The results are in: High-quality creative increases ad ROI

As any art director – or, really, anyone who's ever paid attention to an advertisement – will tell you, campaign creative has a major effect on an ad's success. But don't just take their word for it. A number of recent studies have shown creative quality as the single most important driver of return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns.

Learnings like this are made possible by recent advancements in marketing mix modelling (MMM). MMM has become standard practice for most companies running any sort of advertising – and for good reason. MMM provides marketers with the data necessary to improve advertising effectiveness by looking across all marketing channels – television, newsletters, social media, email, etc. – to identify which inputs are most contributing to sales. Because this type of modelling doesn't rely on cookies or any type of personal information for analysis, MMM is going to continue to have an outsized role in any marketing strategy in this increasingly privacy-focused landscape.

Like with any other type of modelling, MMM findings are only as good as their inputs. For the most part, this type of analysis has traditionally relied on readily quantifiable data, such as impressions, dollars spent or website visitors, to surface insights and predict success. But new research has allowed marketers to better understand the role that less-easily calculated factors like creative play in driving ad performance.

According to Nielsen¹, creativity drives 56% of a campaign's sales ROI and Google² reports that 70% of a campaign's success is determined by the creative. Earlier this year, Meta partnered with global market research firm Nepa to take a deep dive into how creative execution in Facebook and Instagram advertisements drives long- and short-term sales. The results confirmed that following creative best practices can drive a 1.2 to 2.7-times increase in long-term sales and a 1.2 to 7.4-times increase in short-term sales.

Naturally, this begs the question: How can creative be measured to serve as an input for MMM? It's possible with all types of MMMs, from the traditional models to the more innovative, open-source tools. One such tool is Robyn , Meta's open-source marketing mix modelling code, which aims to give marketers of all sizes access to nearly real-time analysis of all their channels to help inform cross-media investment and budget allocation decision making. Robyn is customisable and can accommodate multiple unique variants, including creative quality.

To better understand the role creative plays in driving sales, Meta recently partnered with Jaeger-LeCoultre, a Swiss luxury watch and clock company, to help measure the efficiency of their Facebook and Instagram ads in terms of sales effect compared to other channels. Jaeger-LeCoultre worked with Meta to analyse past campaigns from April 2018 and March 2020 to understand how creative affected success and to generate ideas to test in the future. The analysis showed that short video ads, particularly Instagram ads, produced a higher ROI and advertising on Facebook and Instagram had the best long-term effect among all social media channels.