Catching Two Birds With One Stone: Testing New Ad Creatives While Maintaining Performance
How to reduce the chance of failure and increase the chance of success for ad creatives
“Our current ad creatives might cause ad fatigue if we keep using them... There's a new meme out, should we try it for this campaign? But what if it fails?”
Do you relate to this?
If so, you're a marketer.
New ad creatives always carry risks. If successful, they can dramatically improve current performance by more than double, but if they fail, they can ruin the stable performance you've maintained so far.
Then, to maintain performance, is it best to keep creating creatives similar to the ones that are currently performing well?
Ideally, yes, but reality is different. Even creatives with good performance will eventually cause fatigue or fall behind trends, ultimately leading to a drop in performance. Therefore, we have to take a risk at some point.
Then, is there a way to maintain good ad performance while trying new things?
Catching these two contradictory birds with one stone seems difficult, but it's actually possible depending on your approach. The DelightRoom marketing team has made many attempts over a long period and solved it through a routinized process. In this article, I’ll introduce that process.
DelightRoom Marketing Team's Ad Production Process
First, let me introduce the overall ad production process of the DelightRoom marketing team.
This cycle includes both of the objectives we worried about earlier: "discovering new creatives" and "producing ads with stable performance." So, just by continually following this routine, you can strike a balance between the two.
To explain the important points in each process a bit more,
1) The "Discovering & Trying New Ideas" Process
This corresponds to steps 1 to 3 in the creative process image, and the key points in this process are as follows.
Creative Production
“Produce creatives using as many diverse methods as possible without worrying about failure.”
Examples of diverse methods include "borrowing memes / covering other companies' ads / producing based on the marketer's intuition."
Running Tests
“Run tests for a short period with minimal cost.”
Currently, the DelightRoom marketing team conducts creative performance tests for about 4 to 10 days and determines the success or failure of the test based on metrics.
Retrospective & Listing Lessons
“Do deep retrospectives, and unconditionally archive the lessons.”
During the retrospective, we discuss various things, such as the reasons why a creative did well or failed, and what points could be improved.
The insights discussed and organized this way are archived on a weekly and quarterly basis, keeping them ready to be utilized anytime later.
2) The "Maintaining Stable Ad Performance While Scaling Volume" Process
This corresponds to the final steps 4 and 5 of the creative process, and the key points here are as follows.
“Minimize the time spent on planning creatives, and make as many creatives as possible in the shortest time.”
The reason ad performance can remain above a certain level even when producing many creatives in a short time here is that success formulas have already been accumulated through many prior tests, and this work involves merely tweaking small elements of these creatives.
If you want to further maximize the effect of this process, it's good to have the following additionally prepared.
It's good to build experience in advance on which variation elements often yield good performance.
(Examples of variation elements: swapping genders, replacing with introductions to other similar features in the app, adding comment reactions, etc.)It's helpful to structure the creative by dividing it into Intro-Body-Ending when producing it, and pre-organize the variation resources that can be used for each part.
For example, let's assume the Body of the ad creative is the "part showing the Alarmy app usage screen." Then, if you pre-record and prepare files for scenes like "Alarmy squat mission setting scene / walking mission setting scene," you can quickly produce new variation creatives simply by replacing the Body with another file.
Wrapping Up
There is actually no set success formula for content. You've probably experienced many cases where a successful example from another brand didn't quite fit your own brand.
We can't say this method is the absolute right answer either. Still, we hope our approach can serve as another reference for other marketers who are deeply pondering this today. We will also continue to ponder and try things out, and if another good success case emerges, we'll introduce it.