Lisa Overall, Managing Director of Creatalytics, a company that closes the impact gap between media and message and maximises return on creative investment, discusses the intricate relationship between brand performance and creative optimisation. She explains the role of creative analytics in enhancing media effectiveness and the constraints that can drive creativity.
In 1964, when Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”, there has been an ongoing advertising conundrum – is it the content or the channel? Is it the creative and the media? Is it the message or the medium?
Karen Nelson Field has demonstrated that the choice of media channel impacts attention, but creative messaging is responsible for triggering action.
So, assuming both are essential, how do we ensure the media and the message are working together, particularly in a world where there is so many different media choices?
Lisa shares her views on the future of measuring creative performance, the impact of time on consumer response, and the opportunities presented by social media for testing and learning.
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I don’t think that you would necessarily predict that that creative would do well, but pay back as I understand it, in it’s first 30 days.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Since 1964, when Marshall McLuhan wrote The Medium is the Message, there’s been an ongoing advertising conundrum, is it the content or is it the channel? Is it the creative or the media? Is it the message or the medium?
Karen Nelson-Field has demonstrated the choice of media channel impacts the attention, but the creative messaging is responsible for triggering the action. So, assuming both are essential, how do we ensure that the media and the message are working together, particularly in a world where there are so many different media choices?
To discuss this topic, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the managing director of Creatalytics, a company that’s closing the impact gap between media and message, and maximizing return on creative investment.
Lisa Overall, welcome, Lisa.
Lisa:
Thank you very much for having me, I’m so excited to be here today.
Darren:
Look and when I first heard about Creatalytics-
Lisa:
It’s a bit of a tongue twister.
Darren:
But I was really excited because let’s get this clear up front, you are not there saying what’s good creative and what’s bad creative. You are actually more focused on how creative is then expressed in an optimal way in all of the different media channels, is that right?
Lisa:
That’s correct, yeah. We’ve got no business to have a judgment on creative quality or creative ideas. There are so many wonderful agencies doing great work. What we really want to do is, as you say, make sure that that idea has as much impact in channel as it possibly can.
So, where we kind of operate is what we describe as executional creative effectiveness measures, and that’s making sure that all of the best practices across all of the different platforms are met and complied with.
Darren:
Now, you are not nearly as old as I am, but when I started in advertising, media and creative were actually in the same agency. You were able to, as a creative director, I could get up and wander around, and I’d invariably find myself in the media department, and there was a big reason for that, they had all the tickets to all the best events.
Apart from that, it was also a place of terrific inspiration, finding out what was happening even in those days in all the different media channels and that type of thing. It has created a problem, and people argue and have argued since it happened, that separating the two was sort of losing that opportunity, wasn’t it?
Lisa:
Yeah. I am reasonably old, so I have worked in full-service agencies in my time in New Zealand, and I agree with you. It was just magic to be able to have the conversation between two experts from different areas, and when they come together working in harmony it’s a fantastic outcome for clients.
And so, just with the silos that were created so many years ago, there were good reasons for that to occur, and media has really had a lot of attention placed on it in terms of technical advances around lots of investment and optimization, huge fragmentation. So, you actually need to be able to focus across many, many more platforms and understand them in great detail to be able to operate as a media practitioner these days.
But really what we see is the loss, is being able to have those corridor conversations, or you’re in the kitchen just having a chat about, “Hey, that idea I was thinking, what do you reckon about X, Y, or Z?”
And that’s really magic. And because clients are working with a creative agency group or a media whole call, what have you, some of those conversations don’t really occur. And that’s really a challenge, but where we see it actually manifesting and lowering performance is, that creative agencies don’t get all the data that media agencies do.
So, they don’t actually always know what the latest is around platform best practice. And we’ve had that experience, I mean I’ve come out of media agencies and you spend a lot of time developing a plan, and then you see the creative and your heart sinks because you needed it to be doing certain things that this piece of work won’t do.
That’s not to say that it’s not great creative, it’s just the ensuring that it’s fit for the platform and the needs of the task at hand just hasn’t been communicated properly. So, we want to try and fix that so everybody gets the most impact out of the hard work that they’re doing.
And some people don’t like that, they think it’s kind of policing, but actually, it’s a real opportunity to make sure that clients continue to invest in one of the greatest drivers of business outcomes out there, and that really excites me.
Darren:
Yeah, because I remember you’d come up with a creative idea, and when it was all in one building, you’d go down to production and say, “Is this possible?” And then they’d say, “Well, we need to go and talk to media.”
So, the production manager, and you would head up to the media department and you’d put out the idea and, oh, hang on, I’ll get the sales rep in here. And things sort of happened … to your point, there was input from lots of different people, would start with an idea and it could grow. And sometimes, some of those ideas, yes, they could be achieved, but it was more from my perspective as a creative driving that.
What I find interesting is that this is also a different perspective. I remember account director, Colin Haycock had this poster on his wall from the out of home or Outdoor Media Association, I think it was of America, the OMA. And it was all these great outdoor sites, and why they were affected. And he used to use that as inspiration.
And I think that’s also something that’s missed, is that the media owners themselves across all their clients see what works well and what doesn’t. And that’s incredibly valuable to feed back into the very people. Not so much as rules of how you do it, but at least, guidelines for how to get better performance, isn’t it?
Lisa:
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And we built this platform, and it covers video, audio out of home and digital display and social, and we built it from all of those best practices that come from industry bodies like the OMA that you’ve mentioned. And as well as key media owners who undertake a lot of research into their channel to under understand and try and help clients’ agencies understand how they can get the most out of the medium.
And we’ve found since we launched the business in February this year that we actually have quite a lot of engagement with media owners. They’re interested in working with us, and being able to work with creatives as well in the development of creative that is fit for their platform because it helps them protect revenue and to see their channel do well.
And so, it’s a really great point in terms of the role that media owners and all of the research that they’ve done have contributed to the building of this product or platform.
Darren:
Yeah, particularly the digital platforms. Too many times, you still see videos, for instance, that were made for, say, a broadcast environment, then appear on YouTube. And when they appear on TikTok, they almost jar because it is not made for the environment that it’s being consumed in.
I always said, even putting a TV ad on cinema, you need to be really careful because when you have that big screen and you’re watching it in a big room, if it’s got too much movement, it can actually induce sort of motion sickness in the audience, which you would never get if you were watching it on a phone where it’s quite small and personal.
Why is it, do you think, that (and I’ve got some theories, but I want your thoughts first) not enough thought goes into the way different media channels are consumed and how consumers actually, what their mindsets are when they’re watching these things?
Lisa:
Look, I think there’s a few reasons. And first and foremost, I think that we’ve had this explosion of channels in terms of what’s available, and let’s just work with video for the moment. And there isn’t necessarily, to my knowledge, a really good training ground that helps agencies understand exactly what the differences are.
So, if they’ve got a great relationship with a media agency or a combination of media agencies, that can flow through. Sometimes it also occurs that a creative strategist or an account director may be across all of the platform best practice and what have you, but they might not be involved at the pointy end of the process in terms of once an idea is developed and working with the media to both agency and owner to make sure that it’s fit for platform.
And that’s the consequence of not having enough time in the process. And we now work in an industry that is under pressure all the time on the time available, and it’s a much more complicated development process than it’s ever been. So, complexity and time is a driver.
I think the other factor is to my understanding creative budgets haven’t really changed that much. They’re usually a proportion of the media budget. And that could be anywhere from 5 to 20%, depending on the nature of the client and that kind of thing. But that hasn’t moved in order to reflect the change in the number of channels that are available.
So, for some creative agencies, they may well have the knowledge and understanding, but they might not have the means to be able to produce a creative idea that is actually delivered in a range of platform executions.
So, that’s another really big issue that needs some consideration. And there’s some really nice research that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Kanter, Nielsen or Analytic Partners, they all say the same thing, that creative contributes about 50% of outcomes. And if it’s contributing 50% of outcomes, then perhaps we need to look at how creative is budgeted for in order to reflect that, but also reflect how it meets platforms in market.
Darren:
Yeah. What you’re talking about, or at least what’s come to mind as you were speaking then, was this whole outdated approach of working versus non-working expenditure, which as a creative person years ago, I could never understand, because I’m going, “Hang on, how can you possibly say that the bit I’m doing, i.e. the content that goes in there is non-working?”
Lisa:
Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.
Darren:
Because if I put all your money into working, which is just buying media space, does that mean you could just put up, I don’t know, some static text and that would be enough? Which would explain the vast majority of digital display advertising. It seems to be static text, usually with some price off offer, which I’m not sure the impact that has on margin.
But anyway, which is the first thing. The second thing that I get really annoyed at is this … and it’s creeping back into conversations, which is yes, you can build brand in short-term tactical work, as long as the colors and cuffs match.
And it’s almost as if the actual message doesn’t matter as long as the logo and the colors and the fonts and all those are the same, it will give you a brand impact or a brand building. Which is not necessarily so because just because you see it, I’m not sure actually means that it’s working.
Lisa:
Yeah, I think certain channels are able to build brand in the way that you suggest through short-term tactical activities because they provide a stage that enables it. And others can’t do the same things from a brand perspective. So, you need a combination of channels and a combination of messages to do different things because people are in different mindsets.
And you talked about cinema before, which I just think is one of those channels that’s hugely underutilized, and it just is a magnificent stage for a brand to story tell and develop emotion, and that’s a real shame. And it’s often that channels are left off the schedule because it’s almost like there isn’t the imagination to use them in the right way.
And if I think about Outdoor as well, really interesting it’s such a brilliant channel. They’re all brilliant channels. I’m not going to say one’s better than the other because I love them all, being an old media girl. But I think that there’s a real art form to use those channels to get the most out of them. And also, with understanding and the Outdoor space that you have different modality of consumption.
You have drive by, stand by, walk by, and when there are different dwell times, that delivers different results, that gives a different creative canvas. You can use it to do different things in, let’s say, a cross-track train environment than what you would for a large format Outdoor on a highway. They both have a place in the plan, but they shouldn’t necessarily carry the same creative.
Darren:
Yeah, that’s right. That idea of the six-second rule or can it be read at two kilometers or whatever. And that’s why you should only have this number of words. It is an industry that loves making up rules like that. And then creatively people will tell you that it’s breaking those rules and being effective that is actually where creativity shines.
Lisa:
Yeah. And I think that that can be true. But it’s more of an outlier than a generalization. Most advertisers actually need to at least adhere to the rules until they become good at it before they explore too wildly. And I think that there’s a certain time and a place where creative experimentation is actually better facilitated than others.
And sometimes, that’s actually in tough economic times, but most of the time, we see that advertisers pull back at that point in time rather than experiment and try new things. And so, it’s a delicate balance that I think both clients and agency need to walk.
Darren:
So, what do you see as being the biggest trends in creative and media in the last few years? What are the things that need to be considered when developing campaigns?
Lisa:
There’s quite a few things. So, let me start with a big one, which is distinctive assets. There are so many opportunities for brands to do the work around developing distinctive assets. And that isn’t just about, we’re going to develop a sonic trigger or we’re going to work in a different tagline or a phrasing or what have you.
It’s about identifying the things that are right for the brand and making sure that you put some structure around really understanding that they are distinctive assets for you because there are a lot of categories out there that have conventions or codes, which they’re category conventions rather than unique to advertisers.
And so, I think that there’s been some brilliant work about establishing the idea of distinctive assets, but I’m not sure that marketing science is actually being applied as well as it possibly could be. And so, I think that there’s more work that will be done in this space and the right testing for it, and not just the creation of them, but where Creatalytics comes in.
We look at how those distinctive assets are actually used within an execution in their relation to the branding items. Because you don’t just create distinctive assets and the job’s done, you have to continuously invest in them to make sure that they are identified to your brand, and that they remain familiar over time. And that only comes with consistent investment.
So, making that investment and doing it properly is really important. And I hope from what I’ve seen that there are a number of advertisers that are really beginning to understand and invest in that, which is awesome.
Darren:
Yeah. But isn’t that a little bit like colors and cuffs though? Is that locking yourself in because there are certain distinctive assets that then means that that’s the execution, irrespective of the channel.
Lisa:
Yeah, I think that for some advertisers, it can become that way, but there are a range of them that are out there, and I’m going to talk about McDonald’s. They’ve got a lot of distinctive assets. Obviously, the golden arches, yellow and red, they’ve got their sonic trigger, they’ve got the tagline or the phrasing, I’m loving it.
They also developed a range of characters that represent different products as well with Grimace, that’s an old school distinctive asset that they’ve obviously bought back in recent times. So, they’ve got an embarrassment of riches in that space, and they still manage to have a huge portfolio of work that looks different, but is then rooted in those distinctive assets to make the identification to McDonald’s really easy for consumers.
And those distinctive assets are there as shortcuts, so you don’t have to rely on a logo all the time because nobody really wants to plaster a logo all throughout an ad to get the association. I think the other advertiser that has done a really good job on this, and it’s been shown through, I think that they’ve won a number of effectiveness awards, but that’s KFC. And they developed that campaign, which even before you heard someone reference the question, “Did someone say KFC?” They had this weird moment that you could just go, “Oh my God, this is KFC, no question.”
And look, I know I’m in the industry, so I’m coming at it from a weird fascination with that kind of stuff. But they just invested consistently and that wasn’t matching collars and cuffs kind of thing, it was just this weird thing that they did really well. And I think that’s really impressive.
So, I’m interested to see for them as they move into their FLG — I don’t know whether you call it an enneagram, but some people don’t know what it is, but I knew immediately what it represented because I grew up with that as a tagline.
So, it’s really interesting to see the different ways that distinctive assets can be developed and used, and they don’t always have to control the core proportion of a piece of communication. They’re there to assist it, they’re supports.
Darren:
Well, because I was thinking the sort of classic launch of the … what was it? The iPod and the Silhouette campaign. Now, that was a very visual take which they then put into basically out of home and television, because it didn’t have an audio component couldn’t translate then into, say, radio or today, podcast or anything else. It’s interesting because distinctive assets will also lend themselves to certain channels, won’t they?
Lisa:
Yeah, that’s true. And look, I think that the reference that Apple Silhouette work, I almost think that that was delivered at a time when no one was really thinking about sonic triggers, and sonic triggers as a distinctive asset, they’re much more recent.
And yes, I do agree that some brands tend to orient towards more different types of distinctive assets than others. But it would’ve been really interesting as a brief for creatives to kind of go, “Well, if this is the campaign, how do we represent that sonically so it can become a distinctive asset?”
And I think in the case of Apple, the product itself was actually what was embedded as a distinctive asset, and it became an idea and executions. But we’ve moved to the point where brands and their creative partners are really working hard to develop distinctive assets with a lot of strategy and structure that I don’t think has been considered as much in the past.
Darren:
It’s interesting you say sonic triggers because, oh, what a feeling, and just those notes was probably an early one. But jingles were a huge sonic trigger. And we’ve got, I Love Aeroplane Jelly, and Happy Little Vegemite, I think from the 1920s and 30s when radio dominated. That was the golden era of sonic triggers, except they were called musical jingles or even musical stings as they were known. It’s interesting what goes around, comes around.
Lisa:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of that that we’ve been through this time of amazing technological advancement in our industry, and there’s always something new and innovative that people chase, but actually, we are returning much more, I think, to ensuring that some of the fundamentals are right.
And I think that if nothing else, some of the work that Byron Sharp did when he published How Brands Grow, was he reminded everybody about the importance of reach, and that had become lost because there was the rise of social platforms where they really have their own set of metrics that are used in terminology.
And it became about … we all got so fascinated with metrics that we could measure without really having them linked into what is this actually driving as part of a bigger picture. And so, I think that that’s the same, not just for things like reach and in media, but for creative. Some of the hallmarks of great work that we’ve seen is returning to some of those foundations.
Darren:
We are an industry that loves to reinvent things, don’t we?
Lisa:
Yes.
Darren:
Because one of my bugbears is performance media. And it’s like I’m not sure I want to invest any money into media that’s not going to perform. It used to be called direct response, but in some ways, that lost its shine and the idea that measuring last click attribution or any sort of clicks was frowned upon. But then we called it performance, and of course, everyone wants to do it.
Lisa:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I have a bit of a bugbear myself about the discussion about performance and brand for the same reasons.
Darren:
Yeah, these are not choices.
Lisa:
You’ve got to have both.
Darren:
Its brand and direct response. Because one converts all the potential in the market in that particular time. The other is investing in future potential and actually building that opportunity down the track.
Lisa:
Yeah, I think James Hurman’s done … Peter Field and Les Binet have done obviously lots of work about long and the short of it, and that speaks to what we have kind of shortened to brand and performance, but I much prefer long and short as a term.
And I really like the work that James Hurman’s done around existing and future demand. And I think that he’s been able to put some numbers around the size of those different pools of customers. And that’s really helpful in terms of it, it picks up on the work that Field and Binet have done.
So, if we think about it in those terms, you want your creative and your media playing both of those roles to perform. And that’s where — I don’t talk about Creatalytics as a performance business, but I much prefer the term optimization because you always want to get the absolute maximum that you can out of the investment that you’re making.
And creative is one of those areas currently that doesn’t actually have any real consideration beyond the development of the idea in terms of how it delivers. It’s all in post-analysis or ad tracking that you get a feel for it. And actually, there is an opportunity to optimize creative that doesn’t mean that you need to redo ideas. It’s about enhancing what you’ve got, and that’s where it can meet the platform.
Darren:
So, I want to get into that because Creatalytics talks about optimizing performance or maximizing return on creative. And upfront, we were talking about the fact that this is not telling you which creative you should use, but when you have a creative platform, how do you optimize it into the various media channels. That’s right, isn’t it?
Lisa:
Yeah.
Darren:
So, how does that happen? An agency has come up with a creative idea, the marketing team have approved that, the media agency’s planned all of these media opportunities. Where in that process does Creatalytics bring that together?
Lisa:
Yeah. We work with clients, agencies, and media owners at different points in time. The ideal point is pre-campaign, where as you say, you’ve got an approved concept. And before you go into production for that, you are able to have a look at your media plan to confirm if you’ve got video component, what are the platforms that you’ll be using? Is it forced view? Is it skippable? Is it instream? Is it in feed, or is it all linear?
And actually, having a look at, well, if you’re going to take this video idea into those different platforms, what are the things that you would need to do perhaps in a slightly different edit or order, in order to make that platform fit? So, that is in a perfect world, but we don’t always work in a perfect world, and we can’t always have a look at a concept before it’s produced.
So, we work with advertisers after they might be in market and they’re looking to enhance the optimization to the media team who have done everything that they possibly can. But if there’s still room to move, we take a look at produce creative, and we deliver actionable optimizations that we put in two buckets.
The first bucket is here are the things that we would term real practice. They’re cost-effective and applicable in the short-term, so it won’t take you very much time to do it. And that might be around … it could be in the addition of brand watermarks. It could be in the change and voiceover. It could be in the addition of an end frame.
It could actually be in the creation of they can be called integrated video formats where you have a card that surrounds the creative and it can give you the branding. So, it’s about looking at ways that to cost effectively short-term give some improvements to help that creative actually perform in the platform better.
We also work with clients in a post-analysis capacity, and we fit in a couple of ways. We’re actually a good tool to use to help diagnose ad tracking results. So, you might have a less than desirable recognition score or some results that are less desirable around message takeout and image attribution. So, we can be used to help understand what aspect of the creative execution might be needing to improve in order to address that.
And then in terms of the optimizations, we obviously do real practice as I’ve described, but we’ll also talk about best practice. So, what are the things that might be longer term creative strategy considerations where you might not be able to get back into an edit suite to address a story arc or those kind of things. But you can take them on board and implement them into your next round of development or before you launch in the next year.
Darren:
Oh, you mean test and learn, or learn from your mistakes, or whatever. Oh God-
Lisa:
How do we do this better?
Darren:
God forbid.
Lisa:
It’s that, and even the way that we look at it is we talk about what are your highlights? What have you done really well, as well as the optimizations, because actually, we’ve done some work for advertisers that have a big portfolio of products, and they’re producing a lot of creative. And we might have a look at 30 different pieces of work for them.
And we’re talking about big brands with distinctive assets and all the rest of it. They actually have a difference in performance of their creative from a delivery to best practice and the application of marketing science, which is what we look at. And so, there’s an opportunity to raise the entire level of a portfolio of work as well with some of the work that we do.
Darren:
Yeah. I’m just wondering what’s the sort of reaction though from creative agencies. Because I remember every time, we were told that you had to put some concept into link testing, and now, there’s quite a few different ways of testing creative work.
Is there a natural fear that this is somehow going to limit their creativity or impact their ability to do what they think they do best?
Lisa:
Yeah, and look, I think that that’s a natural reaction, and I completely understand it. Creative is art and science, and a good mix of magic as well. And seemingly, if you put policing around it, or some people have described it as creative by numbers, that can seem really unattractive, and it can seem restrictive and what have you.
But often, a great driver of creativity is the presence of constraint. And we are talking about constraints that are consistently there. The platform is consumed in a certain way, and when you think about skippable as the example for this conversation, you have to stop someone really quickly.
So, that isn’t going to happen in the same way as what it might in a TV environment or a forced view environment, they’re very similar. For skippable, you have to get the attention. So, that constraint is not going to go away. So, what we’re asking creators to think about is actually be really creative to get that attention and to make sure that you don’t just attain it, but you can retain it as well.
So, most of the time, we might walk into what I would describe as a cool room when creative agencies are present. And we ask for creative agencies to be there. Because we want to introduce Creatalytics, help them understand that we are not about judging creative and saying it’s good or bad, that’s none of our business.
You’ve got an idea. You are the experts in developing that idea. All we are there to do is to help that idea get the most amount of impact it possibly can in the platform that it’s been distributed on. And that’s what makes us a bit different to some of the other players out there who are doing creative testing or however you want to describe it. We focus on the platform, it’s 70% of our assessment.
And so, we are not talking about what needs to change in the idea, we are talking about, here are some ways that that idea could really be dialed up. And when we provide those actionable optimizations, sure, we’ll give a suggestion about how you could do that to simply illustrate what the recommendation is.
If you took our recommendation and just implemented it, we’d say that that’s a waste of your creative resource, because there are people who can take that direction that’s really clear and go, this is how we can do it within the integrity of the creative strategy and the idea.
So, we want to work with, not against, and we’re great advocates for creative. We love looking at the work because there’s so much good work out there.
Darren:
Yeah, I can also see where if you are optimizing the creative expression, the creative execution into those channels, it helps overcome in many ways that age old argument about was it the media, was it the idea … not the idea, but the way the idea was presented.
I can imagine that’s quite frustrating because if a campaign for instance is underperforming, why is it underperforming? You’re able to then look at the expression of the idea and optimize that. If it still continues to underperform or performs worse than it was, then it could be the concept.
I love that old saying that, “Good advertising will make bad products fail faster.” In many ways, this shows that bad ideas can’t be optimized.
Lisa:
Yeah. I don’t think that there’s lots of bad advertising out there, I just think that there’s quite a lot-
Darren:
Oh, you’ve got to get out more.
Lisa:
Oh, I’m not going to mention a certain political party that demonstrated very bad advertising practices. I don’t think that there’s necessarily bad ideas out there. I think that they’re just misfits, so they need some tailoring. And we often say, “If you’re going to think about what we can do for you, we’re the creative analysts that you can have at your fingertips without the head count.”
So, it’s about respecting the integrity of the idea, but making sure that it meets that platform where the platform can do its magic. And that’s what we all want because we want continued investment in this industry. And that’s going to take both aspects, creative and media, working really well together.
Darren:
Yeah. What do you see are the opportunities, because we’re seeing a rise of AI being bought into things like marketing mix modeling, and predictive models about performance.
Obviously, that’s predicated, and a lot of it is driven by the media metrics, whereas you don’t see as much quantification around the content in that. A lot of it is optimizing or predicting performance based on what media is being used, at what weights and that type of thing.
Do you see a time when the creative component can be built into that, and what would be required to get there?
Lisa:
Yeah, the rise of modeling and how it’s being used, not just by clients, but also with … nine have introduced a whole platform around modeling for their clients at certain levels, which that’s awesome being able to measure and understand what’s happening and why it’s potentially happening, and what some of the best practices will be. But the gap with modeling is very much granularity around understanding for creative.
So, you can get a sense around from metadata, which durations tend to perform better than others in certain platforms. You can get a sense the same for Outdoor different formats, and have actually done some nice work with Analytic Partners around that.
I think it’s really challenging to get a handle on predicting creative performance outside of some of the work that System1 do, where they’re looking at emotion and the presence of memory encoders and a response from consumers that isn’t reliant on their post-rationalizing, offering comments about what they see and like. That they’re actually looking at it from the science, but there’s still-
Darren:
Yeah, so physiological or neurological response rather than a so rational interpretation of their feelings.
Lisa:
But there’s still so much about creative that we don’t understand because we don’t understand the brain. And some creative that we might all take a look at and go, “That’s not going to do anything that’s going to be terrible.” And you can be proven wrong.
And we look at some work, there’s a really nice case study out of New Zealand for Turners car auctions and some people might think that it’s a dirty retail idea, but it’s brilliantly funny, and it says exactly what it needs. It’s very simple. We sell cars, we love cars, and it’s hugely repetitive, but they’ve got beautiful humor, they’ve used their distinctive assets really well.
And so, I don’t think that you would necessarily predict that that creative would do well, but pay back as I understand it, in it’s first 30 days, that’s extraordinary. So, I think that those elements, the human condition means that it’s going to be difficult to predict those items, but what we’d like to start off with, where there’s more data and it’s about the presence or absence of best practices at that executional level rather than creative quality.
And so, in the next quarter, what we’re going to be working on is exactly kind of proving the impact of optimization and what it can return clients. So, we’re working with some clients to do that in a case study sense and with supported research for it. So, I’d like to come back and talk about that to say what we found.
Darren:
When you’ve got that data and that case study, I’d love to have a chat. Now, we’re going back to, predicting how human beings are going to respond. There’s an incredible dimension that I haven’t seen anyone address, and that is time.
And when you’re testing something, it’s in a moment of time. And the first time someone sees anything, they’ll have a certain reaction, but it’ll also depend on what their mindset’s like at the time, whether they’ve just woken up, whether they’ve had a long … there are so many variables in this that seem to be overlooked when we talk about creative testing.
But I guess what they’re trying to do is not get an empirical result, but an indicative result of what’s marginally better than others. At least I can see in optimizing what’s already there. You can create a baseline and then be able to test against that to see if you get an increased or decreased approval.
I do remember when Karen Nelson-Field was demonstrating the different attention measures by different channels, she used the same creative execution in each one. So, that was the constant and then got the different levels of attention scores for each one. So, at least, as a piece of science, it had a constant, but like all social science you can’t get a null baseline because you have to show them something to get a measure.
Lisa:
Yeah. I mean, I thought that that methodology was interesting because having the same piece of creative without any editing to reflect the platform, that to me, it actually goes against kind of what we stand for. That you want to be tailoring that creative to fit the platform in order to make sure that you do get … not just obtain the attention, but you retain it and the interest and the response.
So, that feels like it’s a little bit counter, because the same piece of creative won’t necessarily always perform the same way across channels because they’re consumed differently and it might not be suited.
And I think your point about time is interesting though. Both when people are actually exposed and in testing environments with consumers, it’s really hard to account for a natural exposure. And I think there’s been lots of great work that’s been done to try and address that.
And I think what happens to that response over time as well in terms of you see it at the beginning of the campaign, you see it three months later, you see it a year later. And there’s a lot of talk about wear out for creative.
And there’s research from people like Analytic Partners that says that creative doesn’t wear out because the response to the circumstances which is created and the investment in the channel mix is actually indicating that people are still responding to it in the same way, at the same level. And actually, sometimes it takes a little bit of time for creative to wear in. And sometimes, it’s not always given that opportunity to wear in.
Darren:
I think the marketing team gets worn out with the creative because they live it each day before the consumer ever does. And this idea of if I’m a brand manager or a marketing manager, do I want to create a new message?
And I think the social media platforms have now reduced that timeline from creating a new message every year as your campaign to creating your new message every week, it feels like because there’s this constant narrative change that happens with brands particularly on social media.
Lisa:
Yeah. Which is driven by the algorithm rather than the consumer in terms of their response. I mean, social’s such a great area to test, learn, and develop and really understand from an executional standpoint what things might resonate better than others. And being able to learn there and take it into other channels is I think a really interesting opportunity as well.
Darren:
Lisa, this has been a terrific conversation. Thank you for sharing what you’re doing at and with Creatalytics. It’s fascinating, very keen to find out how that test comes out. So, please let us know.
Lisa:
I will indeed, thank you so much for having me and the opportunity to have a chat about an area I’m really passionate about.
Darren:
I can tell you’re very passionate. I have got a question for you before you go, and that is, of all the campaigns you’ve seen over your career, is there one for you that really stands out for its ability to capture your attention?
