Creative Analytics: Fueling Imagination with Insights

By identifying how creative components and audience combinations impact engagement, this practice allows for a truly precise, audience-based marketing strategy. Through content personalization, Creative Analytics can markedly optimize consumer engagement for brands. For instance, by applying its principles, Bayer now personalizes over 50% of its digital media to high-value audiences for a 40% improvement in CTR and VTR.

How can Creative Analytics improve marketing performance?

Through enriched datasets and reports, Creative Analytics can provide insights from your marketing campaigns to your creative and media teams. Grounded in real-world data, this methodology can determine which combination of content and audience shows the highest engagement rate and how specific creative assets impact engagements, such as optimal CTA button placement within a display banner. Applying this knowledge yields more sophisticated frameworks for personalization; through testing, validation, and a common set of KPIs, the de-siloing of media and creative strategies can lead to better, more effective campaigns and improved conversions.

Creative Analytics goes beyond the visual appeal of advertisements. A successful strategy requires thorough planning and buy-in across the organization. For an effective implementation, consider these four crucial elements:

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The potential applications of Creative Analytics (CA) vary depending on your digital marketing maturity:

• Data-Exploring: As brands get started on their CA journey, they typically rely on a basic framework for minimal creative variants testing and still-siloed creative and marketing reporting

• Data-Informed: CA implementation begins in earnest with a unified view of creative and audiences. A robust data infrastructure is needed here to properly join datasets together across platforms (Meta, DV360, etc.)

• Data-Driven: The following phase is more complex but yields some of the most valuable insights and capabilities CA can enable. BI solutions-integrated creatives are combined with their associated performance metrics on a single dashboard, allowing for more meaningful comparisons

• Data-Transformed: Finally, forecasting and modeling capabilities are integrated to predict how a new campaign might perform based on past performance data. Activation now benefits from a fully dynamic testing approach to optimize creative and audience strategy against multiple inputs: product feed, offline signals, etc.

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Augmenting Creative Analytics with AI

Enabling enhancements that would have seemed out of reach just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence can be applied to Creative Analytics to enhance its benefits further.

• Traditional AI can uncover insights often invisible to the human eye with pattern spotting, test scaling, automated reports, and performance scaling.

• Generative AI can improve activation with insight-based campaigns and assets for iteration, as well as taxonomy checks and corrections to ensure accurate measurement, potentially saving hours of manpower.

Using traditional AI, Google’s Vision API can measure CTR (Click-Through Rate) depending on a list of objects within the creative, such as logo position, ad copy length, and product placement. Users can rely on its analysis capabilities to determine whether a blue or red background is more impactful, for example.

In collaboration with fifty-five, leading pharmaceutical company Bayer relied on Vision API to refine its precision marketing* strategy. To bolster Bayer’s robust data-driven Business Intelligence Strategy, fifty-five created a custom dashboard which the company used to determine what drove click-through and view-through rates across various audiences, 11 markets, and 64 brands.

“Precision Marketing is a priority initiative at Bayer, and the benefits are numerous,” says Emre Acikel, Global Director Digital Marketing at Bayer. “But whilst Media was more easily measured and evaluated, Creative remained the missing piece of the puzzle for us. fifty-five has worked with our internal teams and agency partners to create new types of insights that change the way we plan and execute campaigns. Our teams now have a short-cut to high-performing campaign planning through taking learnings from brands within our portfolio, and markets across the globe. The in-house dashboard is a significant step in putting insight and data at the heart of our digital marketing investments.” Bayer now personalizes over 50% of its digital media to high-value audiences for a 40% improvement in CTR and VTR.

Generative AI, on the other hand, can be leveraged for rapid asset creation to use in testing, refining each set with the insights obtained from the previous iteration. For instance, Pencil (part of the Brandtech group) allows for the quick production of ad campaigns with easily refinable design prompts.

Through these recent improvements, Creative Analytics has emerged as a key optimization practice for improved performance. If you would like to know more about fifty-five’s collaboration with Bayer, you can find the resulting case study on our website. And for a deeper dive into Creative Analytics, our replay is available, featuring expertise and insights from fifty-five’s Robin Clayton, Managing Director, and Nick Yang, Head of Media, as well as Bayer’s Emre Acikel, Global Head of Data-Driven Marketing.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

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*the right message, to the right person, at the right time