Why you should test your marketing creatives before launching your campaign

When companies make the mistake of testing their advertising creatives as they advertise, they take a big risk of loosing both sales and brand value. In contrast, taking the time and budget to test the marketing material pre-launch pays off massively in increased ROI.

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Big brands’ advertising is oftentimes run via advertising platforms that automatically prioritizes budget to advertising variants that seem to perform better with the audience on metrics like views and clicks. But testing creatives is more than asking consumers 'this or that?' After all, why is it important to know which terrible idea consumers like better, if the end result is that all the variants were terrible ideas? Unfortunately, it is not unusual to hear about how companies have spent millions of euros on developing ads or commercials and then failed. 

Think about Pepsi’s “Live for now” campaign with Kendall Jenner in 2016 that caused an outrage amidst the Black Lives Matter demonstrations (and contributed to Pepsico losing 4% of its brand value that year), VolksWagen’s 2020 commercial launching the new Golf in 2020 that flopped because of racist undertones, or EA’s disastrous 2009 launch of the Godfather II game that resulted in selling only 400,000 copies deeming the game a commercial flop.

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All of that money spent and wasted because the commercial missed its mark with consumers.

None of these examples happened because the brands’ creative team was incompetent, a big event changed the world’s agenda, or because the brand was disrupted by competitors. More likely, they didn’t test their advertising pre-launch, or they half-tested it to bias the result in the direction that one or more stakeholders wanted.

Testing advertising creatives

Advertising creatives can be tested using focus groups or quantitative consumer insights. Focus groups have the benefit of providing deep insights whereas testing using a survey based research framework offers an opportunity for more respondents and, thus, better representation of your target audience. The optimal approach is combining the two, however this may require budget, time, and resources that not all projects have. In the case of having to choose, the quantitative survey approach is preferable. Depending on your choice of setup and target audience, campaign testing can be completed as fast as two days.

When implementing advertising creative testing in the marketing development phase, it is advisable to remember:

1. Make sure your campaign testing follows these best practices for visuals

2. Make sure your questionnaire offers respondents the opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the advertising creatives

3. Set a benchmark for the test: if none of the variants come back above the benchmark, it means none of the advertising creatives was favored enough by your target audience to produce the desired association, emotion, or action. In that case, it is back to drafting new ideas.

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Less risk, more certainty with test insights

B‍y performing campaign testing ahead of the big advertising launch, brands get the upper hand on several aspects of their campaigns:

• Brands can test their thesis on consumers’ perceptions, thus avoiding a marketing faux pas by identifying unintended and harmful references and signals in time to make the needed adjustments. This can potentially save a lot of otherwise wasted budget and resources.

• Brands are able to exclusive spend budget on advertising that resonates with their target audiences and produces the desired outcome - or develop new creatives if none of them do.

• Stakeholder discussions can take place on the basis of insights rather than assumptions.‍‍