Improving Purpose-Driven Ads
GfK studies suggest that “innovation and creativity” are needed to make purpose-driven ads as effective or more effective than “mainstream” ads.
ad creative
Augmented Reality, Neuroscience & Measuring Audience Engagement
This study used neuroscience-based methods to explore if AR experiences—content as well as ads —provide more immersive engagement than other media.
Go Big or Go Home
Go Big or Go Home. Bold media predictions and bold measurement predictions—a media company perspective with Radha Subramanyam of CBS & CBS Vision. The following are edited highlights from Radha’s fireside chat with the ARF’s Scott McDonald.
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The Future of Qual
In 2022 the ARF Cultural Effectiveness Council conducted 18 in-depth interviews (IDIs) with senior research executives via Teams and Zoom to understand how the 'Future of Qual' would evolve with rapidly changing qualitative methods and the urgency across industries to understand cultural shifts. Council members Chloe Stromberg of LinkedIn and Anne Kaplan of Paramount, who worked on this project, presented what the Council learned from these interviews. Their presentation was followed by a panel discussion with a mix of Council members (Tony D’Andrea of General Mills and Tristan Marra of GLAAD) and culture-savvy researchers outside the Council (Danie Hemsley of Cassandra and Kendra Clarke, former Senior Director, Head of Experience Research and Design, Core Technologies at Twitter), led by Council Co-Chair Janelle James of Ipsos. The presentation and discussion focused on how qualitative research is evolving, how it can overcome its challenges —particularly those related to diversity and cultural understanding—and best practices for conducting qual research, moving forward.
Member Only AccessPanel: Future of Creative Effectiveness
Anibal Casso of Ogilvy moderated a discussion with panelists representing different perspectives in the industry (brand, agency, research). They tackled best practices, current challenges and the future of creative effectiveness.
The Power of Creative Data: Insights & Applications from 1 Trillion Ad Impressions
In this session, Anastasia Leng of CreativeX argued that marketing and creative have the power to change things. In the face of an increased ad pool, which has gone up 6x in the last 20 years, ads now have a smaller shelf-life and need to be created in a more customized manner. In large part, technology has created this challenging landscape in marketing and advertising, but technology can now also help to address these new challenges. She pointed to computer vision technology which can help by supplying data created from “micro-feedback,” by clustering this information and fusing this feedback to create more useful macro-data to base decisions on.
How Augmented Intelligence Unlocks Creative Effectiveness on YouTube
Ariane Le Port of Google explored the relationship between augmented intelligence and creative effectiveness on YouTube. She noted that in the past, measuring creative was a challenge that was “so nuanced and so complex” that people tended to shy away from measuring it. In this session, Ariane pointed to a six-year experiment on YouTube video ads to help brands understand what is most effective in mobile video. In the experiment, they conducted A/B testing and took into account a variety of areas, such as framing, pacing, audio and other areas to find patterns of creative effectiveness. These experiments led to a partnership between Google and Ipsos to create YouTube’s ABCDs (Guidelines) for creative effectiveness. YouTube and Ipsos studied 17,000 ads in an effort to identify the creative elements that have a measurable impact, using a human and machine learning (ML) approach. Leveraging machine learning (ML) enabled them to look at large and robust datasets to gain a deep understanding of what elements work best in creative. Ariane discussed their augmented intelligence methodology which included data scope and collection, human and machine creative coding, metrics and data modeling and insights and commercialization.
Copy-Testing Has an Image Problem
Pedr Howard of Ipsos addressed the negative connotations surrounding copy-testing and identified ways that copy-testing can provide great value to marketers. He noted that optimization should not be at the expense of validation. Ipsos validation research shows up to 44% difference in ROI between high and low performing ads. Looking at Super Bowl ads, Ipsos found a wide range in effectiveness with only a small fraction of brands correctly recalled. In addition, measuring just the efficiency of an ad by relying solely on behavorial metrics (e.g., in-view time) can be misleading on effectiveness, which could result in big waste in ad spend. Thus, measuring the creative quality of an ad can be a valuable tool to predict success and save money. However, instead of using it as a stick to just kill a low performing ad, it will be more productive to systematically track the creative output and see how to make it more effective.
The Path Forward: Identity, Representation & Authenticity
Dana Sparber of NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships, discussed how NBCU created an actionable toolkit to guide their clients on media activations for diverse audiences. This multicultural marketing playbook was based on research with Magid on how diverse consumers self-identity and how that informs their life experiences as well as their brand and consumption choices. They first conducted client interviews to understand challenges and needs as it relates to representation. Then, they set up an online community with diverse consumers, which elicited insights into their thoughts on identity, mindsets around representation in media and their expectations and visions for what really makes something authentic. An online quantitative survey validated these findings. This ultimately led to a framework of representation hierarchy, which was validated through driver analysis.
AI and Creative Effectiveness
In this session, Mike Barrett of Supernatural discussed the world of artificial intelligence (AI) in creative effectiveness. Specifically, he demonstrated how AI can be used as a tool to leverage art, copy and strategy. He noted that AI has garnered a lot of attention in advertising and though it’s not used at the level it is in the STEM disciplines, it is gaining traction as a device to enhance productivity. Mike demonstrated the use of AI in advertising with an example from Heinz, which used AI to generate a design for its next ad campaign and an example from Xero which employed a combination of AI software to generate images and copy for an ad. He promoted the use of AI, particularly in the area of stock imagery, which can be used to generate very specific and creative images not available in stock photo banks, in a matter of seconds. Additionally, he touted AI as a tool to help prompt creatives to write great copy. He emphasized that AI is still growing and maturing, with an example of an AI-generated video, but he endorsed AI as an emerging means to create better and more creative ad campaigns. Mike indicated that as different AIs mature and begin to work together, it will yield better and more efficient results.