Clients have long focused on what is sometimes referred to as “working media,” and for good reason—that’s typically where the bulk of the budget is spent. Over time, the industry has deployed new technologies as a way to optimize media spend. As technology has evolved, it’s been brought to bear heavily against different forms of media in a quest to maximize ROI and get the best marketplace response possible.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with maximizing an investment. The challenge is that technology hasn’t really been used on the creative side, beyond when digital marketing allowed for “A/B testing” and finding which color provokes the best response.
Where does creative sit in the value equation? According to WARC, the creative message accounts for at least 50% of the impact of the advertising. And according to Ipsos, the ability of people to remember your advertising message is 75% attributable to the creative. By our calculation, focusing on the creative messaging as much as we focus on the media side would dramatically have a positive impact on the return of ad spend.
While creative has long been seen as subjective, it needs to always be relevant. If your messaging doesn’t connect to your target and stick out among the sea of sameness consumers see all day, the time and money you put into that advertising is wasted.
Our machine allows us to obtain real time information about what a given target audience thinks about a category and how they make decisions and what they are interested in in order for you to craft a tight brief from which you can start the idea process.
It needs not be said, but we will anyway, that you need ultra-talented humans to come up with the ideas and you will for a very long time. But you can get a running start when you can bring a more precise, more nuanced view of your desired target audience.
In a world where advertisers have gotten quite good at optimizing their media performance—they are now no more than one standard deviation from their competitors. This is not a long-term winning strategy. We believe creativity that is based on a tight strategy can be the difference maker for smart brands for some time to come.
If you’d like a demo of our machine, please reach out to John Elder. We’d love to share it with you.