Uniting creative and media to learn which ads work

Effectiveness

EVERY CREATIVE CAMPAIGN INVOLVES AN ELEMENT of guesswork. Market research, past campaign performance and a marketer’s experience can only take a brand so far. Eventually, a lot of resources must be poured into a single big idea that is typically built on assumptions – with no guarantee of success.

Automated Creative (AC), a creative services consultancy founded in the UK, hopes to put an end to that guesswork. By leveraging automation and machine learning, AC can create hundreds of iterations of a digital ad, then test them to improve campaign results and media efficiency, while giving clients insight into why certain ad concepts work better than others.

“Many agencies will tell you which things work,” says Dan Moseley, AC’s managing director for North America. “What we’re trying to do is tell you why.”

After servicing North American clients from the UK for the last few years, AC made its official foray into North America in February. Its two full-time staff in Toronto mentor clients on its in-house Creator tool and lean on the global team in London as well as freelancers across Canada and the U.S. for large or multi-market campaigns.

Creator brings ad testing and creation into one platform. After AC’s designers establish a dynamic creative template to test – a unit containing rules around branding, images and copy – the platform can quickly build hundreds of variations of an ad concept in any size for any platform. Once the ads are deployed, Creator measures their performance to identify the ones that resonate most, and enables the client to incorporate what’s learned from that process into the next phase or “sprint” of a campaign.

AC strategically tags each iteration of an ad and measures its in-market performance using machine learning to gather insights at scale, Moseley explains. So, if one hundred variations of an ad are created using different colours, backgrounds, images and copy lines, Creator can measure the performance of each iteration and return insights on details such as the kinds of designs and tones of voice that deliver the best results.

The findings are fed into the next phase of testing and optimization. “We don't just set and forget campaigns,” Moseley says. “We constantly act and iterate on our data.”

That ongoing process helps eliminate the speculation of campaign development and sometimes destroys long-held category assumptions.

For instance, working with AC, Diageo’s Talisker Whisky tested ads based on the occasions most closely associated with the category, such as birthdays and life milestones. But during a creative sprint, it noticed consumers responded more frequently to content that says “sorry.” Performance was driven by ads that suggested apologies go down easy when sharing a bottle of Talisker, opening a new avenue of creative messaging for the brand.

BELOW: AC’s Creator tool identified an opportunity for Talisker Whisky to break category norms with messages saying “sorry” – specifically that apologies go down easier when sharing a bottle.

Similarly, work with Durex unveiled that messages of empathy and consent drove the greatest performance with a Gen Z audience in APAC markets. Creative that reflected the emotional considerations of sex drove four times more leads than expected and reduced lead cost by 286%.

And with Nivea skincare, the use of real people in ads outperformed studio-edited imagery with models every time, resulting in a fourfold improvement on add to basket and a drop of 60% in the cost per quality visit to the brand’s site.

“We can move brands from knowing which ads work to knowing why those ads work,” says Moseley. It’s important for brands to have access to these insights in a country where demographics are constantly evolving and diversifying, he adds.

Clients can license Creator to run and optimize their own campaigns. But Moseley – whose resume includes stints at We Are Social, Leo Burnett and Publicis – believes his shop’s potential is best achieved when its tech is combined with the expertise of its staff, most of whom have creative agency backgrounds.

“We have a guided service where we add a strategic layer into everything and build the test with the client,” he says. “We help to educate them around dynamic technology and digital marketing more broadly, and act as brand consultants that help bring the media and creative disciplines together.”

A member of the AC team can sit with clients and work out assumptions about their product or brand that can be looked at through an unbiased, data-driven lens, he says. “The sooner we’re involved, the sooner we can drive better performance and deliver improved creative.”

CONTACT: Dan Moseley Managing director, North America dan.moseley@automatedcreative.net