The perfect advertising campaign requires the right mix of investment and focus. The old framework of product, price, promotion, and place still matters. But in today’s high-​tech world, your accounts want to know how the various aspects of a campaign, including creativity in advertising, combine to improve effectiveness. Let’s consider the details.

How Effective Are Your Client’s Ads?

An NC Solutions report, Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness, focused on the CPG industry.  But their findings apply to every account that is seeking to increase market share.

The primary aspect of effectiveness is creativity in advertising. In two studies separated by five years, NC Solutions analysts  report that 49% of a campaign’s success was linked to creativity. Success is measured by the sales lift attributed to the campaign.

What is the Current State of Creativity?

While creativity is important, industry experts disagree on how to evaluate it. These disagreements have led to a sobering conclusion about the state of creativity in today’s ad campaigns.

54% of marketers and 75% of agencies agree that “most creative work doesn’t stand out.” The Better Ideas Project Global Report by BetterBriefs made this assertion. Additionally, 53% of marketers believe “the quality of creative work is not progressing.”

How to Evaluate Creativity

Not only that, once marketers get a creative idea, 64% are not sure how to evaluate it. In many cases, if an agency is working from a brief, 61% would prefer the review be based on the brief details. That strategy makes sense. They are trying to satisfy the account’s expectations.

Marketers, even if they helped develop the brief, let their personal emotions come into play. Only 46% of marketers rank creative ideas on the basis of the brief.

Perhaps more importantly, over half of marketers and agencies, evaluate creativity based on whether it will “engage the target audience.”

New Ways to Measure Creativity

While there's disagreement on how to measure creativity in advertising, Branding Strategy Insider encourages marketers to stay focused on the end goal. They suggest that creativity is defined “solely in terms of originality and used as a substitute for a compelling product message,” an ad campaign might be doomed. Marketers must remember the basic purpose of advertising: The ad must provide a good reason, a message, that encourages consumers to make the purchase.

Once that requirement is satisfied, “creative strategy” can be employed to get consumers thinking about a product and category in a new way. Did you know that 11.8% of pediatrician patients, primarily parents with young kids, call themselves germaphobes? AudienceSCAN from AdMall research shows that 38% of these U.S. adults plan to purchase goods and services that help them feel healthy. 

Looking at the product and audience through a new lens can spark creativity in advertising. For your smaller accounts, tap into the AI Idea Generator in AudienceSCAN to develop scripts for creative advertising.

Audience Engagement

Creativity in advertising matters because it drives consumers to purchase a product or service. But during their path down the purchase funnel, they’ll notice different forms of marketer messaging.

For example, NCSolutions reports that over half of Gen Zers want to see ads that are entertaining. In addition, Gen Zers are “three times more likely to engage with advertising if it includes social messaging that’s aligned with their beliefs.”

The NCSolutions research indicates that proper targeting during an ad campaign can drive up to 11% of incremental sales. How can your accounts improve their targeting? In addition to optimizing creativity, they can purchase media space in the formats used by their target audiences.

Summary

You can impress your accounts by presenting this information in presentations, along with your ideas for better creativity in advertising. Incorporating data from AudienceSCAN, powered by AdMall, will show them where their target customers take in advertising messages.