Sign up to get the latest industry trends, data stories, and creative inspiration direct to your inbox.

You've spent the past decade embracing placement, keyword, and audience optimization to drive increased ROAS. As the industry matures, the “last mile” of marketing effectiveness has proven the toughest. It's time to tackle marketers' blindspot for ROI: the creative itself.

Here are three bits of advice from marketers using creative data to drive business impact.

Takeaways

1. Your creative basics: Adopt proven creative drivers into your creative production like YouTube’s ABCDs.
2. Unleash creativity through data: Take informed risks through experimentation. Testing new creative drivers will help generate richer creative insights
3. Build a culture of effectiveness: Liberate your marketers to work on new ideas with a common language for creative measurement.

Your Creative Basics

Platform recommended best practices are well-evidenced drivers of improved media efficiencies. Simply implementing ABCDs into your video ads can deliver 31-38% sales lift and ROAS, plus a 17% long-term brand lift. But adherence today is low; less than 30% of YouTube impressions feature ABCD-optimized ads.

To scale ABCDs, Eric Gregoire recommends translating “these drivers into something your marketers will understand.” For example, “boiling it down to a Creative Quality Score so you understand, for all your assets – based on the channels – how you are adopting the ABCDs.” This is because “the most important thing is nailing the basics and making sure all brands across all our markets are using those best practices – it would be silly not to maximize those dollars.”

Unleash Creativity Through Data

Infuse data into the creative process to take informed risks. As le Port says, “you need to experiment and take risks, but not on everything. It’s about knowing the rules of the game.”

Once you’ve nailed the ABCDs, you can experiment with new creative drivers. How you use people, contextualize the product, and frame your narrative can change based on what your objectives are.

Gregoire reinforces this point, “at some point, we will plateau [with the basics],” and when that happens, “we will have a lot of data we can add to the engine” to “create more relevant recommendations”, “optimize for different objectives”, and “push boundaries.”

Building a culture of data-led experimentation will provide creators the confidence and knowledge they need to play with creative principles and “push the boundaries” for effectiveness rewards. Rallying them around one metric - the CQS - puts effectiveness at the heart of the creative process.

Build a Culture of Effectiveness

Liberate your marketers to work on new ideas through new learnings and ABCDs.

The ACBDs will not replace creative ideas. They are execution guidelines that help your ideas land. Nailing the ABCDs and experimenting for richer creative insights are practical ways for your marketers to flex their creativity and generate new creative ideas.

To liberate your marketers to do their best work, provide a common, neutral, and objective language for effectiveness. Creative data provides neutrality and objectivity. Rather than limiting creative ideas, help your team adapt their ideas for each channel. And channel mastery will lead to more fresh creative ideas, more frequently.

“Creative is one of the biggest drivers of your campaign performance. The better the creative, the better the media efficiencies. And now we’ve gotten to the stage where we can track that data. And you see it in the numbers. It creates momentum.”

→ See how the world's leading brands are using creative data to drive business impact:

• How Bayer Drove Effectiveness through the Creative Quality Score
• How Barilla Tapped into Creative Data to Transform their Marketing Measurement
• How Nestlé drove 66% ROAS on Meta