Why Creative is still the undisputed champ of ad campaigns
It’s long been understood that creative quality is the biggest driver of ad campaign success, when compared to other variables such as reach, targeting and brand. The formula is simple: good creative sells products, and bad creative doesn’t.
Platforms and tech have changed dramatically in the past decade, and other factors have become important for advertisers to consider, but creative is still king.
Until recently advertisers could get away with under-optimised creative due to the safety net of super-precise targeting on platforms like Meta. But new data privacy laws have lead to diminishing amounts of data being available to advertisers, which makes granular targeting less effective, and sometimes not possible at all.
And that means creative now has to work harder to make campaigns perform. Or put another way, poor creative will lead to poor performance.
Earlier this year, research published by Kantar and WARC added weight to this case, finding that ads with higher creative quality generate more than four times as much profit.
The New Challenge For Brands
The real challenge for brands today is keeping up with the creative needs of audiences. More creative is needed than ever before to meet different audience segments, on different platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Amazon. When A/B testing is thrown into the mix, the volume of creative needed by brands multiplies even further.
In many cases, this creative needs to include video, which offers a richer and more attention-worthy experience for users, but has traditionally been slow and expensive to create. It also needs to be relevant, and with the fast-paced nature of social media, that means content needs to be delivered quickly.
These factors present a challenge for marketers, especially when budgets are tightening and pressure on short-term conversions increases.
A Modern Day Solution
The solution is creative that punches above its weight – video ads optimised for each platform, delivered quickly, and that doesn’t come with huge production fees. So how is that possible?
One method is to take existing brand assets such as product photos or TVC campaigns and transform them into new creatives, built for the specific nuances of each platform. This process cuts out the pre-production phase, and studio days, instead leveraging content the brand has already developed and remixing it into something new, with platform best practices in-mind.
With a streamlined process that focuses on post-production, new video assets can be created quickly and for a significantly lower cost per asset than traditional creative production. Of course this approach relies on the availability of base assets such as product photography, but once this is collected, a high volume of new creative variations can be produced continuously.
That means ‘always-on’ creative production which delivers new ads with agility. These ads can respond to social media trends and react to the performance data of other ads, meaning better performance from campaigns.
This approach is perfect for the modern media landscape which demands more from marketing teams than ever before, and it's something Bumbl specialises in supporting brands with.
To learn more about the creative solutions we offer contact us here.
