• by Joe Marchese , April 13, 2010

In the evolving digital advertising model, the effectiveness of "brand" creative will be measurable. Not only will there be ways to measure how impactful creative is, but there will be a number of metrics that can be used to measure different marketer objectives for their advertising creative. Here are a few.

Time Spent - Unlike the days of the "30-second spot," time is now a variable for creative advertising. This means that marketers can hold people's attention for longer through great creative. While that sounds intuitive, it isn't. Let's not forget those Head On commercials. Annoying creative can be very effective when you are buying a 30-second block of time, but won't get you the upside that the new digital advertising model offers.

Consumer Interactions Rate - All creative implementations in digital should have some sort of consumer call to action. The idea here is that the digital medium allows for interaction, and that getting a consumer to interact with the brand message will help to strengthen the delivery of that message. It is the difference between hearing a car commercial about car X tell you about six safety features, and having a unit that allows you to pick what you think is the most important of six safety features on car X. Same message, more attention and recall generated. How good your creative is at generating these type of consumer interactions is easily measured.

Hint: Every action will have a different drop-off rate depending on how difficult the interaction is. For example, uploading a photo is a lot harder than rating a video. Have a range of activities. If less than 50% of people delivered to your creative interact in some meaningful way, either your media or your creative is ineffective.

Added benefit: Consumer interactions can generate content and feedback for brand marketers, so creative good at getting consumer interactions provides marketers with significant added value.

Share Events - The goals of advertising haven't changed. I don't know of many commercials that were produced where marketers said "boy, I hope nobody talks about this ad to their friends." In fact, how much people talk to their friends about an advertising campaign has always been a measure of success --we just couldn't measure it before. Now we can. Once consumers have engaged with your creative, the "share on twitter/facebook/blogs/email" should be there every time. And the rate at which people share the message they just interacted with is yet another great measure of creative effectiveness.

Hint: People don't want to share brand messages, but they do want to share their interactions with brand messages. Creative develop to elicit this type of interaction gets better rates of sharing. If the share rate on your advertising is less than 5% either your media or your creative is ineffective.

Added Benefit: More consumer-to-consumer shares mean more "free" and highly impactful media. Good creative can be like a bonus or discount on your paid media buy in the new advertising model.

Fans - This one is pretty obvious. Fanning shouldn't be the sole focus of creative efforts, but it's pretty obvious that good creative will lead to greater rates of people connecting to a brand's social media presence on places like Facebook and Twitter.

Awareness, Perception, Preference.... - We are working in a digital medium where we can connect to consumers better than ever before. Pre/post studies of consumer perception should not be hard, and they should be used to understand if your creative is impacting consumer preference.

Leads Generated - Whhhaaaaa???? Yeah, I know, crazy isn't it -- since I think it's the industry's myopic focus on lead generation that's killing the Internet as a good branding medium. But consider it this way: Lead generation doesn't have to be the focus of the creative, because a majority of consumers are not at a point in the funnel that makes them viable immediate leads. Still, there is no harm in having a call to action for those that are. The risk is having the lead generation call to action dominate the creative, which leads to bad creative, which leads to all of the above metrics being poor. So there is a slippery slope. But there's no reason why good BRAND creative won't move a segment of people along in the funnel to the next phase. The key is balance.

The most exciting part about this is the creative revolution that will come once we start measuring what matters. It's going to benefit publishers, marketers and consumers. What did I miss? Feel free to yell at me in the comments section below or on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joemarchese