The rapid adoption of digital technology by consumers over the past few years has prompted advertisers to rethink traditional advertising strategies. What worked before, may not work today. With these changes, brands have increasingly shifted their ad spend toward digital, with larger-than-expected increases in retail media networks and streaming TV, according to a 2021 eMarketer report.

This has created a challenge for brand advertisers. As more brands embrace the shift to digital, and as digital channels become more saturated, it becomes harder to stand out from the crowd. Marketers faced with rising CPCs and diminishing returns on their media spend should consider creative as a path to continued growth. According to Kantar, creative quality remains among the top drivers of brand impact, accounting for 50% of campaign effectiveness.

But in an ever-changing digital landscape, how can advertisers consistently develop compelling, high performing creative?

Focus on the fundamentals

The fundamentals of good design and creative storytelling are timeless. As Jeff Bezos famously advised, it’s often better to focus on what isn’t going to change. This is be doubly true when you operate in a space that changes as quickly as digital advertising. When it comes to creative, the fundamentals are quite simple: Good creative tells a clear, compelling story that’s relevant to your audience and appropriate to the channel.

As we do with everything at Amazon, we start the creative process with our customers and work backward. There is no creative brief without some form of audience insights, but brands must go deeper. Demographics are table stakes. Today’s advertisers should look to understand audience behavior over time to inform their creative strategy: How do their audiences buy, browse and stream? With these kinds of audience insights, the creative concepting becomes a lot easier, and the final campaign far more effective.

Experiment to drive long-term success

Technology will continue to evolve and drive customer behavior changes, which is why creative experimentation is critical to advertiser success. With intentional experiments, advertisers can optimize and improve campaign performance in the short term and drive long term business impact by applying learnings to future creative work. When building your own creative experimentation programs, there are a few tips to keep in mind.

Good creative tells a clear, compelling story that’s relevant to your audience and appropriate to the channel.

First, create dedicated space for experimentation. It’s easy to get busy or otherwise forget to carve out the resources to do this properly. Make it clear to your stakeholders that you plan to allocate a small portion of your media spend and production budget to experimentation that by definition may not immediately drive your KPIs. Build experimentation into your planning cycle and have regular check-ins to review results and make tweaks to improve performance.

Second, decide what not to test. There are some areas you shouldn’t let an experiment decide, especially things like your brand. As an example, I once worked with a healthcare brand that was endlessly testing their brand colors. At the end of the day, the experimentation led to a palette that looked exactly like their competition. It’s important to have conviction and be consistent with your brand tenets and identity.

Third, pick part of the creative to iterate on. It’s far more cost effective to experiment with variations in the details rather than core creative concepts. For example, if you were to test humor-based creative approach vs. a more practical direction built around product beauty shots, you’ll end up paying to produce two directions while only actually using one in the end.

Remember that small changes in execution can really pay off. In 2021, we created a streaming TV spot for a home and garden brand where we played around with a few different end slates. A few minor tweaks to the final call to action led to a 36% lift to branded search according to our internal metrics.

Have fun along the way

The journey to better advertising creative is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s important to carve out time to fuel your creativity. I personally try to find inspiration from a variety of sources to avoid developing tunnel vision. I follow people whose work I admire, like Hey Studio, The Line, and Erik Nohlin, among many others. I also find inspiration at home from the unbounded creativity and “unconventional” thinking of my two daughters. Whether it’s a walk outside or a new playlist, be sure to get that regular dose of inspiration. Exploring creative should be the best part of every advertiser’s day. If it’s not, you need to find a way to change that.

For more insights and best practices to help boost creative performance including category benchmarks and creative and audience insights visit the Amazon Ads library.