More Marketers Turn to Meta’s Creative Tailoring

A marketer working for an auto client needs to figure out how to best advertise a truck on social platforms—with a dog’s head poking out of the front window or sans man’s best friend. How does she decide which creative asset to use? For many marketers, the answer comes from Meta. Meta offers a variety of tools that help marketers test creative assets against the platform's droves of consumer data to help improve campaign effectiveness. What distinguishes Meta from other social platforms, which all tout services for advertisers, is its ability to measure a campaign’s success after it's been served. Other platforms are better suited for help in the creative development stage, said Kelsey Miller, paid social associate director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. Partly, that's because Meta has more tools, including APIs, for marketers to run their own tests. “Facebook has the most self-serve testing tools,” Miller said. “A lot of other platforms have those but it’s served through their marketing teams.” Pinterest Sees Big Plans, Big Spending From Men in 2022 Meta is well placed to offer tools to test campaign effectiveness due to its billions of users, spurring more marketers to prioritize using them this year. Against a backdrop of fading targeting abilities online, tailored and tested creative plays a more important role than before. But Meta's unique ability to offer these tools might be the very thing that could limit their effectiveness. Meta has offered these services to marketers for years. In the fourth quarter of 2021, it rolled out new features, including dynamic experiences and organic content A/B testing, confirmed by Meta to Adweek. Both help marketers with scale. Dynamic experiences, which are still being introduced gradually, create multiple versions of an ad and show a tailored version to each user based on what they're most likely to respond to. Organic content A/B testing lets marketers test up to four versions of a Facebook post with an intended audience. And new tools are gaining new attention from marketers. Graham Wilkinson, executive vice president of product innovation at Kinesso, said he's focused on Meta's tools in 2022. Particularly Gamma Score, announced in June 2021, which uses machine learning to associate specific campaign and creative elements to the likelihood of a consumer recalling having seen a specific ad for a CPG brand. As cookies wane, creativity rules It's not just the new services that make Meta's tools relevant, Wilkinson said. They are particularly resonant during an inflection point in digital advertising when marketers are adapting to a world without Apple’s mobile identifiers and soon, third-party cookies. “With the deprecation of third-party cookies, and with so much uncertainty around what the answer is, really your only answer is to make your creative more compelling,” Wilkinson said. Meta’s solution not only offers marketers tools, but one of the world's largest troves of consumer data to test against, just as brands are losing access to certain data sources, Wilkinson noted. Of course, Meta isn’t a perfect workaround to the thorny targeting landscape—the platform said in September it had been underreporting iOS web conversions and missed analysts’ revenue predictions in the third quarter, which Meta attributed to Apple’s iOS changes. However, Miller said Meta’s tools can even be more valuable following Apple's changes. "The Conversions API is a server-to-server connection that allows brands to directly pass website and offline events into Facebook for better optimization and measurement," Miller said in an email. "This connection helps advertisers better measure ad performance and attribution by increasing the signals Facebook has access to." The limits of Meta-specific tools Like all tech, Meta's tools do not offer a panacea. For one, the more marketers who use Meta’s tools, the less effective each becomes at devising creative assets that truly stand out, said Tom Olivieri, group director of creative services at performance marketing agency WITHIN. “When you have a series of tools [that dictates what is] best practice everything starts to look alike.” Olivieri said. “They all feel like the same ad but for a different product.” Also, while Meta might be chock-full of insights, not all are created equal. “If a machine spots a feature inside a creative asset that makes it perform well, it doesn’t mean you could do something with it,” Wilkinson said. Creative agencies would be remiss to solely rely on Meta's tools, said Libby Brockhoff, CEO of Odysseus Arms. The creative agency relies on a proprietary approach for assessing consumer sentiment. "With Facebook, it’s data and that can be a rearview matter," she said. "When we work with the actual consumers and hang out with them, it becomes a more powerful connection." Olivieri says that Meta's data may not be enough for a successful campaign to feel cohesive yet native to a variety of platforms—from Meta to TikTok to programmatic exchanges. For that, Meta’s tools are only a starting point. “How do we have all of this data to get full audiences and not just platforms?” he said. “We have to make platform specific-content but we have to understand the audience at a larger level too.”

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More Marketers Turn to Meta’s Creative Tailoring and Testing Tools

How to decide which creative asset to use?

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff