Traditional analytics methodologies of evaluating campaigns are fast becoming obsolete. The human eye - scanning Excel sheets that rank best and worst performers - is being replaced by AI tools that enable a new world of dynamic testing or modelling. Insights that fifty-five London has gleaned from the data reveal that digital marketers have been looking for performance gains in the wrong place. 

Digital media reports have always offered extensive metrics on media channel and placement performance, but have been thin on insights about creative performance. Marketers have tended to obsess about which website offered the best value for money, without considering which creative elements work best and why on those websites. This oversimplification of the contribution of creative results in campaign insights are often misleading and potentially even incorrect.  

In essence, new AI-based analysis is revealing that the true causes of effectiveness come from an understanding of the dynamics between creative work and its media environment. Unlocking these combined insights delivers the most valuable nuggets of gold for competitive advantage. 

Adding precision to the plan

Over the past two years, fifty-five London and Bayer have worked together to transform Bayer’s precision marketing program through the innovative use of creative analytics. The collaboration led to fifty-five developing a fully global in-housed cloud-based reporting analytics solution powered by Google’s AI-driven toolset. This methodology has supported Bayer in achieving their objective of establishing a feedback loop that continually enhances creative and optimises campaigns: 

1. A bespoke platform, developed collaboratively with Bayer’s creative and media teams, that ensures precise campaign targeting, and delivers real-time reporting on performance data.  
2. A global dashboard of actionable insights on the interplay between creative elements and audience targeting, shared among the creative and marketing teams across all Bayer’s brands and markets. 

Emre Acikel, global director digital marketing, ecommerce at Bayer, comments: “Precision Marketing is a priority initiative at Bayer, and the benefits are numerous. But whilst Media was more easily measured and evaluated, Creative remained the missing piece of the puzzle for us. 55 has worked with our internal teams and agency partners to create new types of insights that change the way we plan and execute campaigns. Our teams now have a short-cut to high-performing campaign planning through taking learnings from brands within our portfolio, and markets across the globe. The in-house dashboard is a significant step in putting insight and data at the heart of our digital marketing investments. Within one market, we saw that combining personalised audiences and creatives generated a 640% uplift in performance versus an 11% increase in cost”.

Richard Wheaton, MD at fifty-five, comments: “One insight generated from this tool involved the delivery of personalised messaging. Our goal was to measure the incremental performance uplift of personalised creative targeting while accounting for the additional costs required to produce multiple variants globally. By curating specific marketing tests across different combinations of personalised and generic audiences and creatives, we could clearly demonstrate that personalised assets were more efficient and pinpoint the timing for when it was most appropriate to adopt this tactic within the market’s spend volumes and digital strategy”. 

As Bayer expands the platform’s capabilities by integrating more markets and data sources, fifty-five’s solution is poised to become an all-encompassing media marketing and analytics hub. All thanks to creative analytics which has the potential to revolutionize digital marketing campaign success.