SOCIALMEDIAxSCIENCE was held on July 18, 2018 in San Francisco.

Panel Discussion: Best Creative Practices for Ads and Branded Content

Lara Andrews – Creative Researcher, Facebook
Mike Dossett – VP, Associate Director, Digital Strategy, RPA Advertising
Amy Shea – Brand Experience Director, Ameritest
Moderator: Paul Donato – Chief Research Officer, ARF

How can data and research inspire more effective creative? What’s being done now, and what are new opportunities for providing a guide to best practices for creative success?

Key takeaways from presentations:

• Data-Driven Mobile Creative presented by Lara Andrews, Facebook:
  • Successful mobile advertisers use data and insights to fuel marketing strategies – they test and learn, and optimize as they go.
  • Facebook found that the fastest growing mobile advertisers created 11x more creative assets (45 vs. 4) with 11x average variance in ROAS between the top and bottom performing creatives; and by testing and optimizing creative, advertisers reduced cost per incremental buyer by 23%.
  • Case study: Cadbury Milk created different creatives for different moments that best resonated with different desired audiences. Outcome: 17pt lift in ad recall, 6pt lift in message association. Data-driven insights drive creative relevancy.
• The Best Practice is Dead … (Long Live the Best Practice) presented by Mike Dossett, RPA Advertising:
  • Ad blindness has crept into social feeds because we aren’t giving people what they want.
  • There is a lot of bad social advertising due to misaligned incentives and interests, flawed data analysis and application, lack of adequate investment, misunderstanding of/disregard for platform nuances, rejection of audience behaviors, etc.
  • The paradox: creatives don’t like unnecessary constraint, and strategists don’t like uninformed risk. Our job as marketers is to toe the line between the merit of these best practices but not become complacent or over-rely on them. We need to understand the nuances of best practices, so that we can make the best decisions.
• Three Takeaways for a Six-Second World presented by Amy Shea, Ameritest:
  • Ameritest tested 15 :06 ads on a mobile YouTube environment. Viewers could opt to watch a travel video, baby video, or pizza-making video. Before their chosen video would play, they first had to watch a :06 sec ad. The following are the key takeaways from this study:
    • Congruency of brand message and social content positively affects ad performance significantly. That is congruency of tone, of subject, and of audience.
    • Six-second brand messages are seen, but measuring attention works differently in this brand message + social content world.
    • Visualizing brand assets works especially well in this format to efficiently trigger the brand.

Key takeaways from panel discussion:

• There is no magic number or formula for creative success. Best practices can work beautifully for some, but can be horrifically useless for others. Using the same formula also kills creative efficacy because when consumers see the same thing over and over again, it can increase ad blindness. Understand the nuances of best practices and platforms.
• There is no magic number for attention. As people, we seek stories, and storytelling and attention are linked. For instance, Ameritest found that the worst the ad did, the shorter the viewer perceived it to be. The messages appeared fragmented or unclear. When ads resonated, the spot length seemed longer (e.g., viewers thought the Corona spot, which had familiarity and resonance, were actually twice as long as the actual spot length.
• Real constraints can push you into great storytelling. Besides meeting the MRC standards on viewability, every second counts because every second is an audition for the next second of attention in social. Constraints set the barriers for the Creative to surpass. Good Creatives are coming up with different ways to structure their narrative to accommodate the changing dynamics in this space.
• It’s important to test the individual brand and campaign. A lot of generalizations come from big meta-analyses. On average, it may work, but whether it works in an individual campaign can vary.

Presentations:
Lara Andrews, Creative Researcher, Facebook:

Mike Dossett – VP, Associate Director, Digital Strategy, RPA Advertising:

Amy Shea – Brand Experience Director, Ameritest:

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