Four levers you need to pull right now or waste millions on Facebook

A recent research study from Nielsen and Meta found the four key levers for driving media impact:

1. Creative
2. Frequency
3. Campaign duration
4. Reach

The study looked at three years of Media Mix Modeling (MMM) across a range of CPG brands, analyzing the incremental effect Facebook ads had on total business revenue. Interestingly, the study found that 57% of media impact is driven by factors "outside a brand's control." BUT, that remaining 43% was largely driven by four levers (creative, frequency, duration, and reach).

Some crazy stats coming out of this:

• A frequency of 2.25x per week was 80% more effective than a frequency of 1x per week
• No surprise, but having "high quality" creative drove 35% greater impact
• Running a continuous campaign for 50 weeks was 65% more effective than running a short flight of 10 weeks
• The more people you reach (up to a point) the greater the effect: reaching 15% of the population was 35% more effective than reaching only 1%

In marketing planning, we often talk about creative, frequency, and reach (in that order) as being the most important drivers of incrementality. This study essentially corroborated what planners have known since the 50s: prospects have to see a compelling message multiple times (over a long period of time) in order to become customers. It makes perfect intuitive sense, but this kind of humanistic approach to marketing is often overlooked in today's preferred method of deterministic attribution and "cast as wide of a net as possible to inform the algorithm."

Many, many brands that I've worked with run campaigns either in very short sprints (sometimes less than a week), with a huge variety of creatives, in order to "test and quickly optimize." I typically advise against this, and this study backs that up with raw math: you need QUALITY creative (not quantity), and that repeat frequency over the course of nearly a year is crucial. Brand recognition, affinity, and positive value association all take time to create a clear value to the end-user. Even if your in-platform data says that some fresh ad is "performing best," don't be led astray from the human-first approach of product > audience > message.

My recommended action items coming out of this study:

1) Audit your creative. No, really. Is your creative as powerful, clear, and compelling as it can be? If you even thought about saying "ehhhh maybe I think it's pretty good?" then the answer is "no." Go fix it. (As a good place to start, learn everything you can about your ideal customer and how they prefer to be communicated with).

2) Review your reach and frequency. Is your average account-level frequency over the last 30 days less than 8 (2x per week for four weeks)? Then you're probably spreading yourself too thin. Is your campaign reaching more than 40 million unique users (that's more than the recommended 15% max reach of the US adult population)? If so, again, you're probably reaching too many people. How can you tighten this up?

• Well, for one, you can add audience targeting (shocking and controversial, I know). If you narrow your focus to a specific set of characteristics, it might tank in-platform performance, but it will significantly increase frequency and get your brand in front of the same users more often.
• You could focus your campaigns on certain key geos that overindex for your audience (this one can get tricky and has gross impacts on CPMs, so, not a great solution unless you're comfortable with buying non-optimized brand awareness media)
• Or likely the most effective: flow prospects into an ad funnel that moves them from cold, to warm, to hot. It's pretty easy to do with video retargeting campaigns, which allows you to budget more heavily across the warmer/hotter audiences and increase your overall frequency.?

3) Make sure you're running some evergreen campaigns. Stop turning campaigns on and off; leave them alone. Your audience needs continuity, over a long period of time, with consistent frequency across high-quality creatives (albeit with some variety in execution but consistent brand messaging and value props). Stop worrying about "ad fatigue" too much and just leave a core, foundational program on 24/7/365.?

4) Finally, and most importantly, TEST and scientifically MEASURE. If you're not familiar with terms like "incrementality," "matched market testing," "media mix modeling," or "marketing science," you're falling way behind.?

A quick caveat: this multi-year study is specific to a variety of CPG brands, which are likely more "mature" and therefore more well known and easier to purchase at various venues (in-store, online, through a retailer, etc). These findings might not be as pertinent for startups, niche products, or ecommerce-only shops that focus on demand capture for a narrow audience. That being said: at their core these principles should work across most businesses, and mirror the experience I've had across my career.