Malin Tempelman Meincke is responsible for traffic growth via media channels at Tele2, a Swedish telecommunications company. She is passionate about finding new ways to understand the return on investment of media spend.
In an age where attention is limited and marketing competition is fierce, we know that our creative assets are what help us stand out from the crowd.
But one of the biggest challenges marketers face today is measuring the real impact of those assets within our campaigns. That’s because you have to understand the creative, separated out from the platform, budget, product, and any other variables.
At Swedish telco Tele2, we see advertising as an investment. We know that boards are more likely to invest in areas where the return (ROI) is more easily understood, and research has shown that effective creative can account for almost 50% of ROI.
That’s when we decided to team up with our agency GroupM, and Google, to build a next-generation marketing mix model (MMM). The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of media effectiveness and the pivotal role of creativity in driving sales — and ultimately ROI.
“The creative is known to be one of the main drivers of ROI but the ability to measure it in terms of business outcome have so far been very limited,” says GroupM’s Björn Vilson. “By combining MMM with creative AI we are not only able to quantify the impact we are also able to distinguish what creative elements that drive it”
Using AI to analyse ads and unlock insights
We’ve always measured the results of our campaigns using traditional metrics like views and A/B testing. However, these approaches lacked the granularity and depth needed to truly understand the impact of creativity on ROI.
So, we developed an algorithm in Google Cloud Vision API with AI-powered visual feature detection. We fused this with traditional MMM methodology to analyse the creative elements within our ads. The AI analysed factors like the mood and atmosphere of the video, whether or not a logo was present, colours, music, and even smaller aspects like the inclusion of a sunset. Let’s say, for example, this ad was analysed:
The model would rank the ad ‘good’, ‘average’, or ‘poor’ based on the retention rate of each video. And that’s not all, it would also pinpoint specific components associated with higher or lower video retention rates.
We decided to use this metric — viewer retention rate — as a proxy for creative quality, assuming that longer watch times indicated higher attention and, therefore, superior creative.
The creative components that drive higher retention rates
The insights we gathered were really interesting.
“The model revealed that ads featuring more widely known phones performed better than those with lesser known models, and that wasn’t something we’d previously thought about,” explains Fredrik Wasting, Tele2’s brand manager. “Furthermore it showed us that increasing the size and prominence of our logo, particularly at the start of a video, was beneficial.”
We also discovered other, perhaps less obvious, attention drivers that are specific to Tele2 creatives:
- Colour palette: The more successful creatives featured similar specific colours, such as blue.
- Nature and scenery: Elements like sunsets and greenery were noted as contributing to higher retention rates.
- Human presence: Incorporating faces, rather than solely focusing on hardware, was found to be more effective.
- Calm music: Ads featuring calm background music generally performed better than those with more upbeat soundtracks.
- Voiceovers: Adding voiceovers to ads was identified as a valuable tool, particularly for delivering key messages and calls to action.
Recycling creatives for best results — and ROI
“Using all these insights we were able to overhaul our advertising,” Wasting continues. “We increased the size of our logo and added this to the start of the ads rather than the end. We incorporated quicker cuts and added additional content where people held hardware, instead of just focusing on the phones. We also simplified our messaging and are initiating a sound logo project.”
In fact, this is the same ad we showed earlier, with the improved components:
By focusing on the components that drive the highest engagement we are able to achieve significant results. Converting ‘poor’ creatives to ‘average’ increases ROI by 5X. This highlights the significant potential for sales uplift simply by addressing underperforming creative elements.
‘Good’ creatives (those with higher retention rates) delivered higher ROIs, confirming that attention truly drives sales. In fact the study showed that ‘good’ creatives drove 1.7X the return on investment of ‘average’, which in turn were 5X better than ‘poor’ ads.
These insights have highlighted the importance of considering a holistic approach to creative development. It's not just about having a great offer or product featured in our ads. The way it's presented, both with sound and vision, plays a significant role.
By marrying data with creativity, we’re creating campaigns that not only capture attention, but also drive tangible business results.
