New Research from Flashtalking Highlights Urgent Need for Better Measurement of Creative Performance

The quality of ad creative has a direct, measurable impact on campaign performance, and advertisers are largely unable to measure it


NEW YORK, Oct. 09, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Effective creative optimization is one of the major untapped opportunities left for advertisers, according to results of a new report from Flashtalking, the leading global independent platform for ad management, data activation and unified insights.  In its analysis of 60 campaigns comprising 10 billion individual impressions, Flashtalking established that, on average, the top performing quartile of creative is 7X more impactful than the worst-performing quartile, and that click-through rates are negatively correlated with creative performance. These findings make it clear that the quality of advertising creative has a dominant impact on campaign performance and return on ad spend.

“The need to optimize ad creative has become even greater, as multi-channel marketing has become more the norm, yet marketers have lacked the tools to properly understand creative performance,” said Steve Latham, Global Head of Analytics at Flashtalking.  “Across the industry, digital attribution has focused on media and audience performance, while continuing to rely on outdated creative metrics such as click-through rates and last-touch attribution. Creative measurement has received comparatively little attention—particularly in the context of programmatic. That is, until now.”

Flashtalking Report Shines a Light on The Need for Better Creative Analytics -- and Solutions
To bring clarity to the creative measurement problem, Flashtalking developed a methodology to assess creative performance in a way that would better serve advertisers’ needs. Employing an algorithmic, machine learning based approach, Flashtalking assessed the performance of each creative version—defined by its propensity to influence conversions in proportion to the total number of impressions served—across 60+ campaigns from 2018 comprising over 10 billion impressions served on behalf of 24 advertisers; covering the Travel, Media, Telco, Gaming, Consumer Services, and Energy sectors.

Flashtalking’s proprietary, data-driven approach employs clustering algorithms to account for bias from audience and media factors, and machine learning multi-touch attribution to determine the effectiveness of each creative.

The results were clear:

  • On average, the top performing quartile of creatives are 7X more impactful than the worst-performing quartile of creatives.
  • Click-through rates are generally negatively correlated with creative performance.

Combined, these results paint a convincing picture. The variance in creative performance indicates significant gains may be realized by optimizing creative. But if an advertiser is using the wrong creative performance metric for optimization, it is likely to serve more of what is not working.

For advertisers to realize the opportunity to drive better results from creative optimization, they must update their measurement tools, replacing outdated metrics with smarter, data-driven methods.

To access the report, visit: https://www.flashtalking.com/creative-analytics-report/

About Flashtalking
Flashtalking is a data-driven ad management and analytics technology company. We help sophisticated marketers use data to personalize advertising, analyze its effectiveness and optimize performance across channels and formats.  Our platform leads the market with innovative products and services to ensure creative relevance and unbiased, actionable insights, powered by proprietary cookieless tracking, data unification and algorithmic attribution.  Born in the UK, established worldwide, Flashtalking spans the globe with offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles,  Chicago, London, Leeds, Cologne, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Sydney. For more information visit www.flashtalking.com.

Contact:
Kendall Allen
WIT Strategy
For Flashtalking
kallen@witstrategy.com