If your approach to ensuring digital campaign effectiveness is to throw the content out there and make decisions based on real-time data ONLY… then you really are gambling with your brand’s success. argues Kantar Marketplace's Head of Creative Excellence, Lynne Deason. And in today’s hyper competitive, results-focussed environment it’s a gamble you can’t afford to take. But don’t take my word for it – Listen to what the data tell us!

±      The chance of your effective TV ad being as successful on YouTube is like flipping a coin, it’s 50/50.

±      Over a third of digital ads have no or even a negative impact on brand associations.

±      A quarter have negative ROI.

Source: Kantar Marketplace LINK database, Kantar Cross Media database

There has never been a more exciting, nor a more challenging time, to be developing advertising. Marketers have more places and ways to connect with their audiences than ever before. GenAI offers the potential to create lots more content at breakneck speed and lower cost. Ads on digital platforms have immense opportunities to be creatively exciting! But (and this is a big but) the ability to get real-time feedback on the performance of digital assets has led to a giant industry malfunction.

As the expression goes, what you measure is what gets made: digital ads have become too focussed on generating short-term results or in truth, ads that lead to some kind of interaction from people who encounter them. Given that clicks don’t correlate with commercial outcomes in either the short- or long-term, and more realistically capture a purchase that was already going to be made, the industry has been creating advertising on digital platforms that has been doing an injustice to their true potential. OUCH!

Creating effective digital content can feel painful, and many brands are underleveraging its potential. Get it right and it can be rocket-fuel for success in both the short term and the long-term.

The obvious answer is to pretest ads before you invest your hard-earned media money behind them. A whopping 76% of marketers think that all major assets in a campaign should be tested.* There is however, a disconnect between what marketers think and what they do! Oftentimes, the sheer volume of digital assets and the speed with which they are created and need to be deployed creates a perceived barrier to consistently doing what marketers believe to be the right course of action.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Dual pain relief in the form of Kantar Marketplace and Kantar’s AI solutions mean these barriers are complete misconceptions, perceived or imagined pain points that no longer exist – they need to be well and truly banished to the past. Survey results from LINK+ can be available within as few as six hours and AI generated results using LINK AI can be generated within as little as 15 minutes! The associated cost is also significantly less than you’d imagine.

AI enables you to do what was previously inconceivable in terms of time and cost. For example, in less than a month we researched over 11,000 ads for Google to explore and expand upon the ABCD framework for developing effective YouTube ads.

Historically, Unilever tested only a small proportion of their digital video assets and in essence, were investing blindly. By adopting LINK AI for Digital, Unilever can now achieve greater speed and scale of testing within their digital budgets enabling them to make informed decisions ahead of launching digital campaigns. They also use this approach to cost effectively and quickly measure competitor campaigns, applying the understanding of what is and isn’t working for competitors to increase the effectiveness of their own content. Neha Sharma, Global Brand Engagement Lead at Unilever said "LINK AI for Digital has enabled us make quick decisions, pick from our best creatives, test video edits and even measure competitor campaigns with speed and at scale." 

Businesses that thrive on a culture of creative effectiveness adopt a hybrid survey and AI approach to optimise, evaluate, and understand the effectiveness of their creative. It enables them to maximise the commercial contribution that advertising investment delivers now and in the future. They can make informed business decisions before investing, ensuring media money goes behind the assets that are optimised and are holistically the most effective. They can use AI derived learnings to optimise media plans on the fly. As part of a commitment to continuously learning and improving the effectiveness of their brand communications, it equips businesses not only with facts but also an understanding of the ‘why’, which is leveraged to optimise what follows in the future for the featured brand and across the whole business.

At Kantar we have always applied technology for the benefits it reaps, not for the sake of it. We’ve been using AI and machine learning as an integral part of how we do business for over 15 years. Above all, we believe in delivering faster insights to build bolder, more successful brands.

To learn more about how you can use AI to increase your creative and marketing effectiveness, get in touch with me at lynne.deason@kantar.com.

*Kantar Media Reactions Study