Closing the Loop of Creative Optimization with Consumer Insights

A college professor of mine used to say, “If the world’s greatest artist never showed their art, no one would know they existed.” His argument was simple - the world has to both see the work and react to it before they can form any consensus about the quality. He also suggested that at the moment an artist presented something - it no longer belonged to them. At that point, it belonged to the public, and the public’s response was the determining factor in the success of the work. 

The same applies to the success of your advertising. We all know that measuring the success of a campaign can be a moving target, but the end goal comes down to evaluating the public’s reaction. For some industries, success is easier to follow because it’s all digital, like in travel or retail where success equates to online purchases. But for other verticals the measure of success is further removed from the impression or measurable action that viewers take online. For automotive, the best possible outcome is a car sold in real-life at a dealership, for pharmaceutical clients, it’s the public’s awareness of a drug or treatment, and usually for CPG, it’s picking up a different product than you usually do while scanning the shelves.

There are many providers out there who seek to measure these off-line outcomes, but many of the insights come too late to make meaningful messaging optimizations. Which is a shame, because an insight post-campaign is a diminished asset. The marketers dilemma has become one of “what to do with data after the fact.” If you’ve run a successful campaign with hundreds of individual creatives across many creative formats and publishers, you are left happy but contemplating what creative attribute drove the best performance. The ability to understand these attributes and decision on them, in near real-time, is the true value of creative optimization. 

While creative optimization technology has existed for well over a decade, what’s changed is the ability to connect performance data to the delivery of creatives closer to real time. In-store traffic, visits, incremental visits, sales, sales lift, consideration, and awareness has typically lagged behind a campaign’s flight with thirty, sixty and in some cases ninety day look back windows. Now, through partnerships with providers like Cuebiq, we can mobilize these types of data faster than before and reconcile it against delivery logs. We have gone beyond correlative digital actions to develop open strategies that factor in real-world metrics. 

By opening up optimization to external data sources, measuring creative success is no longer a moving target. The elegance of this solution lies in its simplicity. We can deliver, measure, and evaluate which version drove performance with metrics like incremental visits, then using rotation logic, show that creative to more individuals. Not based on a click, or a completion, or online event. Innovid’s open, interoperable, and independent platform allows us to augment delivery based on the metrics from a marketer’s trusted consumer insights partner. From there it’s just a matter of using weighting, rotation, and testing to drive performance higher and higher. 

With the ability to optimize your digital creative across TV, video, and display, the only question that remains is what metric matters most to you?