How to measure creative effectiveness

Creative effectiveness goes beyond surface-level metrics like views, clicks or engagement.

Measuring creative effectiveness allows you to understand how the visuals, messaging, narrative and audio used in your advertising directly impacts your audience and influences business outcomes.

Assessing the effectiveness of your creative also allows you to understand whether it impacts the metrics that matter for business growth and category/market dominance, which elements are undermining or furthering business outcomes and shows you why consumers respond to your creative the way they do.

But how do you measure creative effectiveness for your own brand?

The following article lays out the key metrics you can use to assess your creative’s ability to drive key business outcomes. I’ll break down simple methods to evaluate creative effectiveness and give you guidance on the ideal times to assess your creative throughout the ideation and development process.

What is creative effectiveness measurement?

Creative effectiveness measurement is the process of analyzing the impact of your creative on the metrics that drive business impact.

This type of measurement allows you to dissect each key element of your creative — from the storyline to the music — to help you understand which elements (or combination of elements) are impacting consumers where it matters.

This analysis can tell you how effectively your ad builds brand awareness, elicits specific emotions and creates sales and highlights where you need to make improvements. While media targeting and volume of spend help determine your overarching advertising success, creative effectiveness solely measures the singular impact of your creative.

Creative effectiveness hones in on the quality of your ad, while targeting and volume of spend amplifies the effectiveness of your ad by making sure it gets shown to a higher percentage of the right audience. If you don’t create a great ad, these secondary focuses won’t lead to measurable outcomes for your brand.

Effective creative can produce both short and long-term results for your brand: driving both short-term sales and building long-term brand equity.

Creative effectiveness is also directly connected to ROI. As Paul Dyson, the founder of Accelero consultancy, found, creative quality multiplies profitability by 12x. This result is something we validated in our own research, which saw ads with strong creative effectiveness deliver a 30% greater ROI.

What should you measure to understand creative effectiveness?

What are the key areas you need to measure to understand the impact of your ads? There are several different layers of creative effectiveness you need to understand in order to assess how efficient your ad is at moving you closer towards specific brand and business goals, such as generating more short-term sales or improving brand recognition.

Attention

The first metric to consider is attention and behavior. Is your ad successful at capturing consumers’ active attention or do they simply zone out or scroll by?

It’s important to remember that views and visibility don’t necessarily equal active attention and engagement. People actively notice up to 400 ads per day (despite the marketing myth that the average person sees over 10,000 ads in 24 hours). That means that there are hundreds of other ads competing for consumers’ attention.

Effective creative captures and maintains attention, commanding the sustained focus brands need to deliver their marketing message and influence consumer behavior.

Emotional response

Nostalgia, sadness, joy, amusement: emotions move consumers. Research shows that consumers' emotional responses to an ad have a far greater impact on whether they choose to buy a product than the content of the ad.

Because emotion is one of the most powerful motivators and key accelerators of creative effectiveness, it's an essential component of understanding why your creative performs or doesn’t perform.

Which emotions did your ad make people feel and how strongly did they feel them?

Ads that fail to elicit certain emotions typically fail to influence consumer behavior and generate business results. Ineffective creative may either fail to make your audience feel or lead them to feel counterproductive emotions: irritation instead of joy, hopelessness instead of confidence or anger instead of empathy. A moment that was meant to make your audience laugh just leaves them confused or a moment they were supposed to love only racks up lukewarm likes.

You need to understand whether your ad succeeds in making people feel emotions that are purposeful to your brand, in the moments you want them to feel them.

Find out more about the influence of great advertising on emotions in our post on emotions in advertising.

Brand recognition and recall

Brand recognition and recall help determine whether your creative successfully builds mental availability. The Ehrenberg-Bass method states that brands only grow by gaining more buyers (as opposed to attempting to increase purchases from their already-loyal customers). To do this successfully, brands must create more mental availability — creating more powerful links between their brand and consumers’ memories in buying situations.

For your creative to build this mental availability, consumers need to be able to successfully identify you as the advertiser. If they can’t identify your brand then you’re effectively throwing away ad spend. Even more damaging is when consumers associate your ad with a competitor, effectively rendering your ad spend an investment in your competitors’ success.

This is why it’s so important to feature clear, consistent brand assets in your creative. Great ads boast high visibility when it comes to your brand assets, from brand colors to taglines, effective creative includes brand assets that immediately connect your creative to your brand.

Unaided and aided brand recall are also important metrics to distinguish and use to support your analysis. Unaided brand recall measures a consumer’s ability to remember a brand without any hints or promoting — such as being presented with a category and simply being asked which brands come to mind. While aided brand recall measures a consumer’s ability to remember a brand when shown brand assets like logos, names or taglines.

In particular, unaided brand recall can help assess brand awareness, competitive differentiation, the strength of your brand voice and story and whether you maintain consistency in the expression of your distinctive brand assets across your creative.

At Zappi, we typically support brands to test unaided brand recall by presenting respondents with a clutter reel that also features the ad being tested. We then ask them to list the brands they recall seeing to see whether your brand comes to mind.

Message clarity

Massage clarity is another essential component of advertising effectiveness measurement.

It’s essential that consumers understand your intended message. Confusing and unclear messaging can dramatically decrease the effectiveness of your ad. An ad that’s hard to understand is typically frustrating and irritating for your audience — wasting your ad spend. While message clarity helps build brand trust, strengthens consumers’ emotional connection to your brand and helps your CTA convert more effectively as consumers clearly understand what they need to do next.

Message clarity also helps you to understand which messages were accurately understood and helped play a role in actually influencing consumers’ responses — allowing you to break down and connect specific responses to the main messages in your ad.

Sales impact and brand impact

Sales impact and brand impact directly connect your creative to commercial outcomes. These ad effectiveness metrics can also help you assess whether viewing or listening to your ad changes how consumers feel about choosing or buying from your brand, with great creative positively shaping brand perceptions, driving short-term sales and shaping long-term brand impact or brand equity.

Take Cadbury’s award-winning Gorilla ad following Cadbury’s 2007 rebrand.

Lee Rolston, Cadbury’s director of marketing for block chocolate and beverages, shared: 

"We sensed from all the research we were doing that, although people were still talking about their love for Dairy Milk, it felt a bit passive. It’s a bit like the comfy sweater you keep at the back of the wardrobe that you’ll never throw out but you start wearing less and less."

To help them fix falling sales and reshape brand perceptions, Cadbury approached Fallon London with a brief that dictated that the campaign should feel as good as eating a Dairy Milk bar — giving Fallon’s creative team just a week to execute the brief. To recreate the feeling of unwrapping a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, they brought in actor Garon Michael to drum up a storm to Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight.

The joy-drenched concept, Collins' backing track and the unexpected surprise of a drumming gorilla for a classic brand all added to the ad’s persuasive power and positively influenced brand perceptions. The ad quickly went viral, leading to a 9% jump in Dairy Milk sales from the previous year. It was later crowned the nation’s favorite ad in the U.K by Marketing Magazine, making a lasting impact on Cadbury’s brand equity.

To uncover gems like this, Zappi’s Amplify allows you to predict how well your ads will deliver ROI through both short-term sales and long-term brand equity. In the Zappi platform, a combination of behavioral and survey data ladders into two comprehensive indicators for your sales impact and brand impact:

• Sales Impact (SI) Score: Your sales impact score assesses your creative's potential to generate short-term sales.
• Brand Impact (BI) Score: Your brand impact score measures the potential of your creative to build your brand and drive future sales.

The persuasiveness of your ad and overarching sales impact is then diagnosed and graded using the three Rs — reach, resonance and response:

• Reach: The ad’s ability to distinguish itself, link to the brand, and build distinct memory structures making your brand more salient.
• Resonance: The ad’s ability to elicit emotional responses, embedding the ad into consumers' memory and helping it come to mind more positively into the future.
• Response: The ad’s capacity to trigger a more immediate response and brand reappraisal (something that’s notably helpful for smaller brands).

Methods for measuring creative effectiveness

Here are some of the best methods to help you measure ad creative effectiveness.

Direct consumer feedback

Traditional surveys are a great way to measure several of the creative performance metrics on our list. Surveys give you direct insight into consumers’ responses to your creative. While surface-level traditional metrics like gross impressions, click-through rates and views can help you track basic awareness and engagement, surveys go deeper: helping you understand consumers’ deeper perceptions of and responses to your creative.

Surveys are a great tool for helping you to assess a range of creative effectiveness metrics. They’re an ideal approach for helping to measure unaided brand recall, allowing you to understand if your brand is recognizable in the ad.

What’s more, they’re also a useful method for measuring message clarity, giving you the opportunity to ask consumers’ to summarize your main messages and provide insight into their level of confidence in acting on your CTAs.

You can also use surveys to understand each element of your ad — asking consumers for their opinions on your narrative, featured people, tagline, music and visuals.

Intuitive and emotional measurement

Emotional measurement tools can give you insights into the spontaneous in-the-moment emotional responses that can easily be forgotten, misremembered or misinterpreted when consumers are asked to recall them later.

Emojis are an intuitive, global language that consumers often instinctively use to quickly communicate their emotions to friends and family via text or online messaging. At Zappi, we’ve recreated this natural digital language in our ad testing tool Zappi Amplify, allowing consumers to communicate their quick-fire instinctual emotional reactions to an ad as they watch it.

Behavioral measurement

Behavioral measurement is an important supplementary metric, allowing you to gain a birdseye view of broad trends in consumer behavior in relation to your creative. Observable responses like views, skips, shares and search lift give you a holistic view of your ad’s performance and consumers’ overarching reactions to it. Use Zappi to track in context-exposure — including ad views, skipping, dwell time and rewatches.

Pre and post-exposure measurement

Pre and post-exposure measurement helps you calculate the direct impact of your creative or ad idea on consumers by comparing their responses before and after exposure. Use Zappi to survey consumers on purchase consideration both before and after exposure to your ad to assess how effective it is at influencing a consumers’ shortlist.

When should you measure creative effectiveness?

Never just a one-off calculation, you should measure creative effectiveness at several key stages throughout creative development.

Early-stage ideas, storyboards and animatics

Early-stage idea, storyboard and antimatics testing is important for understanding and improving the creative effectiveness of your ad before you invest your production budget.

Testing early helps you make sure your creative impacts consumers’ emotional states, brand perceptions and buying behavior — allowing you to course correct ideas that fail to positively impact the most important creative effectiveness metrics. Use Zappi to test early-stage ideas and storylines and use insights to shape ideas that directly drive business outcomes.

During creative development

Continuing to test varied creative iterations with your audience is one of the best ways to continue to optimize your creative for effectiveness throughout the entire development process. Ongoing testing and analysis allows you to understand exactly what’s having the biggest impact on your creative effectiveness metrics and what’s undermining them while you still have time to make changes — like changing the music or tweaking the narration.

Before launch

It’s also important to validate your final creative and identify any remaining social risks alongside key metrics like clarity, brand recall and emotional resonance. Testing just before launch allows you to catch any previously overlooked risks or underperforming parts of your ad, giving you the chance to optimize your final creative.

After launch

Optimizing for creative effectiveness shouldn’t end once your ad is launched. Connect creative learnings with in-market performance to gain actionable insights for your future campaigns. Use your data to create a learning loop by comparing each new idea or ad with past performance — giving you layer-upon-layer of insight that you can use to improve the impact of your creative as you move forward.

How to use creative effectiveness benchmarks

The first thing to keep in mind when using creative effectiveness benchmarks is that scores need context.

A score of 80% for brand recall may seem impressive in isolation, but it may actually be underperforming in the context of its product category. To get a more accurate understanding of your scores, use tools backed by a percentile framework derived from the mean scores across your category.

Creative effectiveness can only be measured accurately when you assess it through the lens of relative rather than absolute performance, understanding your creative’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors, past campaigns, category and market.

To measure creative effectiveness accurately, you must look at your data through essential creative effectiveness benchmarks that provide context for your scores. Here are some to consider:

• Category average: What is the baseline for consumers and creative in your category? Do ads in your category typically see high purchase uplift? Do brands typically have high brand appeal? Are consumers easily persuaded by ads for similar products (e.g. toothpaste goes head to head with toothpaste instead of chocolate or apparel)?
• Market: Cultural norms, values and nuances all impact the way consumers interpret and respond to creative. An ad that scores in the top 70th percentile for likability in the U.S. may confuse consumers in Spain — highlighting the importance of testing across markets for global campaigns.
• Top-performing campaigns: How do your ads compare to the top performers in your category? A great ad is only great if it rivals the best in the category. Select ads from your most-successful competitors to understand how your creative performs in comparison.
• Historical performance: I’ve previously covered the importance of continuing to measure and optimize your creative for effectiveness after you launch. To do this efficiently, centralize your learnings and scores across your campaigns.

While comparative data is important, bloated databases and broad averages can also fail to give you an accurate picture of your ad’s performance. When we include too much data, we also typically include data that is outdated, biased or irrelevant to our creative measurement and analysis.

"Bigger doesn’t always mean better. The catch is that those same norms can easily become outdated. Most traditional norms are built by aggregating huge volumes of data over time. The result is scale, yes—but also inertia. The larger the database, the harder it becomes for new trends and consumer expectations to influence the norm. That means benchmarks might reflect what’s great, but they don’t always reflect what’s great now."

- Jack Millership, Product VP: Data and Methodology at Zappi

Curated, relevant norms prioritize the data that truly matters. At Zappi, we use curated norms as our default benchmark in Amplify, making sure that norms are representative, relevant, balanced, stable and transparent.

Find out more about the power of curated norms in measuring creative effectiveness and Zappi’s philosophy by reading our post from Jack Millership, Product VP of Data and Methodology at Zappi.

Common creative effectiveness measurement mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes in measuring creative effectiveness is measuring too late to change the creative. Your initial idea is the foundation of your creative — if consumers don’t like or respond to your idea then it won’t provide sufficient foundation for your final ad, no matter how impressive your visuals are or how catchy your audio is.

Continually testing and measuring the impact of your creative across development will give you the opportunity to consistently refine your creative before you launch, improving creative effectiveness.

As we’ve seen, to understand the creative effectiveness of your ad, you first need to put performance in context. A single metric, even if it’s the “most important” one, won’t provide you with the holistic view you need to understand each layer of your ad’s performance and the way it impacts consumers. This should also be taken into account in the creative testing benchmarks you choose, which must reflect specific, relevant categories, formats and markets.

It’s also essential not to blur attention with effectiveness. A “bad” ad can capture attention for all the wrong reasons: triggering anger, irritation or mockery. An effective ad must turn attention into emotional engagement, sales uplift and long-term brand equity.

Also avoid treating each ad test as an isolated project. It’s important to collect and centralize your data to optimize for creative effectiveness across campaigns — not just a single project. Use each test to inform your creative moving forward.

How Zappi measures creative effectiveness

Zappi’s Amplify Advertising System combines a selection of tools that allow you to test and optimize for creative effectiveness during every stage of development:

1. In-context exposure: This capability measures consumers’ natural media behavior — allowing you to test and understand how consumers view and respond to your ad within a simulated environment.
2. Forced exposure: Allows you to assess essential ad KPIs, social risk and direct consumer feedback.
3. Emotional response: The universal language of emojis enables you to track and measure consumers’ emotional responses across every scene of your ad, helping you understand the emotional impact of your creative before launch.
4. Diagnostic feedback: Diagnose and grade sales impact using the three Rs — reach, resonance and response. And use our AI Quick Reports feature to turn your data into expert-driven summaries on ad performance and notable strengths and weaknesses.

Centralized data and connected insights support the creation of a learning loop that provides you with the opportunity to continually test, analyze, optimize and create great creative that helps deliver both short-term sales and long-term brand equity.

You can learn more about our advertising testing system here. And to learn more about the state of creative effectiveness today, download our latest report below.