It’s All About the Creative

When looking at the various reach and frequency reports available to marketers, the metrics generally focus on a certain time period, campaign, publisher, or network. These are very important in understanding macro-level trends, but there is often one piece of the equation that is overlooked: the creative.

In bringing a campaign to life, there is so much emphasis put on an idea, and then the focus turns to where the media runs. With that, creative often becomes an afterthought. The measurement of creative performance should be maintained throughout the life of a creative. 

In reality, there are often many unanswered questions: How can measurement help planning, investment, analytics, and strategy work closer together on which creative/version performs best? How can measurement inform dynamic creative in real time to make sure the version resonating the most is delivered more often? How do I know when my creative has reached its wear-in or wear-out points?

Creative Meet Measurement. Measurement Meet Creative.

Traditionally, measurement has taken a macro-level view of program-level and commercial ratings for linear. Anything beyond that was not considered due to methodology and data capture. With the growth of digital and CTV, impression-based measurement has opened the door to new ways of thinking and incredible granularity. 

Aligning measurement with creative is paramount. There have never been more ways to buy media, and the walls are getting higher in these gardens. The market needs an interoperable solution, with the right publisher approvals, to capture all creative versions without an additional pixel. Marketers need to report on creative-level reach and frequency, on top of which creative is driving the most outcomes. 

Additionally, marketers need to better understand the creative saturation point of wear out. Wear out is not constrained to one publisher, so a frequency cap with a publisher may not prevent a person or household from being massively overexposed. There needs to be a dynamic trigger, from an ad server, to automatically serve a new version of the creative or the next creative in the sequence to ensure the media is working as hard as it can without overexposing consumers.

Marketers also need to be able to quickly optimize new creative versions or messaging at the ad-server level, based on metrics like reach and frequency that are measured while the campaign is in flight. These optimizations can happen in all types of deals — upfront, direct, and obviously, programmatic — because there is no financial commitment. Flexibility is key in this narrative to allow for measurement to quickly talk to the ad server, which can automatically serve a new version dynamically.

Where Do We Need to Go?

The converged TV viewing experience has become so seamless that the consumer (I can 100% speak for myself in this example) rarely knows what network or streaming service they are watching, let alone show, but it’s the creative that resonates enough to take an action. That’s why measurement should lean more into creative metrics.

On top of the outcomes component, we need to identify the point of market saturation for creative to better understand when it starts hitting new households at a decreasing rate, which will trigger an ad-serving action to take place. Understanding potential reach of a network or publisher is critical when buying media, but swapping creatives and delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time is the holy grail.

Frequency capping at the publisher level needs to go, while creative capping should be in. For example, over the life of a campaign, an advertiser puts a monthly frequency cap of 6 on each publisher partner. Publisher A delivers a frequency of 6, while Publisher B delivers a frequency of 10. Publisher B is frowned upon because of over frequency, but what if they were running two creatives instead of one? What if there was a sequence in place to deliver a more personalized message? What if the measurement is telling you that the optimal frequency is different from the previous campaign’s message based on a lower-funnel KPI?

Innovid’s global platform, InnovidXP, combines cross-platform ad delivery, dynamic creative personalization, and measurement for the linear, CTV, and digital universe — all wrapped in an interoperable, identity infrastructure. Within a single platform, marketers can measure the reach and frequency of each piece of creative, regardless of which publisher it ran on. Once the frequency hits a certain threshold, they can optimize to the next creative in the sequence or a new version. For outcome-driven clients, InnovidXP measures which creative is performing best, and our ad server can give more weight with statistical significance to that creative version, automatically.

Let’s get back to the creative with Innovid!