Understanding the links between creative execution and marketing effectiveness

Client: Meta

Testing factors such as placement, formats and audiences is commonplace, but understanding and breaking down the role of creative and its impact on sales is the final frontier in marketing measurement. However, isolating the impact of creative from marketing tactics or brand health has been historically challenging. Particularly so in a digital landscape, where brands test and use multiple platforms and hundreds/thousands of creative executions.

For the first time at scale and across several brands, we’ve been able to uncover the creative attributes that have the biggest impact on sales outcomes.

Ekimetrics’ landmark study, encompassing billions of data items from 10 brands in four sectors (Insurance, Cosmetics, Hospitality and Automotive), with 13 outcome KPIs, 23,000 individual creatives over 3.5 years, and 124 separate multi-stage econometric and AI object and text detection models, resulted in a new marketing mix modelling (MMM) methodology. The methodology has been made openly available.

We found commonalities around which creative features drive higher ROI, and which are irrelevant. ‘Person’ and ‘Product’, in isolation or combined, drive the highest ROIs.

With significant changes to digital tracking meaning marketers must reinvent their approaches to measurement, this provides an additional edge.