- With advertisers increasingly vying for consumer attention in a saturated market, finding a competitive advantage is essential for brands to stand out from the crowd.
- Working with VidMob, Kraft Heinz discovered how creative data and analytics provide unique insights to identify the creative elements responsible for campaign performance, enabling in-flight and future marketing optimisation at scale through creative effectiveness.
- AI is changing the game right now, offering a competitive advantage to brands when employed as a tool to enhance creativity, enabling marketers to focus on strategies and ideation.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) and creativity have been at odds recently, with torrents of online discourse prompting calls from tech leaders to halt AI developments over ‘profound risks’ to human society. However, a shift of perspective can establish AI as a tool to help creatives rather than replace them – as is the case in digital advertising.
Menno Wagenaar, Head of Sales, Central & Eastern Europe at VidMob, was joined by Matt Cosad, Head of Data & Analytics at Kraft Heinz at the last edition of Advertising Week Europe, to discuss how AI can fuel creativity and drive performance through creative effectiveness.
The rapid expansion of digital content and audience growth has built pressure on marketers to maintain high-quality standards amid budgeting constraints, but Wagenaar feels optimistic about the future of the industry with the emergence of AI. “There’s an opportunity for brands and agencies to help the industry move forward rapidly by embracing AI and creative effectiveness.”
Stiff competition in a saturated market
Standing out from the crowd is increasingly challenging for brands, as the advertising sector expands, and the market saturates with competitors vying for consumers’ attention, said Cosad. “A lot of brands are entering numerous channels, but people’s time to consume media isn’t changing significantly. We’re reaching a point where the volume of brands we’re competing against for consumer attention is growing astronomically. Finding competitive advantage is going to be a key differentiator when it comes to success.”
Maintaining tone and consistency of messaging across different platforms and content types, while still optimising the creative output to fit each channel, is particularly challenging for brands to manage. “It’s impossible to manually track a campaign’s performance with so much content across so many channels, sometimes in multiple markets. We’ve seen this happen with our customers, where assistance is needed to produce the best results” added Wagenaar.
Funding analytics
To free up the budget to spend on technology, procurement, as well as in-housing talent, Kraft Heinz decided to consolidate its partners. The brand managed to increase the volume of production and, curious about the true value of creative effectiveness, brought in VidMob for an in-depth analysis of the creative assets available.
Last January, Heinz Brazil tasked VidMob to deliver media efficiencies for its Mayonnaise campaign in Brazil. Limited by the industry’s lack of accurate creative quality measurement tools, Kraft Heinz needed VidMob’s expertise to focus on creative insights to deliver media efficiencies.
Having analysed the campaign videos created in-house by the Kraft Heinz team over the course of last year, VidMob generated a set of learnings on minute creative details, such as using keywords in the beginning, highlighting the Heinz watermark and human presence, that end up significantly driving campaign performance. “Applying those learnings on a recent campaign delivered 47% cheaper CPM, which is a considerable difference.” said Cosad. The positive results of the partnership cemented creative effectiveness as a campaign performance driver.
In-flight and future optimisation
“Working with VidMob, in particular, is giving us the best insights to understand what we need to include in future content production initiatives”. Cosad continued, highlighting a wider industry issue.
A lot of investment goes into producing content that may or may not generate the desired results. VidMob’s AI technology analyses thousands of creative data points within campaigns and past marketing portfolios to measure which elements are driving the best results. The creative insights gathered can then be used for in-flight optimisation, as well as future strategies, eliminating the need to trial campaigns.
As Cosad puts it, “It’s not something we would have ever been able to really analyse manually, because of the sheer volume of content and creative elements present in each video that could be generating incredibly different results. Partners like VidMob and the work we’re doing with analytics are helping us understand, for this higher volume of production, what is working well and what we should be doing better.”
Competitive advantage
AI, the biggest buzzword of 2023 so far, has been framed as a threat to creativity rather than a tool. But in saturated markets where quality trumps quantity to achieve success, AI provides marketers with invaluable capabilities that free their time to focus on strategies and ideation.
As Wagenaar concluded, “Do we believe AI will take over creativity? No, we think it will enrich it. AI is not the future, it’s now. If brands don’t embrace AI tools as soon as possible, they will be at a competitive disadvantage against those, like Kraft Heinz, who do.”
