Creative Challenges (and How to Solve Them)

Creative Challenges (and How to Solve Them): This is the second part of a 2-part blog series on creative challenges and solutions.

Creative Challenge #2: Improve the quality of creative

This is the second part of a 2-part blog series on creative challenges and solutions.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but is great creative in the eye of the consumer or is there a way to systematically improve the quality of your advertising content? And if so, how can the method be replicated and measured to ensure the ad performs as well as it possibly can? If you’re a large brand and spending significant budget on marketing, you understand the importance of not only consistency, but quality. After all, what value does advertising bring to your organization if it doesn’t perform?

The first step to improved creative is establishing transparency over what is being built. This is where a Creative Management Platform (CMP) comes in to play. All creatives (both live and works-in-progress) are stored in the CMP for various purposes such as reviews, sign-offs, audits, creative workshops and improvement sessions.

The second step is to ensure the creatives are “good quality.” So, how is this defined? In this context, good quality means:

• Creatives are adjusted to the media channel
• Input assets are of appropriate quality
• Reasonable use of modern ad technology and formats
• They respect the standards for a good user experience
• Creatives are aligned with the campaign objectives

But good quality alone is not enough. It’s important to understand how creatives are linked to the actual performance of advertising. For example, how does the creative impact brand lift or conversions? The Celtra CMP plays a key role in this process.

The Celtra CMP facilitates the collection of all the relevant metrics – it’s the source of all creatives; it provides creative serving for 3rd party served advertising; it works with agency ad servers and links their data to creatives; it collects analytics and maps it to creatives for all other channels and platforms and it’s integrated with attribution vendors, establishing a link to conversions. Through these integrations, data is collected for all campaigns and creatives automatically.

Next, it’s possible to measure brand lift because of the unique role of the CMP in the ecosystem – providing the integrations with providers of user identity needed to execute tests (separation of control and treatment groups, etc.), collection of performance metrics (and surveys for brand recognition), and the ability to calculate lifts including both creative and media elements.

Lastly, you’ll want to use this system of measuring and evaluation to learn what really drives performance. This requires repeating tests in a smart way by modifying elements of the campaigns and creatives (i.e. A/B testing). The CMP supports this with a best-in-class authoring tool and dynamic creative capabilities that enable quick iteration.

Once you’ve implemented, measured, iterated and tested, you can share best practices with all of the producing teams, ensuring quality improvement across the board. High performing ads, here you come!