Fewer, better, high quality ads

I mentioned the new?Creative Works research?from Google last week but it deserves more attention. The above chart from the video is old news in many ways – we have been sharing solid research showing the power of creative for years. It is undoubtedly the best way to improve media performance and therefore has huge value – a 10% improvement on a $1m budget means the creative is worth $100k

But…

Look around and the ads are still crap. Quality publishers like Guardian, Telegraph and FT pollute their fine editorial with crap banners that earn them pennies. Social campaigns run cut downs of TV ads – with the same lame ad looking wrong on every platform.

Our friends at CreativeX get the opportunity and their CEO shares her thinking on a Creative Quality Score;

Creative quality is necessary but not sufficient, and it won’t win you any awards. But it’s an important start to establish and control our ability to scale content with confidence and it’s often overlooked: the average adherence to creative quality stand

A few do get this opportunity. The VP of Global Ads at the New York Times says;

We…help brands tap into The Times’s exceptional audience, and elevate them through the industry’s highest quality ad experiences. We believe in fewer but better, higher quality ads that reach the right audiences, and our team continues to focus on develop

Conde Nast take a similar approach ( working with our friends at Responsive Ads) and just announced?their digital ad revenues were up 38%. Caring about the creative enables you to sell a premium service that works for everyone;?readers get a better experience, brands get better results and the publisher makes more money – often a lot more money.

Some of the best agencies get it too – here the global CEO of BBDO talks about their work with Google on a campaign for catfood brand Sheba. His advice;

Adopt a flexible, digital-first mindset, act on data, and seek out complementary partners who can enhance the appeal and impact of your work.

All the platforms have teams who are eager to help and there is no end of inspiration – the regular?Creative Sparks?is a good resource

As is the work we did on TikTok – we ran our webinar sharing our learnings and announcing winners – you can see the video and read the deck?here.

In any advertising we know that bigger better ads work best – and that the ends usually justify the hard work. It’s just the same with digital.

So why the persistent crap? One issue is people nickel and diming on creative development and production. It’s more expensive to build high impact ads and it can be expensive to adapt them for a plethora of formats and partners. (but the right tech can help here?

And people use spurious measurement to justify current bad practice – I had a long argument with the ad team of a major platform who were adamant mobile banners worked, because they did well on 28 day viewthrough data.

But as this chart (and many others we have) shows, this expense can be a great investment – you just need to measure the impact in media terms. I am really keen to help solve this issue and know most of the tech firms that can help – and I happy to work with anyone who wants to improve – ping me and lets plot over a cup of tea.?

Fewer, better. high quality ads. Lets make that happen.

( This is an extract from my Fix Insider newsletter - subscribe at https://www.addictivelondon.com/insider)