Action Insight: Automaker Creative Optimization

An automaker asks: Which creative is giving me the most engagement?

One of the world’s top automakers launched an all-new compact sedan, one whose enticing features and price had potential to capture significant market share.

For the sedan’s launch, the company developed an innovative TV ad campaign featuring multiple 15-second creative units, each one highlighting a different feature like turbo engine, bumper-to-bumper warranty, premium audio, and smartphone app integration. They began by airing six different units – in essence, their “opening weekend”. To start, they ran the six different units in roughly equal proportions.

But, which ads are working best?

They knew that some of the six creatives would perform better than others in terms of driving consumers to search for more information on the web – but which were the best performers?

Conventional qualitative copy testing could not provide a precise answer to that question, and quantitative in-market tracking would not offer answers quickly or precisely enough. They needed a new and different approach.

After the first weekend of the campaign, EDO was able to measure the performance of each individual ad airing using Search Engagement, our proprietary metric that captures consumers’ intent to purchase. We were able to provide the automaker with precise, high-confidence data with which to optimize their creative rotation.

Search Engagement Offers $12 million in Value

Based on our analysis, we recommended an optimized rotation that increased the rotation of the creatives that were generating greater engagement, rather than the previous approach of running all of the creatives in roughly equal proportions.

With this new “Recommended Allocation”, the automaker had the potential to achieve an incremental level of Search Engagement equivalent to an extra 240 primetime ads – worth $12 million.

After 4 Days: New Sedan Model*

This analysis of the first weekend of the New Sedan Model launch indicates a $10M+ optimization opportunity.

The table below shows the performance of the six creative units 4 days into the campaign. With our revised allocation, this advertiser would gain an incremental level of Search Engagement equivalent to an additional 240 primetime ads by the end of their 8 week campaign. (Average primetime ad cost of $50K x 240 ads = $12M)

Sample interpretation: The SER Index of Creative A is 25.8% higher than the SER Index of Creative F. This means that someone who viewed Creative A was 25.8% more likely to engage online with the automaker than someone who viewed Creative F (controlling for media placement and other exogenous factors).