Much is spent on advertising every holiday season, but the key ingredient of persuasive advertising — compelling creative — is scarce.

Why Is Compelling Creative So Rare?

For too long, creative has been caught between two cultures: one of creative directors honing storytelling apart from media buying, and another of performance marketers trying to make creative more measurable. Both know that effective creative simultaneously builds brands and stimulates direct responses, but it’s much easier said than done.

Compelling creative requires a concise, cyclical process that tightly integrates the next big idea with cross-channel media planning. It requires deep empathy between designers and paid media practitioners. A faster, more data-driven creative process that cross-pollinates creative and media intelligence can be the difference between disengaging and deeply persuasive advertising this holiday season.

To get more compelling creative, brands and agencies should:

  • Integrate creative and media briefs and teams. Performance marketers and creative directors should jointly decide which medium and message to use for running and stress-testing decisions. Use multivariate tests to (in-)validate creative concepts and challenge winning variables. Throughout, make your guide the voices of customers, not the opinions of the highest-paid people in the room.
  • Unlock technologies’ workflow and analytical efficiencies. Creative advertising technologies help advertisers, both in house and at agencies, lower risk inherent in the creative process and turn creative into a lever of brand and performance. Creative automation exponentially increases creative volume. Dynamic creative optimization facilitates deep personalization based on inferences of intent. Creative intelligence reveals why ads win or lose, helping creative and media teams decide, for instance, whether to run snow-related text treatments this season.

Create For Consumer Fragmentation

You’ll need to optimize creative across channels as audiences span ever more formats and devices. Marketers running audio ads can test scripts via paid search. Results reduce costs per click on Google and Bing as well as costs per impression on Spotify and Audible. Marketers running digital out-of-home campaigns should build several variations; personalize them based on weather, location, and time of day; and deploy winning variables across providers ranging from Uber to Lamar. Similarly, TV creative should be atomized and tested pre- and in-flight. Variables ranging from the pitch of a siren wailing in an ad’s background to the breed of dog featured in an ad’s first few seconds significantly impact TV advertising’s efficacy.

As you produce, test, and measure creative this holiday season, check out our research, including The Forrester Wave™: Creative Advertising Technologies, Q4 2024, How To Use Technology To Develop Better Ad Creative, and The Ad Creative Competency Assessment Tool. As always, feel free to schedule time to discuss via inquiry or guidance session.