[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]
Go back to Blog
Yannick Wittenauer
Published on 15 July 2024
While media optimization gets all the attention, creative optimization often gets left behind.
But everyone agrees that great Creative is crucial for campaign success. That’s why brands are clamoring for ad tech that helps them measure and improve their ad effectiveness.
In the new era of video advertising, the key might not be finding the next big innovation. It’s more about combining proven strategies with powerful technology.
That’s what Creative Optimization is all about.
Creative Optimization represents a move away from a media-first approach to a creative-first focus, emphasizing the importance of deeply understanding and adapting an audience.
It’s a strategy that involves tailoring ad creatives to align with the target audiences — like their motivations, communication styles, emotions, and values. It maximizes the effectiveness of advertising campaigns while respecting user privacy. Even Meta said: “Creative is the new targeting”.
Note that Creative Optimization is a proven approach for predictively identifying the best-performing assets. The goal is about working smarter, without endlessly creating content through AI capabilities, but achieving better results with less production.
This not only boosts campaign performance but also promotes sustainability.
Creative is known to be the number one driver for effective ROI, both short term and long term, reducing CPAs and increasing ROAS.
According to Luma, Crea Tech and Creative Effectiveness “sit on a spectrum from evolutionary to revolutionary”.
In the 2024 State of Digital report, Luma highlights the game-changing potential of AI-driven Creative Optimization. It discusses an inflection point where the focus will shift significantly toward creatives.
“Software that assists with data, workflow, and media optimizes for efficiency whereas for creative and content, it’s software that optimizes for effectiveness. At the end of the day, we think it’s the latter that will drive better outcomes.”
In this spectrum, Creative Optimization enhances performance by:
Nevertheless, marketing teams still encounter several significant internal and external hurdles with Creative Optimization, including:
Thus, integrating advanced technologies isn’t just about adopting new tools; it fundamentally alters campaign strategies and reshapes collaboration and organization.
Anyway, the revolution in Creative Optimization is already here. Big names like Cadbury, Nestlé, and P&G are unlocking new levels of success by embracing this smarter approach.
We can divide two primary strategies within Creative Optimization, whether it involves upfront production during the creative ideation phase or later on.
These methods use qualitative audience analysis techniques to grasp intrinsic motivations, aiding in the creation of video ads.
The landscape of market research is shifting. Traditional methods like surveys with affinity panels, focus groups, and interviews are giving way to a tech-driven approach.
AI now plays a central role, utilizing audience intelligence and big data to analyze behavior and emotions. This allows for pre-testing multiple creative concepts using facial coding and emotion tracking technology.
The ultimate goal? Optimizing ads for maximum emotional resonance and predicting their performance through advanced statistical modeling, a technique known as predictive analytics.
Recently, P&G used this new tech to pick the best ad concept for their Native deodorant, boosting sales and getting the most out of their ad budget.
Big data and Human intelligence work together to constantly improve video ads.
This “data-driven creative optimization” doesn’t replace good ideas, it makes them even better based on performance metrics and viewer interactions.
In our context, Data-Driven Creative Optimization takes place following the creative ideation, serving to enhance and support it rather than replace it.
Here’s how it works: the marketing team starts by creating different versions of key ingredients of the ad, like intros and calls to action, usually using a predictive scoring.
Then, after the ad launches, data helps them see what’s working best and how they can adjust the ad on the fly.
Within what we refer to as Dynamic Creative Optimization, two main techniques are gaining popularity: multivariate versioning and Dynamic Video Optimization (DVO).
Multiversioning Technology: means the ad can change parts of itself on the fly, like showing different videos, depending on who’s watching. It uses viewer data to pick the most relevant version for each person.
Dynamic Video Optimization (DVO): Optimizes live campaigns by finding the best-performing combination of creative elements. DVO continuously refines ads to improve engagement and conversion rates based on real-time feedback.
VideoRunRun falls within the spectrum of Data-Driven Creative Optimization.
Our Data-Driven Creative Solution is made to generate, iterate and optimize Creatives to get strong and personalized guidelines and extract more ROAS from video ads campaigns.
The VideoRunRun tech stack includes solutions ranging from multiversioning capabilities to the creative analysis of past campaigns.
Additionally, our DVO approach is designed to test and clearly identify which creatives perform best, which do not, and the reasons WHY. This allows for refinement and iteration with live and actionable creative insights.
Brands that set up Creative Optimization are experimenting with a virtuous loop based on Creative and Data, both feeding each other.
Our customers experience shows :
On average, our customers see a two to threefold boost in key performance indicators (KPIs).
Interested in how we can do the same for you? Let’s chat!
The reliance on a single or few creatives often leads to mismatched or under-optimized content. We’ve passed the point where simply throwing unaltered TV ads onto YouTube is a strategy.
Creative Optimization brings an inflection point in video advertising, with a revolutionary way of creating and distributing content. It’s a significant shift toward creativity and creatives that elevate the brand experience.
VideoRunRun not only allows you to adapt your master video for digital but also to prepare, with the maximum of insights and data, the next piece of creative.
Covering both short-term performance and long term vision.
Already have a video? Optimize your video impact with VideoRunRun’s YouTube Creative Scoring to enhance ad performance and eliminate wasted spend.
Read more