If you’re involved in the creation of a campaign, as a marketer or as an agency, it might be tempting to think of the campaign as a holistic, connected body of work, where the idea and its creative elements are adapted and customized to the media channel it appears in. The reality of the consumer experience is different: people will be exposed to different parts of the campaign, and it’s possible that some of the least effective executions will be seen more often. If the effectiveness of individual executions isn’t known as part of a campaign, it could lead to the wrong media channel choices and optimizations, and wasted investment.
Money spent on your ad campaigns, can sometimes feel like something of a gamble in terms of the tangible return you get on your investment. And with the ever-expanding opportunity of choice in terms of where and how you can now spend, taking control is key.
Unlocking the door to control
Kantar’s LINK+ creative testing is well known for its ability to identify and diagnose how ads can be improved before they go live. In fact, ads which are optimized in line with Kantar recommendations on average see a +38% increase in their in-market efficiency. However, not all advertisers and agencies have time to significantly re-edit before campaigns go live.
Recent interrogation of our LINK+ databases has validated the value of further increasing the control you can have over your budget simply by selecting the best ads from a set of options. We investigated the extent of the range of creative effectiveness seen across all the individual elements within any one campaign and were surprised by how broad this could be. When ad agencies and marketers view campaigns as a whole entity, are they making enough informed asset-level decisions?
Fully understanding the value of each individual campaign creative unlocks the door to greater control. Researching creative via LINK+ on Kantar Marketplace is a fast and super-flexible way to determine the overall effectiveness of individual assets as well as identifying ways to make the ads better. LINK+ covers all major media from digital to TV to print & outdoor, enabling both optimization and selection improvements. The solution is also evolving to meet the dynamic needs of our clients. For example, a recent upgrade to our outdoor testing capabilities reflects a growing demand for deeper insights into digital out of home ads, particularly intuitive responses, and the all-important potential for the creative to capture attention.
Kantar also offers LINK AI, which uses machine learning and data from LINK+ to predict how a typical sample of consumers would rate your ad. This is achieved without the need to recruit respondents, making it faster and more cost effective to check all the individual video assets in your campaigns. It is particularly helpful for extending testing for digital videos across multiple platforms and markets.
The selection door unlocked by LINK creative screening
We discovered that picking the best from two or more ads can potentially increase both short-term sales effectiveness and the ability of campaigns to build future demand for your brand. Campaigns researching single media, showed an average range of between 12-17 points across a combination of these measures and interestingly, this was more than double for multi-media campaigns, where the average range seen was between 26-30 points. And remember, this is just the average the range of results for any one individual campaign can in fact be much wider. You don’t need to have an award-winning ad in your portfolio to see major differences between your best and worst assets.
This is also an historical view, based on campaigns researched in the past, and we will not have tested all assets for all these campaigns. As the number of campaign assets increases, it is likely the range of performance between best and worst ads will increase, along with the opportunity to improve ROI via informed ad selection.
How will this help you?
Knowing that the effectiveness range across any campaign can be broad, particularly multi-media campaigns, highlights the importance of understanding all the individual elements. Each creative may be designed to do different jobs and how they all fit together is important, but being armed with that all important knowledge of effectiveness can be a powerful part of the puzzle when it comes to selecting creative and allocating media budget.
Holding that key of effectiveness knowledge allows not only creative optimization and selection opportunities, but also opens the door to control when it comes to planning your media spend, enhancing ROI and avoiding the risk of more people only seeing the least effective elements of your campaign rather than the best.
Kantar makes it easy to inject creative learning into your media planning decisions via our newly updated LINK Campaign Calculator. This calculator splices LINK creative scores with our cross media understanding of how campaigns build brands from LIFT. It allows you to understand which ads you should invest in most. Following the recent upgrade it now covers a wider range of digital media, has more in-depth ability to encompass media spend, and new longer term predictive capabilities.
Get in touch or request a demo of Kantar Marketplace to find out how we can help you open the door to control, via both optimisation AND selection of the best ads for your campaign.
