"Mixers of Ingredients"

Newsletter #32 | "Mixers of Ingredients"

Discover ground-breaking research from Meta, Kantar, and CreativeX on the next set of creative effectiveness levers.?

“Shaken not stirred”. James Bond always had strong preferences on how his martinis were mixed.?

When it comes to marketers, mixing is the verb of choice. In a 1948 article, The Management of Marketing Costs, James Culliton aptly described marketers as “mixers of ingredients”.?

The ‘marketing mix’ is not the latest industry-specific candy selection designed to fuel teams through Super Bowl creative planning sessions (although feel free to steal that idea). It describes the set of variables that a company can change to meet the demands of consumers.?

In Culliton’s framework, adapted and evangelized by Neil Borden, the marketing manager has to “weigh the behavioral forces and then juggle marketing elements in his mix with a keen eye on the resources with which he has to work.”?

The ingredient list making up the marketing mix has changed over the decades. In 1960 James McCarthy coined the 4 P’s of price, promotion, product, and place as the core tenets of any successful marketing campaign. By the 1980s those 4 P’s would become 7, as people, process, and physical evidence were added into the mix. In the 90s the P’s became C’s – consumer, cost, convenience, and communication – as the industry moved away from mass marketing to a narrower, individual customer focus.?

The evolution of the framework brought along a new method for measuring the impact of marketing campaigns: marketing mix modeling (MMM). MMMs use historical information to quantify the impact of marketing on key sales metrics. Before cookies and attribution, MMM studies were a key tactic marketers used to determine the effectiveness of elements of the marketing mix.?

Today, the mix varies across companies and industries, and the ‘special sauce’ to some brands’ marketing success is kept as a closely guarded secret.?

What is undeniable, however, is the outsized impact that creative has on marketing outcomes. Nielsen determined that strong ad creative was responsible for 47% of sales impact, higher than reach, brand, targeting, recency, and context.?

Measuring creativity.?

AI’s biggest transformation of marketing and advertising won’t be (just) from generative AI, but by unlocking new possibilities through data. Not only has it expanded what’s possible with existing data, but it’s also enabled the extraction of new data sources, including creative data.?

While advertisers widely acknowledge the contribution of creative to campaign effectiveness, it’s frequently still brushed off as a piece of the marketing mix that eludes robust measurement. However, the creative datasets AI has unlocked allow for specific creative insight extraction from MMMs.

CreativeX’s creative datasets focus on macro creative learnings that can be applied across campaigns, brands, and markets and look back across multiple years worth of a brand's content. Working with Meta and Kantar, we’ve developed a methodology to take a creative dataset and successfully plug it into MMMs.?

CreativeX worked with Meta’s creative shop to identify creative themes that hypothetically could impact campaign performance. These themes were then codified into 20 unique creative levers. 56,000 images and videos, across over 1,200 campaigns, totaling over 13 billion impressions were tested for these levers.?

With a creative adherence score, for each campaign, each creative theme and individual creative guideline, Kantar was able to plug creative data into their MMM model (Lift ROI). Producing the next generation of creative excellence levers, unique to digital channels.?

A new era of storytelling.??

We’re living in a new era of ad spend. With an increasingly high proportion of total media investment going towards digital channels, understanding the creative levers that work in the mobile environment has never been more important.?

Mobile phones provide a unique environment for both immediacy and intimacy. Consumers have never been so overwhelmed by content, and immediately capturing attention is key. Equally, they’ve never consumed ads in such a personal environment before, with a 1:1 relationship between the viewer and the advert.?

The analysis uncovered key creative levers connected to intimacy (human connection, integration of brand and product) and immediacy (visual dynamism, distinctive atmosphere), with the potential to drive up to 81% greater effectiveness.?

The methodology not only uncovered what creative elements improve campaign performance but also how often these creative elements are already being adopted by brands. Fewer than half of the ads analyzed were using the creative levers uncovered in the research, leaving a huge opportunity for growth.?

James Culliton observed that as a “mixer of ingredients,” a marketer will “sometimes follow a recipe as they go along, sometimes adapt a recipe to the ingredients available, and sometimes experiment with or invent ingredients no one else has tried.”?

This new research provides marketers with a data-backed set of creative ingredients, for marketers to add to their existing recipes, and experiment with new ones. We’re excited to see the creative (and business) results it will drive.?

Thanks for reading!

CreativeX