Big Money Medium, Sub-Optimal Creative: Why Now is the Time for a Creative Revolution in Digital Advertising (comScore Voices)

via blog.comscore.com

Excerpt:

"The implications of this finding cannot be overstated. Let’s compare TV to digital for a moment. This year, a :30 spot in the World Series will reportedly cost an advertiser $450,000. As is nearly always the case with large TV investments, a vast majority of these ads will go through rigorous pre-testing before they see the light of day. In fact, advertisers pre-test multiple strategies and executions to determine what resonates best with consumers and what will likely provide the strongest sales impact. To juxtapose that, in the digital space, a homepage takeover on a major portal can now cost upward of $1MM on a key date (and routinely above and beyond the $450,000 World Series investment). Sure enough, most of these ads are developed without any kind of pre-testing at all. The question is why?

The answer, I believe, is simple. Despite advertisers’ increasing investment in digital media, copy-testing is simply not yet an accepted discipline in digital. This primarily lies in the way digital ad effectiveness research has been historically funded. Unlike television pre-testing (which is funded and owned by the “client-side”), digital marketing effectiveness research has typically been carved out of media plan budgets. This is a result of three key factors:

1. Historically, a small proportion of total ad budgets have been allocated to digital. With a relatively minimal investment in digital, the importance of getting the creative “right” was simply not a high priority on the client-side.

2. The use of ad formats such as static banners has historically meant that production costs were low and so the cost of being wrong was minimal. As the use of rich media and video increases, so do production costs, which, in turn, means that the cost of not having an effective ad becomes material.

3. Because so much of digital advertising has been (and in many cases still is) transacted and evaluated in strictly quantitative terms (i.e. where impressions are bought and sold on exchanges and delivered through complex targeting algorithms), it can be easy to overlook the impact creative quality can have on the overall effectiveness of a campaign. Many digital creatives know this all too well...."

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http://blog.comscore.com/2010/10/creative_digital_advertising.html

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