How brands can win this golden quarter
The ‘Golden Quarter’ – coined as such due to its major financial importance for marketers and brands alike. The latest analysis by WARC and the Ad Association expect UK advertisers to have spent a record £9.5bn this Christmas.
Meanwhile, the UK ad market has overtaken Japan as the globe’s third-largest ad market by revenue and the UK economy seems to be returning to a new normal.
But despite economic constraints somewhat easing, the pressure for marketers and brands to do more with less remains. And as the quick succession of marketing milestones in Q4 – from Black Friday to Christmas – entail more content, more ad spend and more pressure, brands must ensure their digital ads are set up for success.
Brands are falling at the final furlong
Our analysis of 3.9 million ads found that brands wasted over $600M worldwide on digitally unsuitable ads during Q4 of 2021-22.
In the UK, this equates to a total wasted ad spend of $22.4M (£18m) – in other words, 61% of all digital ad spend across the 2021 and 2022 holiday seasons was wasted.
Holiday ads are a significant investment – with big budget creatives battling to capture consumer attention. But the most captivating ad will stumble at the last hurdle if they aren’t digitally suitable.
What are platform best practices?
In short, UK marketers are wasting precious budgets on ads that do not meet platform creative best practices. These best practices are guidelines researched by platforms, such as Meta or YouTube, which are statistically proven to drive stronger performance. For example, the inclusion of branding in the first 3-5 seconds of an ad, which is the average view-length of a digital video.
No matter how brilliant the creative idea, without excellent creative execution, digital ads will not have the impact you’d like if they aren’t optimised for the platform they’ll run on. A 30-second advert may work brilliantly for a Super Bowl TV slot, but it won’t drive impact on digital channels without incorporating platform best practices.
The key – the Creative Quality Score
As the number of digital channels and formats has proliferated, and marketers are producing an ever larger volume of content, ensuring that all ads meet these best practices becomes an impossible manual task.
The Creative Quality Score (CQS) helps marketers overcome this challenge. The CQS is an industry metric which assesses an ad’s digital suitability and checks for adoption of these fit-for-platform creative criteria.
Over half of the world’s biggest advertisers have already transformed their creative workflows and embedded the solution, ensuring that all of their digital assets are in line with digital suitability standards.
The CQS has been linked to improved media efficiency, leading to results such as a cheaper CPM (cost-per-mille) and ROAS. For instance, since leveraging the CQS, beverage giant Diageo has halved the cost per mile per 1,000 advertisement impressions in their UK market.
Beyond crunch season
Although most marketers will soon be logging off for Christmas, and looking forward to kicking off their 2024 plans, the lessons from this season should inform next year’s strategy.
By nailing digital suitability now, with a few simple steps such as implementing the CQS before rolling out digital assets, brands will ensure they are ahead of the curve and ultimately, gain a competitive advantage.
