Creative is the dominant influence on campaign success, with most experts attributing its contribution to campaign success at 45% - 60%. As Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik said: “It turns out … the creative has approximately 60% influence on the ultimate success of your campaign! The creative is what matters, and, unfortunately, few people who do modern analytics focus on the creative.”

And the best way to maximize creative efficiency is to focus on driving attention. If a viewer is not paying attention to your advertisement, what you’re saying and in what medium it is running are irrelevant.

We examined 42 YouTube ad creatives across seven major CPG brands, with the goal of demonstrating the efficacy of Creative Attention to drive share of voice (SOV).

Here’s What We Found:

·         Greater advertising efficiency can drive cost savings and profitability and unlock opportunities for capital reinvestment.

·         Advertising that performs poorly on attention increases cost because the creative isn’t as impactful

·         Brand leaders managing campaigns for growth also must manage for attention, and that requires the orchestration of both creative and media

Videos that perform well on attention earn a lower quality CPM (qCPM) than videos that perform poorly. We determine qCPM by estimating the cost of one thousand quality media exposures based on Creative Attention metrics and derived from a nominal cost of one thousand impressions.

Advertising, therefore, becomes more expensive if it fails to earn and capture attention and move audiences emotionally. Using Creative Attention makes for a more useful SOV model because it accounts for the actual likelihood of audience impact, not just impression delivery and the opportunity to see.

To demonstrate how it plays out: we found one brand’s qCPM to be $13.97, and its SOV was 22%, while another brand’s $42.86 qCPM meant its SOV is 7%. This means there was a 3X delta in the cost of a quality media exposure, resulting in a 3X difference in SOV between the two.

A brand with dominant creative could have the luxury to manage for margin or reinvest spend to achieve more quality exposures and higher SOV for the same spend. Conversely, brands whose creative performs poorly on attention may have limited options – either outspend to compensate for poor creative, or cut the low performing creative, weight the top creative, and edit the middling creative.

Realeyes will be speaking at ATTENTION@MAD//Fest. Click here to get your early bird ticket.