Adspend has always been hard to defend.
For a long time, Creative budgets have been tricky to justify. Every marketer knows that good, memorable Creative is important, and there are countless studies that show this — but how do you consistently link those studies’ results to the specific financial results of your campaigns? It’s simply been too difficult to prove in the Boardroom that without investing in memorability, you’re losing millions to the bottom line.
This leads to questions like: “Should we spend this much?”…“How can we make it cheaper?”… and “What can we cut from production?” In turn, these questions lead to cheaper ideas trumping champion ideas.
Then along comes AI, with the threat of replacing Creative. But is that really what’s going to happen? Not as long as humans can create (or co-create, with AI) memorable campaigns. And just as importantly, measure how memorable they are.
Now we have the power to measure memorability.
Mutinex is a Market Mix Modeling company that specialises in measurement, using AI. We link sales to things companies do (across pricing, marketing and more). Funny for a measurement company to say — but too often, measurement of ROI has been focused on giving the impact to the media channel. We think that’s wrong. Because what we see, time and time again, in time-varying models, is that Creativity is a key driver.
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When buying and measuring media, memorability drives a significant part of the channel’s effectiveness. Its impact on revenue is usually shifted by: Format x Campaign.
So how can AI save creative budgets?
In every market mix model we create, we include memorability metrics called adstocks — which capture the prolonged effect of a campaign beyond its initial run — and factor in that memorability can change over time. We can also compare the impact of a campaign with memorability versus one without. Instantly. For example, we can ask AI to tell us what would have happened if memorability was reduced by 80%, or increased by that.
These are the answers we’ve chased for a decade to champion creativity into the most powerful commercial force on the planet. Now, we can do it in seconds — and the power of this for brands can’t be understated.
Far from being a threat, AI is in fact how we can measure memorability, and save Creative budgets. So it’s time to let AI fight this battle, and help humans get what they need to create memorable connections with other humans. It’s time to get Creativity its seat back in the boardroom.