A Guide to Creative Effectiveness in 2024
With 2024 planning underway, what should be on marketers radars for the year ahead?
Written by
Isobel Bruce
January 22, 2024
3
min read
With teams returning to 2024 planning sessions this month, brands, platforms and industry voices look to their crystal balls to try and predict what the year has in store. While never a perfect science, looking at the core trends across 2023 in the marketing space can provide a roadmap for what’s ahead.
Some trends this past year were anticipated: AI became more important, digital channels consumed more attention and spend. But their impact on creative effectiveness and efficiency in 2023 and beyond was less predictable.
2023 affirmed a core advertising theme of the 2020s to date. If the 2010s offered brands new opportunities to become more advanced in their uses of media, the 2020s are set to offer brands new innovations to put the creative at the core of digital transformation efforts.
While targeting and media placements are important, their impact is negligible if the creative is subpar. As the ever astute Rory Sutherland surmised, “If you optimize targeting, that’s helping you find your customers. But good creative can actually create them.”
But while creative excellence has always been critical today the only way to achieve it at scale is with data. This brings us to the first trend of 2023:
The advertising industry’s foundations rest on creativity. But in 2023, scaling that creativity to reach new audiences rests on combining the creative with data.
Over the last two decades, data in advertising has mainly been the purview of media agencies. But new technologies have opened up marketers’ abilities to tap into a new data source, from the creative itself.
Creative excellence has always been critical because it resonates with consumers and delivers big business effects. But as the signals that previously helped optimize creative are become less reliable, and the creative production process is increasingly decentralized, achieving creative excellence is reliant on uncovering new insights from the creative itself.
Forward-leaning brands are uniting teams under Creative Excellence Departments, applying creative data across the entire business, from agency measurement to campaign and creative decisioning itself. Agencies are bound to follow suit.
Digital advertising is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ problem. On each platform, a unique algorithm determines the last mile of advertising effectiveness, built around how consumers watch content on these platforms.
Executing creative effectively at scale in 2024 means moving beyond subjective judgements about whether content is digitally suitable to objective tools that can deliver repeatable, actionable results.
CreativeX analysis of over 900,000 assets revealed over 50% of spend was put behind ads which failed to meet key platform validated guidelines. With over $450 billion predicted in digital media spend for 2024, not creating digitally suitable content means brands risk pouring millions into creatives not set up for success.
As Eric Gregoire, SVP Global Head of Strategic Marketing and Digital, Bayer summed up at Advertising Week New York: “If it's a fantastic creative idea, not executed properly, it's a missed opportunity.”
According to Kantar’s Media Reactions 2023, 67% of marketers feel positive about the possibilities of Gen AI. Gen AI offers marketers seemingly endless possibilities in terms of driving efficiencies in content production, with new tools producing increasingly complex and high quality image and video content.
But while the possibilities for content production are seemingly endless, as volume increases by 10x to 100x, brands will experience quality and decisioning bottlenecks due to there being more content than there are people who can review and approve it.
Improving and guaranteeing the creative quality of content produced by AI will be reliant on AI tools to meet the scale of the challenge. Establishing automatic checks for everything from digital suitability to brand consistency and more to ensure that even the ads the robots make for you are aligned to your brand and your existing creative learnings.
In 2024, spend behind digital channels is expected to account for almost 60% of total media spend according to Dentsu. The rise and rise of digital formats in importance has been a recurring trend for the last decade, but in 2023 seemingly everything became an advertising opportunity.
Digital channels are becoming ever more seamlessly integrated with e-commerce platforms, or establishing their own. You can now shop on Amazon directly from Meta platforms, and move seamlessly from your TikTok FYP to TikTok shop.
As everything from Uber to Walmart to Netflix to Telcos becomes an ad network, marketers will need to work even smarter to keep up with the changing content requirements of each platform and align their message to the environment where it’s being received.
The key takeaway?
Speaking at DMEXCO, Aude Gandon, described marketing as “a blend of science and art”. For Gandon, “The science of the new digital tools, the science of the new data, is in service of the thing we’ve always known and we’ve always done, which is the art of creativity.”
In 2024, advertisers need to look at the art of creativity and the science of new technology as two halves of the solution to the greater overarching problem. Creative effectiveness cannot be achieved without both.
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