By Corey McKeegan, Senior Marketing Creative Manager
Whatever way you choose to spin the stats, it’s undeniable: creative is essential to campaign performance and the key to success.
“53% of all campaign outcomes can be attributed to creative” – Meta
“Creative quality is responsible for 70% of ad performance” – Google Media Lab
“High creative quality and effectiveness quadruples ROMI (return on marketing investment)” – Kantar
However, many marketers and businesses aren’t able to keep up with the increasingly demanding level of production output required to capitalise on creative as a performance lever. MVF experiences these challenges tenfold but we tackle them head on. Against the odds, our campaign managers make all of their own ad creatives across dozens of markets and languages and hundreds of verticals ranging from heavy duty equipment tracking in Canada to market research in Singapore.
I saw a TikTok recently (a daily utterance in our team) showing how a 20-second ad spot for a well-known supermarket cheddar brand was made. It took 38 people from production, cast and agency to put the ad together. The ad was good but nothing special. It cost a lot to produce and will be very difficult to measure ROI, so what was the point?
In contrast, 3 of the Marketing Innovation Team went on a 2-week trip to Austin in September. We ran 4 production events, sourced 3 locations and hired 4 actors. To date, from that one trip, we have delivered 43 ads and have created over 800 assets. Gross profit uplift from a single ad has already paid for the cost of the trip several times over.
One of the many ways we differentiate ourselves here at MVF is through the scale and impact of our creatives. Here are 5 learnings that have enabled us to produce over 400 highly performant ad creatives per month.
1) We don’t put all our eggs in one basket
If you’re going to the effort and cost of hiring an actor and a location, you should be prepared to test multiple things.
This is sometimes called a modular approach to scripting or storyboarding where one or more elements of a creative can be swapped, recombined or remixed. We do this in a number of ways. You can test multiple hooks with one video body, one image with multiple copy variations or avoid using connective words in scripts altogether to make footage reusable and sustainable.
Slight variations to creatives can help increase your hit rate but also provide more data points to draw conclusions from.
2) We keep creative data reporting simple
Reporting on creative performance is challenging; there are lots of channels, asset types and variables to compare and contrast.
At MVF, we label our creative assets simply and accurately so that we can easily recognise and group assets according to visual style or angle.
Well structured creative assets enable us to identify, iterate on and roll out wins more quickly.
3) We take time for creative
Side-of-desk creative work is incredibly valuable, every marketer at MVF is given the skills and tools to produce their own ad iterations and creatives.
Having campaign managers who meet their own creative needs could even be described as our secret sauce. And thanks to the proliferation of AI-enhanced editing software like Canva and Kapwing we’re able to do more for less.
We don’t need everyone who makes ads to be a pro videographer. We offer short-form video production & lightweight mobile editing training to anyone in the business who wants it. We believe that no matter who you are, if you’ve ever posted a video to your social media you’re more than qualified to make an ad.
Someone in the team can have an idea at 9am (ok, 9:30am), turn it into an ad by lunch, launch it and already have insights the next day. MVF’s characteristic pace and scale of testing means we can tailor our marketing to better serve customers and clients.
And then there are times when you need to go even further, break out and allocate a whole afternoon, day or week exclusively to creative production. MVF’s internal creative agency, the Creative Innovation Team, is a small outfit of marketers and creative producers who propose, plan and facilitate production events for our wider Paid Marketing team.
This approach will come as no surprise to creative agencies but to performance marketing it’s a relatively nascent concept.
4) We strive to understand our customers
MVF is fortunate enough to have a number of brilliant teams, all of whom contribute to a better understanding of our customers and the industries we operate in.
Our Marketing Campaign Managers are category experts. They provide us with a wealth of platform and customer data to inform our copy and the angles we take with ads.
Our Insights Team conducts primary research into B2B industries to fuel our business with the latest market research. We use this insight to better understand the needs and pain points of our customers.
When it comes to ideation, we always bring in new perspectives using learnings from across the business. These new angles help us to stay ahead of the competition and combat fatigue in our copy.
5) We live and breathe the platforms we advertise on
We aren’t purely creative. Each of the Creative Strategists in the Marketing Innovation Team has a background in a particular platform. Together we have in-depth coverage of the full suite of Google and Meta marketing platforms as well as additional expertise in influencer marketing, LinkedIn and TikTok.
Our deep knowledge of platform-specific marketing levers enables us to develop creative strategies that align with the commercial goals of our clients while providing positive and relevant experiences for our customers.
