The value of normative data

While marketers are often fierce competitors, there are a number of ways in which they can benefit from each other’s creative successes and failures. In a silo, marketers are faced with the ever-expanding complexities of the ads measurement world. Creatively, the complexities of measurement are amplified further by technical limitations but also by the nature of creativity.

Each brand must decide how to creatively express themselves and identify what works under different conditions (seasonality, audience, objective, channel, etc.) which can be extremely challenging. VidMob’s AI-powered Creative Intelligence solution helps individual brands uncover creative drivers of performance (objects, actions, talent, color, etc..).

This provides a granular look for brands, but what happens when creative drivers are aggregated across various dimensions, such as industry, platform, and objective? The aggregation of creative element & performance data unlocks normative insights and facilitates a symbiotic relationship between marketers without any proprietary learnings being exposed.

This creates a classic, ‘I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine’, relationship.

Below are some examples of normative insights to better understand:

• There is a 2x lift in Purchase Rate when CTAs are introduced at second 0 compared to after the first two seconds (CPG, Personal Care, Facebook & Instagram).
• Videos with 1–2 scene changes in the opening three seconds have a 70% greater view rate than assets with 3+ scene changes at the opening (CPG, YouTube).
• Ads with higher text contrast against background visuals have a 8% greater 2s View Rate compared to those with low text contrast (CPG, TikTok).

Beyond brand creative insights

Beyond brand level creative insights, we’ve aggregated creative element & performance data to provide users of the Agile Creative Studio the benefit of macro creative trends that lead to measurably better assets.

These insights often complement or supplement brand specific insights but generally provide users with a broad perspective of the industry at large. When brands require a reference point and lack creative precedent, normative data can be extremely helpful in providing a data-backed approach to creative decision making. In addition, reference data & insights from the industry also help promote more experimentation, leading to more brand-specific learning & a wider diversity of creative approaches. If you see the market using certain creative techniques or messages, that may help inspire your own brand creativity.

We’ve been at this for a while, and because of that, we’ve been able to gain insight into the longitudinal & cyclical nature of creative trends. Another benefit of long term data aggregation is in the size of the data source itself. Generally, the more data you have the greater the opportunity to uncover significant insights with more precision and across platforms, placements, objectives, and metrics.

Building normative data

While it may be more technically challenging, companies in the ads measurement space should strive to build robust normative data sets; without it, marketers are not seeing the full picture. In fact, Nielsen has found that brands that do not account for all campaign effectiveness drivers in their measurement approach have an 80% increased average error rate in forecasting ability. This in turn has led to 68% misattributed ROI (Busignani,L., 2021).

While multiple data & measurement sources should be references to fully understand effectiveness and guide decision making, creative norms data is powerful in its own right. Today, it helps marketers understand what visual components of creative generally drive significant differences in the metrics they care about.

Tomorrow, I believe there are a number of ways we can leverage the robustness of norms to make even more informed creative decisions. Namely, using norms data to be more predictive of creative trends and outcomes based on the visual components within an ad. Think pretesting but much quicker than traditional methodologies…more on this down the road.

While creative, to many, feels like a constant moving target, my hope is that continuous innovation around our data & our capabilities will help provide marketers with more confidence as they jump into their next campaign. Norms, I believe, will be an integral part to the overall picture but certainly not the only reference points brands should consider. The key in the years to come will be for brands to recognize the benefits of participating in blinded norms data sets — in doing so they will find it much easier to address creative challenges.

Sources:

Busignani, L. 2021, “The Power of Effective Outcomes Measurement in the New Normal”