Holodeck

On my daily commute, I often get talking to the Creative Director of a globally respected digital agency. Aside from his usual moans, which you may recognize (briefing process is “shoddy”, not enough time is ever given to “creative thought”, the “clients never seem to understand” the creative idea etc.) one of our perpetual arguments revolves around the value of creative execution vs. ad placement.

His view? Without great creative, you wouldn’t get the eyeballs. My view? Without knowing where the audience is, even the best creative is going to struggle (a more loquacious person than me once referred to the technique of getting the same creative exposed to as many sites as possible as ‘spraying and praying’).

Ideally, the best approach is a combination of the two: developing creative that is pertinent to the media placement; but sometimes clients simply don’t have the budget to do this.

Anyway, the Atlas Institute recently issued a study* that showed that conversion rates across media placements vary six times more than conversion rates across different ad creatives (something they refer to as the 6* Rule). This means that checking and optimising the performance of a media placement is much more likely to have an effect than just changing the creative. It’s quite a staggering figure and underlines how important it is to continually optimize media placements during a campaign – helping us learn to understand the numbers behind our campaigns is something I’m looking work on over the year.

Of course campaign planning and management  is a much more complex science than this and just to redress the scales for our creative teams, another metric that is starting to be bandied around is Brand Exposure Duration (BXD), which refers to the length of time an individual is exposed to a given advertisement. The logic behind this measurement is that the longer an individual is exposed to a brand, the greater the branding impact on that individual. And the more compelling the creative, the more time that an individual will spend interacting with it. It is why I often talk about the amount of hours of brand interaction that a website generates. Anyway, what I like about BXD is that it is universally applicable and allows us to benchmark brand performance across multiple channels.

So to finish off, I thought to link to three creative assets we have developed for clients and one fun video. The assets in themselves are great examples of our creative talent but, IMHO, could be work so much harder for our clients if used as media assets…

•    The GSK Self-selection Tool is a decision tree tool for the Future Talent community that helps people who visit the GSK UK careers site gain a clearer understanding of potential career paths within GSK, whilst getting across the company culture and values. The idea being that GSK gets a better quality of lead, whilst candidates are given valuable assistance in navigating the GSK programmes.
•    For Royal Mail graduates, we developed a game that helped prospective candidates get a feel for the scale and speed of delivery at Royal Mail. The game is a reskin of Tetris, which was recently voted as the Greatest Game of All Time, and has already proven to be a hit with candidates, generating over one hundred hours of brand interaction.
•    Finally, KPMG tasked us with challenging the staid perception of professional services – asking us to produce an interactive experience that was fun, increased brand favourability and encouraged applications all at the same time. Our solution, the KPMG Mini mind-gym, is a game based around KPMG’s key competencies.  Players can register their scores on a leader board (thus providing useful data capture for KPMG) and also forward the game to their friends, encouraging them to compete too (and thus introducing the all-important viral element). The game has already proved a big success – and you can try it for yourself by clicking here.

A coca-cola vending machine is transformed in to a happiness machine, delivering ‘doses’ of happiness to students. Watch how the spread of happiness becomes infectious.

Enjoy

*Atlas Institute Digital Marketing Insights, Ad Creative of Media Placement,  John Chandler-Pepelnjak and Young-Bean Song