How a Creative Quality Score can bring down CPMs

While marketers are under pressure to deliver more effective marketing in a crisis, managers are often more concerned with efficiency – a new report attempts to quantify how more creatively effective marketing leads to greater efficiency.

Why it matters

Practitioners have long known that high quality creative is a force multiplier to advertising effectiveness. Recently, these intuitive conclusions are being formalised by ideas like Creative Commitment, and now CreativeX’s (FKA Picasso Labs) Creative Quality Score, which are attempting to put hard numbers on the effects of creativity.

The Creative Quality Score (CQS), simply, attempts to replace brand and platform best practices for creative excellence with an industry-wide metric backed by a broad dataset.

The metric

CreativeX outlines the idea in a new report, Data From 1M Ads, $1B Media Spend, 1 Trillion Impressions: And What It Tells Us About Creative Effectiveness. The title effectively outlines its methodology, where the creative excellence platform has brought together brands’ and platforms’ creative best practice guides and performance data from platforms (impressions, recall, cost per completed view) in order to understand whether following best practice does indeed drive performance. It works like this:

Creative Quality Score [CQS %] = no. best practices applied / total no. of best practices tracked.

But what does it actually mean?

The report identifies three key effects.

• Lower CPMs. Higher creative quality scores are related to lower CPMs. Across all channels, a 10% increase in CQS is associated with a -2% decrease to CPMs.  Better still, ads ranking in the top third (with a CQS of 67-100%) saw 15% cheaper CPMs versus the bottom third.
  
  “If you are a brand with a Creative Quality Score of 20%, a CPM of $5, and a Facebook ad spend of $100m, you can expect to see 2.3 billion more impressions by increasing your score to 80%,” the report states. Alternatively, by increasing CQS, you could buy the same number of impressions for $12m less.
  
  
• More memorable ads tend to have higher CQS. For Facebook and Instagram ads – for which ad recall metrics are programmatically available – a 10% increase in CQS lifts ad recall by 2%.
  
  
• Better engagement. Creative with a high CQS brings down the cost per completed view (CPCV). A 10% CQS lift on Facebook platforms brings down CPCV, which Facebook measures as 30 second views per dollar, by 4.8%; on Twitter and YouTube, which measure 100% views per dollar, the same CQS increases lead to a decrease in CPCV of 5.7%.

Sourced from CreativeX, WARC/Cannes Lions

_{[Image: CreativeX]}