Creative Experimentation At Scale With Natasha Potashnik, SVP Data Science and Media Optimization
This May, Natasha Potashnik, SVP Data Science and Media Optimization at Known, spoke with Seb Joseph, the Brands Editor at Digiday for Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit. Natasha and other experts discussed how data privacy challenges and the demise of the third party cookie are reshaping the marketing and advertising landscape. The main takeaway? Implementing a more sophisticated programmatic marketing strategy is essential for a competitive edge.
During the summit, Natasha spoke about how advertisers are starting to double down on creative experimentation within programmatic marketing. Effective creative is a big part of what can help drive campaigns to achieve and exceed KPIs. At the same time, a lot can be learned from technology, testing, and algorithms. It’s important to pair human evaluation and technology to verify which creative will influence the consumer most effectively.
“I think we need to question the speed at which we arrive at the conclusion of which idea works,” Natasha says. “The creative process historically has involved one big idea chosen after a series of meetings and presentations.”
Selecting the right creative for the campaign has to be driven by data and science to ensure the idea actually works, plus it is fun for the creative team because it can gamify the process in a way that it hasn’t been done before. We ask ourselves, “Is the creative we made going to work? If it doesn’t work, what can we do to tweak it and what can we learn from the media team?” A client can love an idea upfront, but no one wants a campaign that’s unsuccessful.
“We regularly see in our campaigns that the difference between the best and worst performing creative can be over five times in efficacy. It’s interesting that humans are bad at determining creative performance — a paper a few years ago showed that award-winning creative is on average no more performant than non award-winning creative,” Natasha points out. “Multiple studies have shown that creative is at least 50 percent of media effectiveness, beating out the more traditional optimization levers like audience and pricing.”
We regularly see in our campaigns that the difference between the best and worst performing creative can be over five times in efficacy.
Teams across media and creative need to collaborate and work closely with the client to ensure authentic storytelling. Once the campaign is live, the data science and media buying teams are in the position to continuously evaluate performance of their hypotheses and extract meaningful insights, which then the creative team can run with to develop new assets. This way there’s a continuous rapid feedback loop which allows for efficient experimentation. At Known, Natasha’s team works with both the media and creative arms, which means our data scientists and creative strategists get to work side-by-side every day.
Multiple studies have shown that creative is at least 50 percent of media effectiveness, beating out the more traditional optimization levers like audience and pricing.
In order to support rapid and creative experimentation, the technology needs to be up to snuff. We need the right set of algorithms, capable of extracting insights, which are actionable for a creative team. Instead of Ad A is better than Ad B, sharing certain themes that really resonated with certain audiences and surfacing new ideas that should be explored is more actionable for a creative team and really enables that feedback loop.
“The reality is that different creative works for different audiences, and you can’t test everything due to budgets and other factors,” explains Natasha.
Known sets a learning agenda upfront with clients to be clear on what the testing goals are to build a framework for success. This prevents from going too wide from the start and losing the signal in the data.
As brands, agencies, and the technology they use evolve, there will always be a need for creative experimentation and a way to measure it. At Known, we’ll continuously invest in this practice because everything we do is rooted in science. Blended with our special touch of creativity, we’ve been able to offer a personalized, actionable data approach for our clients.
Read more about the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit here.
