It's Time to Start Measuring 'Return on Creativity'

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Ad-Lib.io’s Adit Abhyankar advocates for data-driven approaches to expand to creative teams and campaigns. Below, in his own words, he urges marketers to add creative testing to their toolbox. What is your return on creativity? I was listening to a panel discussion this week where one of the speakers was lamenting the fact that, when it comes to marketing, measurement is the tail that wags the dog. This is particularly true in digital media, where hypergranular evaluation and test-and-learn cycles (on by default within the buying platforms and DSPs) are the foundations of success. This numbers-based optimization assumes that if you can measure the path, you can understand the drivers—and if you control the drivers, you can take action. With those actions, you will improve your results. On the eternal mission to understand what works and why, we as marketers obsessively look for new tools to manipulate those levers to get another point or two of improvement. For example, when we saw that the engagement with an ad differed by audience, we built programmatic buying tools that let you specifically target your desired audience segments. When we identified the declining impact of over-serving ads, we built tools to cap the frequency with which your audience will see an ad. This approach to innovation and improvement has driven a decade and billions of investment dollars in new technologies on the media side. Surprisingly, almost none of this innovation has been invested on the creative side. You measure ROAS, but do you measure ROC? Up to 70% of the performance of a campaign can be attributed to the creative being used. But in order to apply “programmatic ROI” to advertising creative, you first must be able to measure which elements work and why. Does pink work better than blue? Should I focus on the model wearing the shoe or the shoe itself? Are my brand guidelines mandating a font that hurts performance? Similar to analyzing media, most of what you find when you measure creative elements will lead you to correlation but not causation. A report on what “worked” is misleading until you validate your hypotheses with ongoing testing and turn insights into actions. Then, the results of these actions must feed back into the creative ideation process. If the insight has a strong enough ROI, it will be worth the cost to invest in that new tool. Can math inform creativity? Yes. You can take your “big idea” and build one great ad, or you can build 1,000 variations and then test creative elements, just as you would test a media placement or audience segment. Relevance in digital is highly nuanced. Ads that resonate with consumers on YouTube may not work on TikTok. Testing words and images is the key to driving those incremental points of leverage for each campaign. The only “right” answer is that you must measure return on creativity, and there are finally ways of doing so. It must become an always-on activity and not a luxury. Equip your creative teams with the right tools to test and measure each element of your ads, and you’ll ensure their creativity really pays off for you.