Top-performing creative ad production recipe

The work of creating advertising creatives is not just fun and creativity. But also the dense work with metrics often.?

It's like finding the perfect recipe for a cake. And yes, I love culinary metaphors :)?

The task of working with metrics for creatives obviously arises when the main task, finding the foundation from which we will build upwards, is already done.

It ideally matches projects at two stages:

• with the only top-performing idea that works and needs to be beaten;
• with several ideas working "good", and no obvious winner around them.

The process starts with the creative decomposition of top approach(es) and market research. The top-performing creative is taken and decomposed in key snapshots in order to test them in statics.

This is how we do it here, at Adside Media.

We suggest ideas for static creatives based on the snapshots and A/B test variations of characters, mechanics, locations, etc. Those test are run as a 50-60 banners UA tests and then we turn the most performing ones into videos (usually it is around 10-20 videos).

The second step is two test those videos and compare them to the top-performance benchmark and define new winners (2-3-5 concepts).

Result: Based on the winnning concepts we produce 10-20 already tested videos, comparable to the top-benchmark results and ready to be put into campaigns.

Example:

Current TOP-perfroming creative (snapshot)

Variations for tests (changing characters, locations while remain around the key "bridge" mechanic):

The final result

The example presented above ends up becoming the new top performer in real campaigns and boldly outperforms its ideological ancestor in all major metrics.?

And the best part is, it happens systematically!?

We tested this approach on more than 7 different projects and invariably got good results.?

But to be fair, it's worth noting:?

All of these projects were casual with a strong emphasis on advertising monetization, hence targeting CPI as the main metric to work with.?

But still, we're doing well!?

That's what I wanted to share in this article. I hope you found it interesting.?

Have a great day, reader! Thank you for your attention.