This is how to measure creativity - and creative effectiveness. Calculate you Creative Performance Score.
The customer creates 500 new unique ad creatives every month. They have it automated through a DCO setup so their data and inhouse tool creates the output dynamically. The Designer and Copywriter spends around 10 hours on creating new ad templates and new ad texts. They spend €3.000 on the tool.
This gives them a cost on €8 per Ad Creative resulting in a Cost Efficiency Score of:
92 / 100
As their ads are live-updated automatically the customer spends in average 7 days from the brief came in until the ads are now live. This gives them a Speed Score of:
77,4 / 100
Their primary marketing objective with their display campaigns is traffic, so the indicative KPI is CTR. Their average monthly CTR is 0,12%. This gives them a Performance Score of:
24 / 100
Combing the 3 results, the customer is now able to evaluate their Creative Performance.
Where are they doing great compared to the market benchmarks?
Where are they doing better or worse than their previous own results?
Recommendation
In this customer’s case, they are in the top-quartile in both Cost Efficiency and Speed, but Performance is what is dragging down their CPS.
= Produce higher-quality and more creative ad creatives to bring up their CTR.
The customer creates 20 new unique ad creatives every month. They have outsourced their production to an agency so they spend 3 hours on communication and feedback back-and-forth with the agency. They pay the agency €1.500 to help them produce new ad creatives.
This gives them a cost on €90 per Ad Creative resulting in a Cost Efficiency Score of:
10 / 100
The feedback loops and bottleneck of many stakeholders, the customer spends in average 17 days from the brief came in until the ads are now live. This gives them a Speed Score of:
45,2 / 100
Their primary marketing objective with their display campaigns is traffic, so the indicative KPI is CTR. Their average monthly CTR is 0,4%. This gives them a Performance Score of:
80 / 100
Combing the 3 results, the customer is now able to evaluate their Creative Performance.
Where are they doing great compared to the market benchmarks?
Where are they doing better or worse than their previous own results?
Recommendation
The customer’s Performance is doing great as the market average CTR for display campaigns is 0,10%, but they are paying a lot for few creatives. They should look at how they can bring down costs for a more scalable setup? What will they do if they want to start producing x2 (20) new ad creatives every month as they are scaling their business?
Additionally, they spend a lot of time to get to market. Perhaps if they could insource their production, they would be able to go-to-market faster?
Curious to see how you are doing? Try it on your own.
We have asked +50 CMOs and decision makers about their performance across the 3 input variables. Based on their responses, these are the benchmarks and numbers we use for the calculation: