Optimise your Q4 digital toolkits in-flight

This Q4 2023, the pressure is truly on to deliver results and secure 2024 marketing budgets. Automated Creative (AC) surveyed a range of senior marketers who shared their concerns and admitted to falling behind when it comes to creative optimisation. In a recent white paper, read about these findings and the solutions for delivering on marketing KPIs.

When doing research for their white paper, “Compounding Creative,” AC discovered that ⅓ of marketers don’t optimise their creative in-flight. This is the equivalent of building a high-performance rocket and launching it without mission control. What will happen to those Christmas campaigns? Can they be adjusted? How will you know if they’re doing well, or why certain ads are outperforming others?

This year, the pressure to deliver on KPIs and secure future marketing budgets is stronger than ever. 64% of the marketers in our survey admitted to being under more scrutiny, while 44.7% of senior marketers expect to see a cut in budgets if Q4 doesn’t hit targets.

Top Mistakes Marketers Could Be Making in Q4

Why are these budgets in danger and what should marketers avoid as they look to the end of the year?

After analysing over 6 billion media impressions of live campaign data across our portfolio, we found that optimised creative delivers up to 17% more media value than “business as usual” work (aka “set and forget”). Here’s why things are not going as well as they should be.

Campaigns aren’t fit for digital
Brands we audited were running 55% of media spends with creative that was “below par” and didn’t meet industry standards best practice for digital platforms. 

Ads aren’t fit for platform
You could be gaining 13% in brand equity by setting ads to the right platforms, not to mention the platform performance gains that come with that. 

Setting & forgetting creative
Soon, optimising ads in-flight will be non-negotiable. We offer a sprint-on-sprint optimisation model that works for top-of-funnel awareness campaigns, as well as bottom-of-funnel direct conversion campaigns.

Being able to identify the elements of your ads that click with your target audience boosts overall performance and avoids a natural campaign fatigue. It drives campaigns to hit targets and go beyond them.

Leaving free media money on the table
By diversifying your creative, running ads at scale, and strategically testing to see what works, you can boost the effectiveness of your existing media exponentially. Besides, it’s the most competitive time of year to run ads - so why not try and get the most results for your spend?

Using Creative Optimisation to Boost Performance

Working with the World Federation of Advertisers, we analysed the industry wide problem of creative effectiveness (or lack thereof). It looks like most marketers often struggle with process - and the biggest weakness organisations complain about is an inability to ‘measure the impact of marketing ability in a timely manner.’

Going back to the rocket launch analogy, an effective, on-point mission control approach offers marketers the tools to measure their work in real time and correct it where needed. Doing so at scale and using AI to automate processes and boost efficiency is another level of this. 

No corrections can work overnight, but starting with small steps is better than not optimising at all. In our report, we present a few first steps that will provide immediate results. You’ll see a change within 2-3 weeks of live media through our methodology. 

Take pressure off your decision making, put in-flight optimisation to work today, and get Q4 back under control. Read more here.

By Tom Ollerton, founder of Automated Creative - the Creative Effectiveness platform. AC’s ambition is to stop the billions of media dollars that are being wasted every day on ineffective ads.