Research shows only 31% of campaigns used a human presence, and only 36% of digital campaigns effectively integrated the brand and product into the story, leaving massive opportunity for marketers who embrace these creative best practices.
New York, NY, November 14, 2024 – Today, Kantar, Meta and CreativeX launched “The New Era of Storytelling”, a global research report that unveils how to best maximize the impact of digital creative to drive sales in the short-term and boost long term brand equity. The research leveraged CreativeX’s AI/ML technology to tag creative elements in 56,984 Meta assets across 1,295 campaigns and 13.1 billion impressions over 3 years. Kantar’s AI-driven marketing measurement framework LIFT ROI was used to analyze creative performance across these executions, identifying the impact of these elements on sales and brand outcomes.
“The New Era of Storytelling” finds a huge quality gap in digital creative and shows marketers how to drive better brand and performance results by applying well-known marketing truths. From embracing “intimacy” through human connection and integration of brand/product to capturing “immediacy” via visual dynamism and distinctive atmosphere, marketers can immediately improve the performance of their digital creative.
“What people have been teaching us for 40 or 50 years has remained true: You still need to think about human connection, about making the ads relatable, and you still need to make the brand and product the hero, because that’s what we’ve seen works,” says Shekhar Deshpande, head of strategy, global accounts at Meta.
The research found:
- Human connection is timelessly powerful, and ads that featured even a single human or eye contact scored +81% higher effectiveness
- Only 36% effectively integrated the brand and product into the story
- Ads deemed “visually dynamic” achieved a 74% increase in effectiveness, but the adoption is only 37%
- Fast storytelling— presenting four scenes in six seconds— was associated with a 73% higher ad effectiveness in terms of both short-term and long-term impact
There’s a lot to be desired from how marketers leverage these channels to drive performance for their brands with better creative executions.
"“The new era of storytelling” is that marketers now have facts not just hypotheses to base their campaigns and creatives around. And with 80% of a campaign’s impact on brand predisposition coming from just 20% of paid, owned and earned channels, it’s critical that marketers maximize their efforts to create effective executions," “says Vivek Priyadarshi, Kantar NA ROI Analytics Lead, Kantar. “With our Lift ROI framework, we’re able to analyze a new scale of data that made fact-finding possible. And we hope that our industry finally fully embraces the creative truths we unveil through this study because they are timeless, intuitive and a great way to significantly improve the effectiveness and ROI of campaigns.”
For example, “The New Era of Storytelling” finds that the average adoption of the human-connection lever is only 31%, which means there is huge upside for nearly 70% of creatives. “Human Vibe”—showing a single person with a visible face—is the single most effective of all the levers analyzed, increasing an ad’s effectiveness by more than 100%.
"Intimacy has always been a hugely important lever in creating a connection with the audience. Creative directors know instinctively that, in today's dynamic, fast-paced ad ecosystem, connecting to people drives cut through,” says Rebecca Dykema, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Creative Transformation, CreativeX, “We've put hard data behind these truisms to help creative teams build a business case for deeper investment into digital creative, enabling marketers to drive both short and long term performance improvements for their brands."
To learn more about "The New Era of Storytelling”, click here.
About New Era of Storytelling Study
For this study, Meta commissioned Kantar to study the impact of various creative features on sales and brand KPIs. Kantar conducted five LIFT ROI studies across auto, food and beverage, QSR, beauty/ personal care, and apparel advertisers in France, Germany, the U.S., Canada, and Thailand. Studying brands across such diverse industry verticals and markets enabled researchers to evaluate whether creative best practices are universally true across context and culture. This work leveraged human expertise and artificial intelligence to create the data inputs and to analyze the results. To start, Meta and CreativeX identified creative elements expected to drive in-market effectiveness. CreativeX leveraged AI/ML creative data platform to tag every Meta asset creative with 20 features - across, 56,984 creatives, 1,295 campaigns and 13.1 billion impressions, over a period of three years. Kantar then leveraged its LIFT ROI modeling solution to measure the impact of these creative features on sales and brand outcomes for each individual brand. Kantar LIFT ROI maps the relative contribution of the complete marketing mix, the synergies between channels and their short and long-term impact on sales and brand equity via cookieless modeling and validated AI technologies. LIFT ROI drives 10x faster insights through continuous data input and up to 40% growth in marketing ROI.
Beyond the traditional effectiveness and efficiency outputs that enable advertisers to understand channel and platform ROIs, this work goes further to uncover the role of creative in driving performance KPIs, which is often a blind spot for marketers and their partners. The scale achieved in this study was possible only with the usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Definitional research terms
“Intimacy” is about driving human connection, like eye contact, presence of people in an ad, interaction with the consumer, and integrating product and brand.
“Immediacy” refers to visual dynamism, like fast pacing, quick cuts, animated supers, and a distinctive atmosphere, like music and color palette.
About Kantar
Kantar is the world’s leading marketing data and analytics business and an indispensable brand partner to the world’s top companies, including 96 of the world’s 100 biggest advertisers. We have a complete, unique and rounded understanding of people around the world: how they think, feel and act, globally and locally in over 90 markets. We don’t just help clients understand what’s happened, we tell them why and how they can shape the future.
https://www.kantar.com/
About Meta
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.
About CreativeX
CreativeX provides technology that empowers marketers at the world's leading brands to define, measure and scale creative excellence across their global content. Used by brands like Facebook, Heineken, Bayer, Unilever, and more, CreativeX provides the first-ever creative data platform, which allows digital marketing and consumer insights teams to scale great creative decision-making with a single source of truth for tracking the efficiency and effectiveness of images and videos globally. Their unique tools and data set bring transparency to complex content challenges, providing a common language to improve creative work and delivering globally relevant learnings to power creative thinking and help marketers build effective and responsible brands with confidence.