here to stay despite third party cookies will remain for some Chrome users. Most other browsers have no third party cookies and higher limitations on user identification will continue. As an advertiser, slowing down the adoption of solutions to get ready for this new environment is not the smartest move today. Go ahead of your competitors and ensure you have a marketing operation which complements cookies with the best of the industry solutions, taking the best of each platform according to your needs.
Modern Brand Measurement
As a great complement to the Modern Measurement Playbook, Google has released their “Modern Brand Measurement” (link) with some overall recommendations on how to capture the brand strength and its impact into business.
Brand trackers, brand lift studies, share of search and full-funnel MMMs comprised of lower-funnel MMM and nested brand-equity MMM are the measurement artifacts included in this playbook. All of it with a test and learn approach which is required in today’s uncertain world of measurement.
Long list Premios Eficacia
Spain’s Premios Eficacia long list has been announced. A record of 284 cases will be competing in the awards to be announced October 24th. A busy summer for the juries!
Chart of the week
Want to know how the interest on Olympic Games is trending? Use this link for the latest information comparing several editions.
Oldies but goodies
“How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know” is a book written by Byron Sharp and published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. If you have not read it yet, make it the reading for the summer! It is an entertaining one, with lots of reasons to take notes and build some mental maps to understand how people decide what to buy and how to influence it using marketing. All learnings are based on strong research, which remains valid until you prove against. A strong manifesto about using scientific research to understanding human behavior and make better marketing recommendations.
In this already classic book, some of the marketing assumptions that govern most of marketers’ minds are challenged with research and data. Loyalty is much a function of market penetration and branding is a matter of physical and mental availability rather than relationship or meaning.
On the effects of advertising, mass marketing rather than highly targeted advertising is what works, as most of your customers will be light and not loyal. You want to reach all your potential buyers, not just the loyal ones. Focusing on existing customers to improve loyalty alone is a futile effort. You will have higher impact reaching a broader audience and making the brand more available in the minds of all potential customers.
This book challenges traditional marketing learnings such as those coming from Philip Kotler. To name a few:
Broader reach is desired against targeting specific customer groups
Differentiation is not a driver for brand growth, you just need to be distinguishable
Promotions have no long term effects and short term effects are not sustainable
Loyalty is a consequence of penetration and market share, difficult to work as an objective
Advertising is more effective in building memory structures and long term effects rather than immediate persuasion.
There are reasons and research behind each of these affirmations. In case you doubt about it, go ahead and read the book!