Blog
October 10, 2021
How does a brand today stand out to outshine the competition – and win consumer love, loyalty and wallet share? For BrandTotal, this is one the key questions we set out to answer.
In a marketing landscape with more competition than ever before, a limited number of mainstream social media platforms, innovative upstart brands, and consumers who experience constant ad clutter and banner blindness – it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate your brand, drive performance, and achieve sustainable ROI.
However, there is one evergreen strategy that allows brands to stand out, despite these challenges.
That strategy is creativity.
Today, creative performance can be accurately measured, down to the last detail or ad creative in a campaign. With so much data available, and the ability to make real-time changes, each creative element can make a massive difference to a campaign’s impact. What’s more, brands can see what competitors are doing, and respond appropriately in terms of their own creative response.
A key challenge for brands however, is visibility. With more than 85% of social advertising hidden from public view and micro-targeted to specific audience segments, this “dark marketing” is often a huge part of brands’ social strategies.
BrandTotal delivers deep insight into competitors’ dark versus public advertising, showing the entire number and percentage of dark and public social ads each brand is running. It also offers contextual intelligence layers and correlates filters such as consumer sentiment by dark ads, public ads, or all ads – and much more.
Read on as we assess how brands – and you – can use different creatives across campaign types, how creatives can be used differently in public and dark ad campaigns, and how the sentiment around creatives can be measured to ensure that messaging resonates with the target consumer audience.
05/12/2021 - 08/09/2021
A few campaigns really stood out for their creativity.
This campaign from Lifebuoy used the Friends Reunion to market a product and a message – with inside references throughout.
This campaign from Bonobos channelled the best of summer along with celebrities and bright colors.
You can read our full list of stand-out creative campaigns in the full report here.
We’ll use the BrandTotal Creatives quadrant to assess Away Luggage’s creative performance.
Specifically, we’ll contrast the best and worst performances to draw out learnings.
The top performer here in the “epic win” category is this campaign from the brand:
The creative has proven winners: dogs, and not just dogs, a puppy. As simple as it sounds, ads with puppies consistently score highly on the creative quadrant. The ad also places the products front-and-center, and the feeling is of a photo someone has snapped on an iPhone rather than a professional photo shoot – which serves to connect it more to consumers.
The bottom performer misses out in all the areas the top performer didn’t; there is no image, the copy is general, and there is no “hook” to draw the eye or call to action.
Creativity can overcome any obstacles, including budgetary ones. Brands both large and small can and should leverage creativity as a key differentiator over their competitors.
Having insight into what creative strategies brands are pursuing is absolutely critical. This is true both for competitors, and in general. Armed with this information, brands can learn the secrets to success (or failure) from leaders in any industry.
This visibility empowers you to see what your competition is doing, and what public and dark creatives are resonating with core category consumers. It enables you to see how they’re responding, reacting and interacting with different creatives, as well as to analyze their effectiveness across campaigns and platforms.
It also allows you to iterate quickly, see what’s working for others (and what’s not) so that you can create campaigns that are set up for success from the very beginning, without wasting any budget.
BrandTotal delivers deep insight into competitors’ dark versus public advertising, showing the entire number and percentage of dark and public social ads each brand is running. You can also use contextual intelligence layers and correlate filters such as consumer sentiment by dark ads, public ads, or all ads – and much more.
BrandTotal thus gives the most complete picture of a brand’s performance, its competitors’ strategies, and a clear and actionable path to success to see results a whole lot faster.
Read the full report here and unlock more creative strategies and brand insights!
