A Cheeky Football Ad Isn't Enough for Today's CEO

This article was originally published in Adweek.

As legendary director Stanley Kubrick once said, a great ad idea in just 30 seconds explains why “some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials.”

But for all the creativity and technical execution that goes into producing the high-quality ads we’ll see this NFL season, many of advertisers’ biggest decisions will hinge on out-of-date, survey-based methods for measuring creative effectiveness.

Whether they measure consumers’ favorability, brand recall, or purchase intent, all of these methods focus on what consumers say, rather than what they do. We’re not measuring whether the ad did its job: driving a consumer to meaningful action.

CMOs invest heavily in increasingly ambitious creative to reach football’s massive TV audiences, combining high production values with pricey celebrity talent. But a funny or inspiring ad won’t be enough to satisfy today’s CEOs and CFOs; it needs to impact the bottom line.

Without metrics truly aligned with business results, creatives are pressured to produce ads with tired tactics that drive consumers to merely remember their brand while flying blind when assessing whether those spots compelled viewers to take action. Once the campaign is over, creative agencies and their CMO clients are stuck defending huge investments to their C-suite colleagues and boards with weak data that does not align with business results.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. By reorienting creative measurement toward real, in-market consumer behaviors, marketers can empower creative professionals to unleash their most groundbreaking ideas while better understanding how their ads drive the critical business outcomes their clients expect.

The trouble with surveys

Survey-based tools for measuring creative effectiveness often incentivize advertisers to repeatedly beat consumers over the head with brand messaging. That’s bad news for TV viewers this football season, and worse news for the advertisers themselves.

EDO research has found that ads with price offers don’t outperform those without them. And, while focus groups can help validate ideas and avoid many such pitfalls, they often miss the mark on the groundbreaking creative that transforms brands and businesses.

All of this is to say that the bluntest approaches incentivized by survey metrics aren’t always the best. What the reliance on these old-school metrics does is make creative pros less fulfilled and keep their CMO clients from the decision-worthy data and insights that move the business forward.

The metrics that matter

Solving this problem is fairly simple: We have to reorient our marketing metrics around what consumers do, rather than what they say. It’s what we’ve already been doing in social and search advertising all along. Why? Because we could.

By looking at the actual consumer actions that occur after an ad airs—such as website visits, brand searches, store visits, and sales—marketers and creatives alike can know what works. Creatives can understand the ideas and messages that move the needle, marketers can prove the value of their investment, and we can all start making (and seeing) even better, more effective ads.

Don’t believe it? The data bears out that these predictive consumer engagements are highly proven drivers of future sales. Campaigns optimized for an ad’s ability to drive these predictive outcomes, as well as impression cost, can deliver a 280% greater ROI than campaigns optimized on cost alone.

Even better is an approach centered on consumer engagement actions that yields creative success, as well as commercial impact. Kia, a brand that has produced some of the freshest, most interesting auto ads of the past decade, carefully tracks how those creative choices impacted consumer actions. It’s no surprise Kia has been gobbling up market share.

Or look to the insurance world, where Progressive (and Flo) continue to unveil one outside-the-box idea after another, carefully testing their approach and inching closer to the industry’s traditional leaders.

When brands focus on real, in-market actions, everyone wins. Creatives get to flex their muscles, brands drive results, and everyone gets actionable insights they can use for the next campaign.

A new scoreboard for 2024

As brands prepare to kick into high gear with the NFL and Fall TV season, we should all commit to our creative professionals in making sure they have the right tools to know what works.

Actions speak louder than words, especially when it comes to measuring TV ad impact. With the right data in hand, we can unleash the power of our creative agency partners, and our campaigns can move our consumers closer to purchase.

And creative pros can take that check all the way to the bank.