Creative messaging can make or break a campaign, which is why it is crucial for B2B brands to get it just right. In fact, in this cut-throat economic climate, never has it been more imperative to ensure that a creative message achieves maximum standout and exposure.
Whilst it can be relatively easy to know you’re achieving the latter by running ads in the right places and measuring how many pairs of eyes are viewing your creative efforts it can be notoriously difficult to measure the former. How do you know you’re achieving standout? How do you know whether your artistic efforts are pleasing to the audience they’re intended for? With creative work being as subjective as it is, there are few hard and fast rules for effective evaluation, but read on for eight top tips and hints that should help you to discover whether you’re on the right track.
1. Follow a logical process
The first step to the successful evaluation of creative work begins before the first brush stroke or snapshot has even manifested itself, says Ian Allison, creative director at Bell. People often talk of creative as an end-product, when in fact it is part of a process with a tangible end-product, says Allison.
He argues that any campaign needs to start with the outlay of key performance indicators (KPIs), which take much of the subjectivity, or fear out of the creative process. This gives you a logical narrative, where creative is built on sound ergonomic principle rather than on pure aesthetics, he says. This doesn’t mean that your creative can’t be imaginative and exciting. Creativity is the step from logic to magic, says Scot McKee, director at Birddog. You can still communicate very logical messages in a creative and impactful way.
2. Understand your audience
When looking at a creative execution, can you visualise precisely the type of customer you want to be viewing it? Name and picture a single person that is a good example, advises Alan Jarvie, founding partner and creative director at London Advertising. Is your idea relevant? Are you talking to your audience as human beings and not in some techno gobbledegook or pseudo marketing speak?
It might sound difficult to look at your own creative work with a degree of objectivity, but Chris Cleaver, MD of business brands at Dragon, agrees that it can be done using this simple step. Pull together a list of responses that you think you’d like to prompt, and use this list to see if the creative ticks the right boxes, he says.
3. Focus, focus, focus
It’s often difficult to view your own creative work objectively, which is why focus groups are a good way to get others to do it for you. Focus groups can help to develop creative messages before they are unleashed on your audience, or help to evaluate success or failure post-campaign.
The main pointers are really to establish how appropriate and original an idea is. Create a panel or forum of businesses to bounce your ideas past, suggests Jarvie. Doing this can give you unrivalled insight into how your creative is viewed by your audience. It’s a B2C example, but when we worked with Sony on the Bravia campaign, where coloured balls were bounced down a San Francisco hill, we found through focus groups that people were more interested in the process of filming the ad than they were the product itself but that’s a fantastic conversation to have because it means that the following year we were able to provide lots of relevant content, like behind-the-scenes footage, to really engage them with the brand, says Ranzie Anthony, founder and managing partner at Tonic.
Be aware though that focus groups can’t give you a right or a wrong answer, only a steer a steer that sometimes you might choose to override. Before Audi launched it’s (now iconic) ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ campaign, it researched atrociously, reveals Chris Murphy, chairman at Balloondog. The focus group said they didn’t understand the message, that playing up the Germanic element wasn’t appealing, and that the use of a foreign language was elitist. But the marketing director at the time decided to run with it anyway. The rest is history.
4. Keep things in context
Viewing or asking focus groups to view a creative execution in isolation gives it a distorted impact and doesn’t help to establish how it will stand out in the real world. Your audience won’t (naturally) dwell on and study the creative, points out Garrett Dearey, associate director at Positive Digital. You’ll get a very different picture if you look at an ad or piece of creative in isolation rather than in the actual context it will appear. If it’s a press ad, mock it up into the relevant publication, if it’s a poster put it alongside others that might appear with it, he advises.
5. Get digital
The crucial difference when evaluating digital, versus more traditional forms of creative, lies in the success of the interactive element as well as the pure aesthetics. The intersection between aesthetics and practicality is important in the digital world you can have an incredible looking website but it’s not going to engage if it’s not useable, says Dearey. Smooth navigation is key if your messages are going to be communicated.
Ask yourself questions such as ‘Is the functionality intuitive or does it take a mastermind to interact with it?’ says Trefor Thomas, creative director of Brand Advocate. The ease of measurability of digital creative also means that the evaluation of it can be used to complement and enhance more traditional forms, he adds.
6. Don’t overlook emotional intelligence
It can be easy to get bogged down measuring the ‘scientific’ success of a creative campaign, by analysing leads generated and ROI, but being able to judge how a creative execution actually makes a person feel can be equally insightful especially for use when planning future campaigns.
Communication research agency Mesh Planning has pioneered a way to capture customer’s emotions at the time of viewing an ad, which it feeds back to clients. Paid participants use their mobile phones to text pre-agreed codes, which explain their thoughts and reactions whenever they come into contact with a specific brand they have been asked to look out for. They also keep an online diary to log any comments they have to share on an ad campaign.
We’ve worked with a psychologist at the London School of Economics who confirmed that you can’t as effectively ask people to recall their emotional response to an ad as you can effectively capture that emotion in real time, says Mesh’s chief experience officer, Fiona Blades.
7. It’s all in the eyes
Eyetracking offers another way of grasping some tangible results to ascertain creative success. The process involves mapping eye movements, using special goggles, to establish what the eye is drawn to when looking at an ad or a brand placed in situation.
Specialist company, Eyetracker, can track a participant’s eye movements as he or she looks at a website, or flicks through a magazine in which a client’s ad has been placed, to see if or how they engage with it. According to Iain Janes, research director at Eyetracker, this is a technique more and more B2B brands are showing an interest in. Used properly, it can be a hugely powerful tool for analysing creative work, he says. The expense attached to the process depends on the depth of the study but day rate prices to hire the equipment and an operator start from around £1500 per day, says Janes.
8. Consider science versus art
When evaluating the success of a piece of creative, the trick is not to be too scientific about it, warns McKee. The science part is what happens at the end of the campaign process looking at your ROI and how many leads you achieved but that’s not the same as measuring creative directly he argues. Creative is as much an inspired moment of clarity or genius as it is a measurable, tangible thing that you can put your finger on in. It’s about what makes you feel good. If it was something you could put in a can, label and put on a shelf, everyone would be doing it. To try and over prescribe how you develop creative work is a mistake.
