In a new YouTube study commissioned by Google, global leader in data science Ekimetrics has developed a groundbreaking approach to video ad creative effectiveness measurement. It also identified the opportunity to more than double YouTube ROI, with three golden advertising rules for marketers to follow.
The independent study used over three years of Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) from four participating brands to quantify the impact of ad creative quality on YouTube video performance.
Not only did the study find that creative execution is a significant driver of sales performance, it has also resulted in a completely new, repeatable and scalable way to measure creative effectiveness. The new methodology helps to understand the impact of creative quality on sales. It is an enhancement to the industry-accepted holistic measurement approach of MMMs, which is a significant step forward in marketing science and a first for the industry.
The study validated and used Google’s existing ABCD framework, which consists of 73 creative levers clustered into ‘Attention,’ ‘Branding,’ ‘Connection’ and ‘Direction,’ proven and derived over several years of research. These were further distilled into 20 creative best practices that explained 80% of the performance for the brands in the study.
It also found that 58% of the video ads assessed were suboptimal, where ‘optimal’ videos featured nine or more of the 20 best practices, with ‘good’ featuring five to eight and ‘poor’ four or less. This finding suggests there is significant opportunity for brands to make substantial gains; turning ‘poor’ creatives into ‘optimal’ ones could deliver a 2.2x ROI uplift.
Speaking about the study, Sona Abaryan, Partner, Ekimetrics said, “Finding that more than half of videos were suboptimal was surprising and demonstrates clearly that measuring creative effectiveness is a worthwhile pursuit, with the potential to more than double ROI. Brands are now able to achieve these uplifts through this new, scalable integration into MMM.”
Ariane Pol, Global Head of Research, Google Creative Works, added, “Where previous studies have shown the importance of creative, they have been one offs with no mechanism to operationalize measurement. It’s incredibly exciting that now, for the first time, based on our ABCD creative principles we have both a repeatable methodology and three golden rules that help marketers to focus their efforts on the areas that will make the biggest difference.”
“Brands that adopt the methodology to understand their own creative performance will truly tackle this final frontier in marketing effectiveness, and we’re delighted to have been part of the development of a quantifiable framework for creative execution. What’s more, while this study was based on YouTube, we believe the methodology will translate to other video advertising, including TV.”
