The Importance of Creative Assets

The creative is the single biggest lever to impact your campaign performance. Just as comedian Ron White puts it: you can’t fix stupid…well, you can’t fix awful creatives with all the AI in the world. Running a variety of assets will help these platforms personalize your ads for as many ad placements as are available. Another thing to keep in mind: the better the click-through rate on creative, the less you need to pay to win competitive bids in either of the major advertising marketplaces to win the impression to get your ad in front of your target audience—a higher click-through rate is a good “signal” to ad platforms that your creative and your targeting are in a good zone, creating a positive user experience. It’s important to remember that the quality and quantity of your creatives could end up making or breaking your campaign.

The better the conversion rate on your ads, the more you can afford to be aggressive with your bidding strategy. Being more aggressive on the different advertising exchanges allows you to unlock access to premium ad inventory that can give you a big competitive advantage when your campaigns are bolstered with AI managing your bidding at a detailed level based on performance.

The creative is the single biggest lever to impact your campaign performance.

Having great-performing creative is one of the biggest levers in a marketer’s toolbox, but most growth teams don’t effectively leverage creative performance to their advantage. Great creative with performance marketing can also help build brand awareness, which can lead to more loyal customers in the long term—and help your message stand out in the busy world of highly distracted consumers. By creating innovative advertising units, marketers can increase the effectiveness of their campaigns by using programmatic media buying technology to expand the campaign reach further.

Using Creative Teams

Once your overall system and workflow processes are built, the creative development process should become the competitive advantage (or weakest link) that impacts your overall performance.

The whole creative development process of coming up with new ads is heavily dependent on human intelligence, but should be powered by data-driven insights surfaced through the intelligent machine. A creative brainstorming and ideation process isn’t something AI can replicate today. Dynamic creative is a good option for combining images and experiences together, but the AI is not skilled at choosing the right creative concepts and/or able to figure out those dynamic ads impact on the branding. When narrow AI is rules based, it will be a long time before AI can reliably recognize a subjective aesthetic or detail that puts one creative ahead of another. I don’t envision this changing in the near future and startups will need to invest into their creative throughput pipeline to help set up their AI intelligent machine for success.

Most startups don’t have the budget to invest into developing an in-house creative team and so the option is to work with either a team of freelancers or creative agencies to help manage this for you. I have generally started out working with several dedicated creative freelancers or small creative agencies and then look to pivot this into hiring a small dedicated creative team in-house depending on the size of the budget being spent on our paid user acquisition.

The creative development costs would eventually help dictate your decision on whether to continue to work with an outsourced provider or bring this function in-house because you eventually reach a point where the ROI indicates it is more cost-effective doing this in-house based on the size of your user acquisition budget. At IMVU, investing into growing our in-house creative team has really helped us significantly improve performance across all our paid user acquisition campaigns as we’ve ramped up our use of AI for campaign orchestration and management.

Ad Fatigue

The more budget you spend, the faster your creative ads are going to experience ad fatigue—especially if you have a limited number of creatives to begin with. This is defined as the weakening effect that people seeing the same creative ad over and over again will have over time as it becomes familiar and therefore more likely to be tuned out with reduced impact (this is also known as saturation).

The best way to figure out if you may be battling ad fatigue is to see how long it takes for your new ad’s performance to reach degradation against your specific KPI goals. For example, if your KPI is ROI, then watch ad performance closely to see when it starts to perform poorly after a certain timeframe. This would indicate the ad isn’t performing as well anymore, and new creative variations could give you a much needed lift in performance.

In general, you always have to ensure your creative refresh is happening faster than your ad fatigue, so that you’re being proactive against running into ad fatigue as you continue to scale up your creative testing with AI. Think of the creative as fuel to the flames, but keep in mind it needs to be revised and refreshed at least several times per month on average in order to avoid fatigue or saturation depending on your budget. You can delay ad fatigue by expanding your audience or creating new ads. Creating new ads is the more effective approach. It’s important to figure out how often to refresh by looking at your creative performance data.

How many creatives should you produce? It’s ultimately a practical function of budget. As a rule of thumb, you can assume you need about $10 per day per creative to give each one enough budget for your intelligent machine to gather enough data to make confident decisions. So for a budget of $500 a day across all your channels, you should plan on having roughly 50 creative variations in your arsenal to create an ideal pool for testing and learning. This number can, of course, grow as you get more granular with audience targeting and life cycle marketing.

Benefits of Great Creative

There are three key ways that great creative and AI can help scale up your customer acquisition performance:

Brand awareness

The reality is that exposing your brand consistently to the right audience, with the right message, at the right time is going to help build awareness for your product in the customer’s mind; over time, it becomes familiar and more trusted among the consumers you’re reaching. An engaging witty, funny, compelling, or original creative ad is more likely to stand out and influence the customer to like your brand, then take the desired next steps in their customer journey and funnel. All great creative also needs a clear and strong call to action (CTA) to encourage the customer to take your desired next steps in their customer journey. For example, a compelling creative with a special deal or offer (say, 15% off) is more likely to get someone to purchase versus the same creative with no deal. Incorporating customer reviews and influencers to drive up “social proof” and build trust can also be a solid middle of the funnel creative tactic that appeals to customers who are less likely to act on deals or offers.

Loyalty

Data-driven creative messages get more attention and better responses about the products being marketed to their customers. Even in the era of privacy, consumers are clamoring for better use of their personal data to drive relevant and better targeted personalized ads with consistent cross-channel experiences. Any startup that can deliver an experience that respects the user’s time, attention, and money will end up building more trust and an engaged community of loyal fans. An example is Amazon, which has built their Prime membership based on leveraging customer data to deliver great personalized ads to encourage more sales and loyalty.

More learning

Investing resources to develop a variety of different ad creative orientations, sizes, formats (images and video), copy variations, and CTAs would help to maximize your reach and performance by letting the AI do the work to optimize toward the best-performing creatives.

The more creative A/B testing you can do with AI, the faster you will learn to find insights to capture customer attention in today’s highly distracted world. This will enable you to scale up user growth with different sequential creatives and CTAs to positively influence the purchase behavior of your product and improve ROI. At IMVU, we found after extensive testing that user-generated content (UGC) creative ads showing actual customer avatars and virtual world in-app experiences performed much better than standard creatives. These UGC creatives provided actual gameplay experiences that closely match user expectations and showed the audience authentic IMVU experiences.

Creative Best Practices

In order to grow a loyal customer base, you need to serve the right messages and designs to the right audiences. Here are some creative best practices to help guide you:

Know your target

The biggest benefit of running advertising with an AI intelligent machine is the ability to target specific customers who are most likely to make a purchase. Therefore, you should leverage this data to your advantage by creating the relevant ads that are most likely to resonate with the different target audiences. One of the best ways to do this is running a series of different A/B testing on creative ads to figure out which is the most compelling to the different target audiences at different stages of their customer journey.

KISS (keep it simple, stupid)

It’s always more effective to be less cluttered than to overwhelm users with too much information on ads. It’s tempting to want to get the most bang from your ads and throw as much information as possible. Unfortunately, you are not going to communicate your entire value proposition story in just one ad. It’s best to be concise and get to the point with your messaging. This is where sequencing your creatives to your targeted audience can make a big difference.

The key goal for ads is to capture your target audience’s attention by piquing their desire to want to learn more about you, and not necessarily to close the deal right away. Use ads to tease a product, service, or promotion. Earn the attention of the audience and entice them into following through to the richer content on your website or mobile app. It’s always good to create a series of sequential ads to communicate different value propositions with “snackable content” that is easy for users to digest to break through the clutter of all the other ads that are fighting for their attention.

Most common display ad sizes are small and too much information can be overwhelming, confusing, and difficult to read. It’s best to keep the ad simple and easy to understand (stupid). You have to get your message across clearly and quickly, because you only have your viewer’s attention for a second. You normally don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Make that small window of attention count.

Use compelling visuals, copy, and CTA

One of the most daunting parts of designing a good piece of creative is deciding on the best combination of copy, visuals, and CTAs. You want your creative to stand out from the rest of the ads competing for the customer’s attention. It’s always good to A/B test different creative formats, messages, CTAs, images, or videos to figure out the best-performing ads for the different target audiences at different stages of their customer journey. Our job as growth marketers is to include a CTA that makes it clear what you want a customer to do, then make it simple for them to do exactly that. Continue to take the winners of your tests, create slight variations, then rinse and repeat the tests again. Testing should always be ongoing, and never one and done.

The color scheme of your creative should reflect your brand guidelines and the landing page that users click through to. There should be a seamless, integrated experience from the ad to the landing page, so it carries the same look and feel of the advertising. The color emotion guide in Figure 8-1 illustrates the psychology of color in advertising.

Figure 8-1. Color emotion guide

Use simple images that are easy for the eye to register. You should never use images to simply fill up space, and you must make sure that the image visually communicates what is written in the copy. Design your creative with clearly defined borders, which draws visitors’ eyes to the ad.

Limit your typography to two fonts per ad. Make sure to only bold the important information. Try to limit the ad to no more than one-third of the real estate devoted to text. Too much copy can be overwhelming and most users won’t even read it. That’s why the most compelling billboards limit themselves to eight easily readable words.

Mobile Ads Best Practices

With 3.8 billion smartphones in the hands of consumers worldwide, mobile devices are fast becoming the primary way your customers are finding and consuming information. In addition, by 2021, 78% of all mobile data will be video.¹ Advertisers need to be prepared for this shift from a static mobile experience to one that takes a video-first approach. Luckily, best practices for mobile advertising and video creatives are relatively simple and there are literally hundreds of tools available to help you build great video-powered mobile creatives. Keep these criteria in mind as you develop mobile creatives:

Future Creative Development and Iteration

As we noted earlier, today’s neural networks and NLP advances make it possible to “train” intelligent machines to write advertising or marketing copy in your brand’s voice, or recommend things like hashtags for social media posts.

Using off-the-shelf libraries and training them on a significant sample of your brand’s marketing copy (the more structured, the better), you can achieve interesting results today. These exercises can be useful for idea generation, creating variations in ad copy, emails, or other types of marketing materials.

Some companies that operate in highly structured reporting environments—think sports, financial reporting, etc.—have replaced reporters with trained, special purpose machines designed to crank out quality copy that is virtually indistinguishable from an editorial product.

For now, the large amount of training data required to make automated copy generation really work for a brand and carry its “voice” in copy makes the technique a bit out of reach for most startups. But this will evolve considerably over the next few years and it’s a place to watch. In the meantime, experiment with online text generators (they get better and more powerful every day) to get some ideas and inspiration. However, it’s currently hard to envision a world where AI would be able to completely automate the entire creative development process without human intelligence driving the creative machine. This is one area where human creativity is far superior to AI; even though it may replace many of the mundane creative tasks, it will not usurp the entire process anytime soon.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore the area of cross-channel attribution to help provide measurement for your AI machine to determine which channels and creatives have the greatest impact on the complex customer journey to achieve your desired business KPI goals.