Did you know that creative is responsible for 86% of sales lift in digital ads? Isabella and Mike explore the importance of high-quality tailored creative in the digital advertising space.
Isabella discusses several approaches and helpful tools for creating high-performing ads, focussing on testing and experimentation.
- 00:06 – The importance of creative experimentation
- 01:19 – Gaining stakeholder buy-in for investment in creative
- 03:20 – Platform-first creative and UGC
- 04:50 – Tailoring your creative for brand awareness vs conversions
- 07:39 – How to use modular creative to get more value from your marketing assets
Mike Weir: How important is creative?
Isabella Smith: Creative is incredibly important. It’s often the lion’s share in terms of driving campaign effectiveness. That’s been loads of studies on this. There’s a recent Nielsen study which shows that creative is responsible for 86% of sales lift in digital ads.
Mike Weir: That’s massive, isn’t it? I suppose that’s that cut point, isn’t it, where really like adverts have to grab your attention, in order to hold your attention has to be novel or they have to tie in to like a human motivation. But it also create some sort of emotional cut-through. I suppose that’s really interesting because obviously creative is very subjective, it’s different emotions, different pictures mean different things to different people. So what sort of tools would you use or recommend or what approaches would you recommend to do with that?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, it’s exactly that. Basically, creative is completely subjective. We’re trying to reach a whole range of different people who will fall into different age groups, different genders, have different behaviours and interests, even different markets and all of these things will change how they feel about an ad and how they respond, like you say. The way that we can try and tackle this has to be through testing and it has to be through experimentation. What will work for one brand might not work for your brand and it can’t ever be a one-size-fits-all.
Mike Weir: Why do you think creative is so challenging to get signed off given it is so important?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think a lot of it comes back to the point around subjectivity. If you think about an in-house marketing team and the senior stakeholders who they’re reporting into, every person in that room is going to have an opinion on which direction the creative should go in and what the creative should be saying, which can often mean that…
Mike Weir: Design by committee?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly. Which means it can be hard to sign off and that approach is leaning on subjective opinions. When really those decisions should be made based on data and research.
Mike Weir: Exactly, it’s like the creative most of the time is for the customer, right? That’s who that’s who the end user is, that’s who it’s for, but often the people who are making the decisions are very, very far removed from the end user. And that leads to all sorts of challenges, doesn’t it?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly.
Mike Weir: What sort of research techniques would you use to try and tackle that?
Isabella Smith: So it really varies, lots of platforms these days have AB testing in and stuff like that, but things like brand campaigns, you might want to consider, things like eye tracking studies, EEG, there’s also online tools that you can use that test emotionality of adverts. So the emotional resonance of an advert will affect its memorability. So usually positive emotions like joy are often used, but also increasingly they use negative emotions then to spike with positive because that gap between the two increases the advert’s effectiveness. I think there are tools like EEGs out there that can be used to measure brain level reactions, but that’s kind of like control studies. Another option is things like panel testing where effectively what we can do is we can take a piece of creative or up to ten pieces of creative, and we can show them to people’s audiences and we get them to impose the emotionality onto a piece of creative. And therefore, by doing that, we can build out what association someone’s brain is making when they see a picture or see an image.
Mike Weir: Kind of like the ink blot test that you see in lots of films, where they’re like “how does it make you feel?” We can test the creative using that.
Isabella Smith: So obviously a lot of people start off with creative concepts or creative ideas, like a big brand idea or a message. There is so many different devices and places that adverts can end up these days
Mike Weir: Why do you think that’s such a challenge for brands to get that right?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, it’s often a mistake which we see from advertisers. There’s a real need for your creative to be platform first. The rise of UGC over the last few years is a great example of this and shows how advertisers have had to adapt to try and communicate in the way that customers want them to communicate to them.
Mike Weir: When you talk about User Generated Content, are you talking about channels like TikTok? Where are you most seeing that be effective?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly. TikTok has been the driving force behind that but now we’re seeing that across Reels and YouTube Shorts as well.
Mike Weir: Yeah, I remember ages ago seeing an IKEA carousel where basically the imagery was actually from someone’s Instagram and they were putting it onto the website and I thought, what a great way of making something trustworthy because obviously people are always wondering like, how does this fit when you get the piece of furniture home? So taking the actual Instagram, it has a double whammy of like social proof and trust. So yeah, that was really interesting.
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly. But it does mean that we require a lot more creative because every bit of creative then needs to be platform first. Then when you layer in what we’re trying to do with that ad, which objectives and KPIs are we trying to drive, a brand ad is trying to trigger a very different response from a direct sales ad and our creative needs to reflect that. Brands ads need to be more emotive. We want to drive a feeling or an emotion from our audience, whereas a sales driving ad, that’s when we’re looking for a direct response. We want them to act immediately off the back of it.
Mike Weir: So I suppose when you think about a brand campaign and a sales campaign, what are the key differences?
Isabella Smith: So we are essentially driving a different reaction from our audience with the sales driving creative we want to be driving immediate action. We want a strong call to action, maybe for them to click to site, maybe them to purchase or generate a lead. With our brand ads, it’s a different response we’re looking for. It’s more about driving emotion and feeling from the audience that we’re communicating with.
Mike Weir: That’s really interesting because you’ve got effectively, from a brand campaign where you’re trying to be emotive people think about people as being rational human beings, but actually we’re not and actually our emotional state massively influences what we’re going to do next and how we remember and how we feel.
Isabella Smith: I always remember this term like imagery can be soaked with emotion so we can sort of get a feeling or a sensation from simply looking at a piece of imagery. So choosing the right imagery to give the right emotion is half the challenge. But then two people can look at the same image and feel completely differently about it. So that’s a really interesting one and then I suppose on the flip side, on the sales one, things like urgency and like practical measures, discounting all of that stuff again can be like changed with psychology perspective.
Mike Weir: And when you’re talking about like UGC, like does UGC have to be genuine? User Generated Content traditionally is like, things from Instagram, that type of content. Is that a trend that’s continuing or is that a trend that is up or down?
Isabella Smith: We’re seeing UGC transform all the time. Influencer Content and Content Creators are a huge part of many brands advertising spend now and there’s much more professionalism behind that.
Mike Weir: That’s really interesting because in a way, UGC is designed to inspire trust, I wonder if in the future, as everyone starts to do it, the effects of the trust, the effects of the trustiworthiness that made it so potent in the first place might start to decrease
Isabella Smith: Yeah, that’s that’s a really good point actually and something which will be interesting to check.
Mike Weir: And that’s why you need to run the experiment, I guess?
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly. What will have worked probably a couple of years ago might not work in the next year or two years and we’re constantly seen an evolving landscape with creative, which comes back to our point about experimentation. It’s not a case of we’re experimenting to get to an end goal. There needs to be a constant cycle of experimentation to make sure that our message and our creative is speaking to our audience in the right way.
Mike Weir: It’s exactly the same on websites like, if something works in an advert, the chances are if you experiment with it, the same type of messaging might work, but it’s interesting what a microcosm a brand is. So like, two brands of the exact same category, can have two very different user groups. I think people wrongly assume that like Nike and Adidas customers are the same, for example, and actually they’re not.
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly.
Mike Weir: Tell me a bit more about Modular Creative.
Isabella Smith: Modular Creative is essentially about changing certain elements of the shoot at the shoot stage. This approach means that we can then chop and change later on, creating different variations by switching those elements in or out.
Mike Weir: That’s really interesting because I suppose from a testing perspective, you need to have those different variations pre-made. You can’t just turn up on the day and expect to have 20 different images.
Isabella Smith: Yeah, exactly. One of the challenges we have with the experimentation-led process, which I’ve been talking about, is actually access to the assets that we then need to test. One way around this is making sure that we get the Modular Creative at the shoot stage so we can then make the changes post-production.
Mike Weir: It’s really interesting because there’s a web design philosophy from someone called Brad Foss. Basically, what he talks about is taking the smallest possible elements and then building things back from the elements. What this means is, let’s say you take an interface with a wireframe; the wireframe is then modular. You’ve got your hero image, your columns on the left and the right, and by designing in these fixed patterns, everything breaks back down from the larger scale to the smallest scale of like a letter or an element or a color. By using them consistently, it allows you to modulate your designs into lots of different spaces.
Isabella Smith: And I suppose that’s probably a very similar way of looking at that type of creative, I guess.
Mike Weir: Yeah, exactly.
