Have you ever thought about what factors primarily drive your video and TV media brand lift & ROI? A closer look might challenge your preconceptions. Counterintuitively, the creative brief, often an overlooked aspect of the measurement process, could be the most potent lever for optimizing performance. This insight comes from no less an authority than Tim D’Auria, ex-Head of TV & Video Data Science at Tripadvisor, where Tim’s teams were optimizing over $100M per year in video across more than 10 countries. Tim’s observation about video creative is gaining traction from some high-profile names, including Steve Kaufer, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Tripadvisor, who recently joined Tim’s advisory team.
The ROI Breakdown: Creative vs. Media
When considering ROI from TV commercials and social video, our analysis suggests that an astonishing 79.8% of video brand lift and performance outcome stems from the creative concept and its execution. Meanwhile, only about 20% is attributable to the specifics of the media itself, such as channels, networks, dayparts, and other media levers.
These findings may seem startling, but they make sense when we consider that data scientists specializing in TV & video optimization rapidly identify and capitalize on the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of media optimization. Having overseen video data science teams, Tim noticed that most media wins are captured within the first year of robust video measurement. Subsequent optimizations merely fine-tune the process.
However, the real game-changer is the creative concept. Something as simple as altering key talking points in the voiceover can cause a step-function change in ROI associated with TV & video spends. In other words, altering the video creative can significantly increase or decrease all media ROI.
Uncovering the Creative Powerhouse
It was this observation that prompted Tim to measure the impact each video “lever” has on performance outcomes. Tim discovered that the creative aspect was 4x more influential on TV & video performance optimization than the specifics of the media buys. Tracing this back even further, Tim found that the creative brief—the core instructions for what video content needs to be built—was a critical factor in brand & performance optimization.
Unfortunately, creative briefs, despite their oversized impact on return on investment and brand lift, lacks the rigor of data science in its current state. More often than not, creative briefs are the product of speculation. More advanced teams may use surveys, panels, and focus groups to inform their creative briefs, but the insights these methods yield often fail to reflect what transpires in the real world.
Some teams attempt to A/B test their way to victories, but the high cost of producing and running videos makes this approach unsustainable. Brands that try to create multiple variants from a single core concept quickly discover that it’s the core concept itself that needs testing, an economically unfeasible proposition.
Enter Videoquant: Challenging Creative Optimization
Recognizing these challenges while overseeing data science teams managing over $110M per year in video across the globe, it became clear that the status quo was untenable. This led Tim and his team to develop a method that leverages other brands’ resources and data science to test video creative concepts for us, enabling us to outpace competition without even spending a penny on buying media on a video before we have clarity that it has a high probability of success.
For more information, contact us to connect with Videoquant and learn how you can step-function increase brand lift and ROI through quantitative optimization of your video creative brief.