The Virtual CMO

Using AI to Make Better Decisions on Your Creatives with Anastasia Leng

May 24, 2021 Eric Dickmann, Anastasia Leng Season 5 Episode 5
The Virtual CMO
Using AI to Make Better Decisions on Your Creatives with Anastasia Leng
Show Notes Transcript

In episode 71, host Eric Dickmann interviews Anastasia Leng. Anastasia is the Founder & CEO of CreativeX, formerly known as Picasso Labs. CreativeX is an automated creative excellence platform that aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. Their technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Nestle, Heineken, and even Facebook to measure creative efficiency, consistency, and impact across all their image and video content worldwide.

Prior to CreativeX, Anastasia co-founded Hatch, one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in New York, and one of the four most innovative retail companies. Leng had spent more than five years at Google, where she worked on every ad tech and analytics product, led entrepreneurship efforts in EMEA, and was responsible for early-stage partnerships for Google Voice, Chrome, and Wallet.

For show notes and a  list of resources mentioned in this episode, please visit: https://fiveechelon.com/using-ai-make-better-decisions-creatives-s5e5/

A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.

The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at: 

https://fiveechelon.com


Eric Dickmann:

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week, I'm excited to welcome Anastasia Leng to the podcast. Anastasia is the founder and CEO of CreativeX, formerly known as Picasso Labs. CreativeX is an automated creative excellence platform that aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. Their technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Nestle, Heineken, and even Facebook to measure creative efficiency, consistency, and impact across all their image and video content worldwide. Anastasia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and French. She has been a nomad all her life and his lived in Bahrain Vietnam, Hungary, Russia, France, England, and the US. Today, we're going to talk about implementing AI in your creatives to impact your audience and prospects. Please help me welcome Anastasia to the program. Anastasia, welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Anastasia Leng:

Thanks for having me Eric, I'm so excited to be here.

Eric Dickmann:

I'm really excited that you're here as well. When I do this show, I get requests all the time from people who are web developers or SEO experts, or content creators. And so we cover a lot of familiar territory, just looking at it from different angles. But, we're going to be talking today about the power of AI. And I think the power of AI being used in a very different way than I think any guests have talked about before. So I'm really looking forward to getting into this discussion and hearing your insights on this great new world of technology that we have at our fingertips. As we kick things off, could you just share a little background with the audience?

Anastasia Leng:

Yes, absolutely. Um, so I started my career as a marketer. I went to, I went to Google shortly after graduating from university. And I, you know, I didn't know what marketing was at that time. Google or you just kind of got thrown into the deep end and that was it. So I learned marketing through experience, not through education. And then after about six years at Google, it felt like the right time for me to leave and start my own company. So I started a company in the e-commerce space. That company did not work out. It was a failed startup by all accounts, but actually as we were building that company, we were having a lot of marketing challenges and through the process, trying to solve those challenges, we ending up building technology for marketers and ended up essentially pivoting our company's focus to help Marketers with some of the challenges they were seeing in a new landscape which relied predominantly on visual communication. And so a lot of it was right place, right time, a lot of my journey has also been about uh sort of the inability to admit that something was failing and to keep persevering, and that's sort of what led to the creation of the company I run today, which is called CreativeX.

Eric Dickmann:

I think what's so interesting is that we are in a time of just unbelievable content creation, right? Everybody who's got a phone in their pocket is a content creator and they have the ability to do it at a price point that is practically free for a lot of them. And yet there's so much bad content out there too, and I think there's been a big adjustment for marketers because in the past content in the marketing realm was white papers, and presentation decks, and brochures, and a lot of this very static content. And now in some ways, marketing is catching up to what individuals are doing in their own personal lives in terms of content creation. Just from your perspective, how do you look at the landscape in terms of just what's being created out there?

Anastasia Leng:

Yeah mean It's changing every day. And I think the the rise of different consumer platforms dictate the kind of content that we create. So when you looked at at marketing content, you know 10 15 20 years ago A lot of it was really focused on content that had a very long shelf life. It was you know a couple of television ads, a couple of radio ads, print advertising, et cetera. Obviously with the explosion of the internet, you saw a huge explosion in website as content and therefore sort of online written content obviously, SEO, SEM, search ads, et cetera. And then came the rise of the visual platforms and the social networks which drove a mass influx of visual content, but also content with a much shorter shelf life, right? And It's such a need to create content that marketers just couldn't keep up. I think what we're seeing, and a lot of the service interpreted through our lens where we focus predominantly on visual content is even things that used to be done through long Uh white papers are now being forced to be done through infographics essentially the contents of shortening,, in most cases, right? Because the perception is consumers have a much shorter attention span than they did before, because then bombarded with so many things, so they make a very, very quick decision, in most cases in three seconds. As to whether or not your content is something they actually want to pay attention to. The second thing that we're seeing is a big influx and a big shift from static content to dynamic content, right? So when we started the company, maybe five years ago, most of the visual content we were analyzing, static imagery, today that's video. So I think again, especially in a time of COVID, there is a desire for more dynamic, detractive engagement, engaging content and depth. Video is the perfect platform for that

Eric Dickmann:

But it's hugely challenging too, right? I think in the past, you know if we go back to that 10, 15 years ago when marketing teams were creating a static piece of collateral, a brochure, white paper or something like that. Maybe the different forms that had to take were language translations if you had different markets. Now you've got Facebook which has one set of rules and Instagram which has a set of rules and LinkedIn. So you can have very similar content, but it has to be customized for all of these different platforms and the engagement models of those platforms. Do you see that as a real challenge for brands or do you think the tools are robust enough to make that easy?

Anastasia Leng:

No I mean, you're absolutely right. You've been a marketer for a long time, right? And I don't know what you think about this but my view is it's never been more difficult to be a marketer than it is today, because the sheer amount of information to share amount of things you have to remember, and do, and perfect, and learn is frankly overwhelming. You've mentioned a couple of them which is let's say you are a marketer who's investing in social media and you say Okay great, I'm going to invest in let's say Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. But all three of them are completely different platforms with completely different rules of engagement and completely different best practices. Before what we used to do is you know we might especially sort of at the beginning of let's say YouTube, it was common to take a television ad and run it on YouTube And we learned very quickly that you know that just doesn't work. Um I think with digital we haven't quite learned that lesson to the full extent where we're still taking content then applying the same content across multiple platforms, and it just doesn't work. But the reality is it's also very difficult for people to remember and maintain a constant evolving body of knowledge about what they have to tweak to perfect their content for these Platforms And there are very Three tools that help with this There's a lot of knowledge but I think the challenge and this is where technology comes in is how do you apply that knowledge at scale Right And how do you fresh that knowledge In real time And that's a problem that we're hoping that technology can solve

Eric Dickmann:

You're so right. There are tools out there that allow you to post across multiple platforms. But many of them sort of go to the lowest common denominator, right? They're not necessarily taking advantage of what each platform can offer. And each platform is always changing, and I saw something the other day where Twitter is now looking to expand the size of the photos that they put in the feed. It's just constantly evolving and the same holds true with things like tagging companies and tagging names, sometimes, the platforms allow third-party products to do that, other times there are some real limitations around that. And so it is increasingly hard. But I agree with your statement that I think it's never been more challenging to be a marketer at the same time, I think these tools are so accessible that many companies feel that it's easy. And because of that a lot of money gets wasted.

Anastasia Leng:

Well I think hopefully what technology has shown is that um not only can it help you save time and money, but it can hopefully get you back to doing the things that you enjoy doing rather than doing sometimes those monotonous tasks having to figure out how do I take this piece of content that I think is really great and just get it ready to be successful on this other platform, right? And I think those are things that technology can really help. So we free up people's time to focus on the big ideas.

Eric Dickmann:

So as we've sort of moved you know as we were talking about 10 to 15 years ago to where we are today, it used to be the words were the most important thing, right? The words mattered, that's what people would see first the headline whatnot. Now, it's the imagery, it's that video content, it's that picture. And that's really where your company comes into play, right? We've had so many tools out there that help us pick the best words which headline wins this one versus that one, which copy wins this one versus that one. But the imagery has been something of a mystery, right? You kind of pick what your gut feel says might be, the kind of imagery that you want to use. But now you're really able to apply some science and some technology to that to help people determine what creative wins. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on there? What's happening behind the scenes that allows that to work?

Anastasia Leng:

Yeah Well so you're absolutely right in terms of creative is now incredibly important. I think to some extent, it always was. I think it's become more important which is why we're paying attention. So currently Uh research shows that creative uh can be attributed to about 56 percent of the impact toward sales lift. So when you look at all the other things we spend our time optimizing, you know the place where the ad is running, the audience it's targeting you know the time of day et cetera All of these things In comparison to the importance of the creative piece the calls will be seen I released some research where they showed um Through eye-tracking studies Where does your attention go When you see an ad right And Facebook has sort of Um multifaceted sort of ad container right You've got the creative I'm in the middle whether it's an image or a video you've got copy at the top You've got the logo You've You know the comments and the likes et cetera And what they found is the majority of tension first goes to the actual image and video Then next it goes to the copy Finally last thing is the logo And then lastly the comment So I you know it is what people are paying attention to In terms of uh in terms of how do we actually learn from all the things that we're doing Well this is where this is where the power of technology comes I think what technology now allows us to do is to teach any creative And really break it down to the sum of its parts to some extent If you think about uh Looking at a pre-K We can start to understand that scale What are all the visual elements contained to that creative So if someone were to take a picture of this screen right now they would You know we would be able to identify Oh there's a man and a woman in the street and they're wearing glasses and they have a microphone and you know it looks like they're indoors and things like that And that data in and of itself may not seem particularly useful Right I think there's a big trend of um Of almost using too much data in marketing where sometimes you can't really see the forest for the trees But when you think about applying that data and using that data across every image or video you have and figuring out how do you use that data to create Ads that are more consistent to create ads that are more likely to succeed Then that becomes really valuable data that can help you reform your creative execution your creative road.

Eric Dickmann:

So you talked about Facebook studies where you know they actually tracked eye movements where people are going. When your software gets in there and starts to evaluate that, is it using similar kinds of technology is it using different samples to say we're going to run different kinds of ads using different kinds of imagery, and a one is going to win, one is obviously going to be more popular, what's the mechanics of what's happening behind the scenes?

Anastasia Leng:

Yeah So I think it's important to take a step back And um so let's talk a little bit about uh the the challenge at work trying to help our market yourselves And really that challenge is you know We think uh we think technology's never going to replace creativity nor does that sort of the business we're in We're not going to tell you to put a dog in the adder or put a baby in the ad because that gets more clicks We think fundamentally that's not how creativity works And you know sort of think goodness for that Right Where's thinking about is uh what is the container the most sort of successful container that your ad can go in to help you get the attention and capture the consumer's attention when you have that You know sort of split second opportunity to grab them And so ultimately a lot of the brands we work with Their their goal is to become better brands Their goal is to create Better content more consistent content more diverse and representative content So taking a step back would that He means for us is one of the things you spend a lot of time thinking about is what is that set of criteria that will make it an ad successful on Facebook On Snapchat on Twitter And then how do we help you essentially make sure that whatever messages whatever creative you want to send out there It's optimized So it's got the highest chance of being seen and heard Right And that was something a little bit different for every platform But these things that we're we're emphasizing right now Are things that have been proven time and time again To enhance sales of the brand list across these platforms And they're very different So you know again the the goal here is not sort of micro optimization micro ad tweaking The goal is more to understand what is what are the creative fundamentals that make it more likely for your ad to get seen. Does that make sense?

Eric Dickmann:

It does make sense and so once you understand what those fundamentals are, you can build an ad campaign that really uses those set of fundamentals to consistently represent your brand, and the imagery, and the container, as you call it so that it becomes recognizable to the brand?

Anastasia Leng:

That's all right So uh so we we take kind of a multifaceted journey. The first part of the journey is just to understand Okay We see that there are these fundamentals in some brands will have done their own research and they have they would have learned Hey here are some things that we see always work for us And some things that don't right A lot of brands are doing lots of AB testing They're always learning right And so we'll take those learnings and we'll figure out okay you've got these learnings How often are you actually climbing Right again it's one thing to know something It's another thing to apply At scale and this will give us a view of what we think of as their Freedom health score right Essentially the percentage of content of their deploying that Ash needs each platform specific best practices and recommendations for their industry as well as their own learning and their own data about what makes an ad successful for them In addition to that we'll look at how inefficient is their media spend So how much money are you actually deploying behind content that meets all of these things And that really helps you establish you know Uh Which is what the goal should be how well you're doing how much games are there to be made And then from there we have we have a tool that helps you since you avoid any wasted media spend before the creative actually goes out the door Right So this is called pre-fight evaluations Exactly what it sounds like you upload an ad before it goes live We tell you thumbs up Thumbs down Does it adhere to the to the fundamentals of what it means to be successful on those platforms Does it adhere to the best practices that you've established is It adhere to your brand guidelines Um does it meet your regulatory standards Right Some of the of the brands we work with might also have other creative constraints such as you know You're an alcohol company We probably don't want to show people driving in the same app Right There's a lot of other things that go into consideration all of it around this idea of can we help you get message across in a way that's more likely to be seen And in a way that will get recognition to your brand to happen as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Eric Dickmann:

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Do you find that a lot of companies that you work with their brands just get a little stale that they get very into a routine of a of a certain kind of brand persona that they put out in the marketplace and a lot of their creatives just tend to fall in line without ever really doing the research to see how effective that is?

Anastasia Leng:

It's a multi-faceted question So I'll try and take it one by one So you know to your point about um How many best practices are backed by data Um the reality is when we when we tend to start working with a brand very few Right There is Um There has been this perception in the industry that uh creative is the one area you don't challenge and you don't embed data into right And so sometimes what we tend to see is when we when we see a list of best practices or learnings coming from a company They are recommendations from an individual rather than things that have gone through that full data and testing cycle right there They're not actually data pack there Uh there's things people feel they should be doing for their brand because of their past experience learning et cetera Our goal is not to challenge and necessarily our goal is to give that data to let them determine is this the right thing for your brand Yes or no And I think the way to do that as you say okay let's say you have a best practice around putting people in your ads right Humanizing the ad is is always good. Uh well but we might do a Suki let's let's measure that Um so we we'd run all their ads through our system We would categorize them by those that have people in those that didn't And we would give them that data and they could look at you know From a digital point of view does having people the ad seem to correlate with higher click through higher conversion et cetera You can also for some of the bigger brands for whom ultimately it's about sales lift and brand lift metrics you can't When you measure digitally you can export our data out and actually combine it with their first or third party data And look for those bigger um Bigger correlations to those macro macro metrics Right So I think that's one problem It's your point There's a lot of little bit exists that hasn't been vetted Did the other point around he wants to have these best practices do things get a little bit scale a sale The answer is typically not Mostly because actually again if you take a PTK A bigger brand A lot a lot of teams have trouble marching to the beat of the same drum Right You have you know dozens if not hundreds of marketers you have Different markets different products et cetera And all of them are doing their own thing A little bit So what we tend to see Inconsistency is a bigger problem than than consistency Dallas but it does bring sort of the third point which I think is underlying your question Uh we we tend to think about quite a lot Let's say you follow all these best practices What does that mean for creativity Right What does that mean for creative expression The last thing that we want to do is be prescriptive about the kinds of things that Uh that people in the creative space should be doing And the way that we think about it is what we're simply doing or trying to do is give you some constraints in which your creativity is a higher chance to thrive Right There's a tremendous amount of research that says you know Uh constraints are essentially the mother of invention right Then when people have uh a few barriers around a blank page they actually get much more creative and thinking about how to do things in a way within those constraints Right And so um our goal and we try and make this very very clear And I think technology is good overall is not to replace creativity It's to give it uh it's to give it a container which it has a higher chance of being seen or heard

Eric Dickmann:

Well if I play that back a little bit what I hear is that you're applying data and science to creativity to help companies make better decisions. Not necessarily taking away the creative aspect of it, but as we've said many times on this podcast, you know opinions are like belly buttons, everybody's got one but they're not facts, right? They're just people's preferences And when you can start to back some of that up with data then you've got some more punch behind what you're actually trying to do.

Anastasia Leng:

That's right That's exactly right And I think there is there This is changing But for a very long time the creative team and the data team sat in different parts of the building within a marketing organization Right So you ha you had your you had your teams who were the big idea people right And the creative people And then you had your your quants and the other corner do all the Excel work and your data crunching And it was rare for these teams to talk to each other That's changing now And I think largely that's because the role of the CMO is changing Right And this again goes back to the difficulty of being a marketer today because you almost have to be all these things now Right You have to be you have to have familiarity with data You have to have familiarity with uh with the quantitative methods But you also need to be able to tap into your creative side and and try and come up with the big ideas What we're hoping for And our goal is ultimately to think about how do you enhance creative expression through data Right Not replace not take over How do use that data then give it back to those people who are thinking about you know what the next the creative ideas and let them put that data on steroids And interpret it in different ways So if you tend to see that Hey having people in my ads Is really powerful It's not about sticking a human in every ad right The maybe maybe means your brand needs to be humanized What are other ways you can humanize your brand Right I don't think it's it's a computer says this now and I do this do In every app.

Eric Dickmann:

Well one of the things that I've noticed too about uh creativity, and I think this applies more to smaller businesses than larger businesses that have big ad budgets and can afford to do a lot of original creative work, is we are being inundated with the same old stock photography over and over. You know, people say well we got to put a image of a of a woman working at a desk, and that same picture has been used literally tens of thousands of times. And I think almost the purpose of the creative gets lost because people just don't register with the image at all. They've seen it too many times. And for if you're a larger company and can go hire somebody to do all original work that's not really your problem. But do you see this as well sometimes even though the imagery might be good, it's stale in some ways, it's dated in terms of its reference, or it's been overused?

Anastasia Leng:

Yeah You know there is fatigue, right? There's definitely visual fatigue. And that goes not only to the image itself but to the trends For example one of the things uh we saw ages ago was um imagery that was black and white tended to over-perform on Instagram feeds. And the reason for that is not because black and white imagery is better, just because it's different. When everything else around you is in bright bold colors and you see something black and white, it catches your attention, something different. Then everyone all of a sudden started writing black and white imagery, the same trend would apply to to the color one. So yes there is there is I'm sure there is image fatigue and again we've all seen kind of the same stock imagery circulate for certain things On the flip side though you We've seen this trend of brands wanting to or relying on influencers for content and that has allowed them to freshen up freshen up their photography freshen up their content do so in a way that to know faster more scalable more diverse The problem they have there though is when you start scaling something like that out You start to also see some brand risks associated with that Right How do you ramp brand erosion How do you prevent inconsistency in the way your brand is portrayed So you see that I think smaller and medium-sized brands are starting to think about the things that the large brands are very constantly because they have spent billions building their brand A good example here is if you think about Coca-Cola Uh there's a tremendous amount of research If we just show the shade of the Coca-Cola red without anything else no product no logo People will instantly know that is Coca-Cola So think about the cost of all of a sudden having you know a bunch of marketing images where that red is slightly off by a little bit Now I know it sounds silly right Because you're like well red is red But actually these things make a really big difference over time And for marketers who are just starting on their branding journey If you don't get consistency right from the beginning it's much harder to get it right later And that's all opportunity loss In terms of really building that cognitive shortcut between whatever you consider distinctive about your brand And your users But for the larger brands it's actually setting them back And again Means that they've wasted tons of budget towards creating these distinctive brand assets and these shortcuts between their marketing and their consumers

Eric Dickmann:

I can totally relate to that. Working for years at Oracle they were very militant about their policing of their Oracle red. We cringed and marketing when salespeople would go out and create a presentation deck and shrink and stretch logos to fit a fit on slides and Oh it was awful, yeah. But there but for good reason just like you said. Little changes can all of a sudden throw that off. A lot of big enterprise customers have the advantage so many of these tools that are out there, we're built for them in mind, you know. They were built for large companies, big budgets to be able to afford them, but not everybody can do that. What do you say to companies that might not have not necessarily the budget, but the volume? Because a lot of times when you're doing testing of advertising, you know unless you get a certain sample size, you really don't know whether your test is valid or not. And I think for a lot of small and medium-sized businesses, their budgets may be such that they really don't get great sample sizes to know what ads are effective. Any thoughts on that?

Anastasia Leng:

Yeah, Yeah absolutely, In some ways I think when you don't have a lot of data testing can I don't wanna say it can be worse than not testing but it can lead you to draw erroneous conclusions because you don't have to your point a large enough sample size So what I would say to people who have lower content volumes who are uh who are more budget constrained is start with the basics Right So let's talk about Facebook For example Facebook is probably one of the biggest platforms where a lot of small and medium size businesses are trying to cut through What are the basics on Facebook that anyone can take advantage of What are the best practices But for that channel Um well okay So one is you have to brand early right The average view time of a Facebook video is zero to three seconds I think a lot of marketers tend to assume you know I'll build up to my brand I don't want them to lose attention but actually that assumption tends to not play out When you look at meta studies around the effectiveness of Facebook advertising So if you know that zero to three seconds is The chance of God You've got to put your planning upfront and early Now the we do it That doesn't mean it's not the logo on it right It could mean It could mean it's it's in the text overlay It could mean you show your product Could mean many different things but make sure you're branded upfront Another thing that's very important to platform like Facebook is optimizing for sound So I believe I I'm not sure this is the latest app but somewhere between 80 and 96 of Facebook videos Are watched without sound

Eric Dickmann:

Incredible statistics really, yeah.

Anastasia Leng:

Right. So so if any of your messaging is delivered through sound or anything that relates to understanding your piece of content is through the audio, you've just lost your audience, you know. Your ad does not have the chance to be seen and heard. So the common best practice areas use supers or subtitles right So people can can actually follow along with the audio if there is any or think about how do I tell the story without sound How do I rely Predominantly on visual to do this Another uh another best practice that is super unsexy but super important is making sure your asset is actually framed correctly So this is again where we see people take a Instagram video and put it on YouTube or they take a Facebook ad and they put it as an Instagram story Different platforms different viewing behaviors different recommended aspect ratios You would be amazed at how many times we see a uh uh an ad on an Instagram story that's horizontal instead of vertical. Just paid money to waste like 80 of your real estate Right So um this is where it comes down to It's not there's a lot of studies that show these are the right things for you And that doesn't mean it's right for everyone but this is a pretty good place to start While you get more data and while you figure out what are some of the other things that I should be doing Um another one along those lines is show the product and show the product in action Right And again going back to that um to that upfront nature of Facebook consumption the earlier you get it in likely the better So uh so that folks can actually see it If they drop off before Uh before you know kind of a couple of seconds

Eric Dickmann:

This may be asking you to speculate a little bit, but when we're in an era of TikTok videos and so many content creators, and I think about ads uh you know from the past that I remember, almost all of them are humorous. The ones that stick in your mind are the ones that for some reason they just worked at a comedy element and they made you chuckle. Um but Humor is really hard, right? Humor, it's going to fail more times than it works. Any advice or things that you've seen from studies about when you're looking at how you frame an ad, do you tend to advise clients to stay away from that?

Anastasia Leng:

No So you know we it's funny one of the so when we start working with a brand um, one of the big discussions we have up front with everyone is Hey, what are some of the things that we want to measure and track? And it is amazing how many times we want to track it for ad is funny, right?

Eric Dickmann:

Okay. Interesting!

Anastasia Leng:

And the reality is technology can't do. That At least not in a way that we've figured out yet. The way that we think about it is, the best things to track are things that are binary. So if you and I had a very clear definition like does this ad have people in it? You and I can both look at the same ad and come up with the same answer, right? And that makes it easy for sort of machines to learn, Hey you know people know people. When you look at some humor, you and I could watch the same video, and you could think it's the funniest thing in the world, and I could find them incredibly insulting, right? So so humor is one of those things that is incredibly subjective. Um and something that's really tricky to measure. There you're right. There are studies that show that having ads that are funny tends to be better because people let their guard down. Therefore they are more receptive to the messaging. How you create funny ads and what is humorous, is you know if I solve that problem then I think I'd be retired.

Eric Dickmann:

Probably. So yeah it is it is interesting because I things don't always translate whether it's in languages or cultures and humor is definitely one of those things that's especially tricky. So you know I've had a number of clients who have come to me and said you know we want to do something funny. And it's hard to even know where to start unless that's really the face of your brand, I don't know. Yeah

Anastasia Leng:

Right And I think I think you know the way we um. A lot of what our brands end up then wanting to measure once they realize Hey technology is not at a place where you can you can It can measure a funny is just try and go trying to go back to what is distinctive about their brand how do we measure some of those things right And what does it seem to about their voice their their visual identity their character identity their positioning et cetera How do we start to measure that and scale and see what happens But the humor is a challenge for sure

Eric Dickmann:

What do you think about ad frequency? I know that sometimes we are just bombarded with the same ad over and over again, and obviously that that works to some extended, puts a brand or a product in people's mind, but it also can really cause fatigue not only in the the length of time that you see it. You know if you see the same ad multiple times within a day to you know if you've seen the same ad for the last two years. Is is there a lot of good data on that or again do you see that being very dependent by the industry, by the brand, by the product?

Anastasia Leng:

I think we we see that as being you know the data's all over the place is that is the long and short of it Um I think what you're seeing in terms of the changes that are being made to cookie tracking On browsers like Chrome mean that it will be harder for ads to follow you across different sites and for your behavior on one site to impact what you see on a on a different side So I think some of that will start to change which is why You know I think especially direct response marketers where if you put something in your basket and then left the sign in That item chases you around for the next two years You know there's a reason for concern there I mean the reality is It does work otherwise we wouldn't have so many marketers doing it I think it tends to work more in certain categories And for certain campaign objectives like direct response especially when you then layer a discount on it To be honest to be Sometimes I do it as a tactic right Where I'm looking to buy something I'll put something in my cart I'll leave And then a week later I stopped to get discounts for that item so it's it's been great If you can sort of pack it a little bit Uh it tends to come at the expense of branding because you're right You get annoyed and annoyance Isn't good if you're trying to it doesn't really matter if you're trying to get at an item for as cheaply as possible If you're looking to build a brand it's probably not the best idea which is why a huge trend we see across companies doing brand building work is just a proliferation of content because they don't they want to show you a similar message but that looks visually different right They want to be consistent with what they're trying to say but we seen a content production triple to quintuple over the last couple of years Simply because of this ad fatigue problem that many brands to avoid.

Eric Dickmann:

That's really interesting, yeah. And there's some amazing advertising going on, and these platforms give you so much flexibility and you're right this new cookie tracking and some of the privacy policies that are coming up in iOS and other places are going to change things. It's going to be interesting to see how advertisers work around that. In some ways I think it's good. I'd rather be served ads that are relevant to me than things that are completely irrelevant. So it's going to be interesting to see what the impact of all this has. So as we sort of come to the close of our interview here, I'm curious you know what do you see the future holding for CreativeX? What do you see the future holding for advertising in the next year or two, three years out? Are big changes afoot?

Anastasia Leng:

Well ah that's a very difficult question.

Eric Dickmann:

I know.

Anastasia Leng:

I think the CreativeX Is easier to answer. So a lot of what we think about um internally is what does it mean to build a better brand, right? And what does it mean to do so globally. And when we started creative acts we really thought about the creative fundamentals, right? Kind of getting the basics right and helping you scale that knowledge out. And as we've gone deeper and deeper we've had some really interesting conversations around how are our brands think about branding and once you've nailed the fundamentals what's next? Well what's next to be some of those brand consistency elements, right? And then a lot of what we're hearing now is uh is really around diversity and inclusion representation So how do you make sure that not only are you representing a diverse set of people but when you do you represent him You're not relying on a set of old cliches and tropes and the way you you actually feature people and the stories you tell them about them And so something a lot of what we're thinking about is how do we help brands be more responsible as they're doing branding and represent people a little bit more authentically Uh than they do today So so that's kind of what's in store what's in store for us Um In terms of what's in store for advertising That is a great question Uh You know I think I don't know if I can tell you something that The other billion folks you've had on your podcast haven't already told you but What we see is there's no such thing as sort of a uh a user on Facebook versus some user who sees your ad on TV You have to assume everyone will see everything everywhere So what that means for sort of audience segmentation Kind of how you deliver a consistent message is really difficult Uh I think this question Living any largely trickiness world Becomes very interesting from the point of view of when you have a lot less data about the behavior of your consumers what do you resort to and how will that drive impact Um And then you know I guess I guess the other thing that I think about a lot and I read this study recently Which showed that um marketers largely don't understand their consumers which I That was fascinating So there's a bunch of data that shows that um When market is we're asked to to select kind of the kinds of things their consumers care about They largely get it wrong When you crossed up in the data with what consumers say And so I guess there's I think a lot more of that data is getting published So we're seeing a lot of marketers we work with Really reckoning with this idea of what do I know about Michael We're doing truly no Right did myself out of the equation what I feel and what I want You know when I think what am I consumers actually want And can I still be a good marketer I am not like them Right That's again more of a macro point but um something we've been we've been thinking a bit about and that I've heard a couple of marketers talk about.

Eric Dickmann:

No that's a really interesting point. Yeah things are changing. Love the point too about diversity and inclusion. We've been having some conversations on this podcast about that. yeah you want to make your products welcoming to everybody and sometimes you can get blinded by the fact that the imagery you use or the words that you use are really pushing a group away. And so I think that there's a lot more focus on that which is great for everyone.

Anastasia Leng:

One of the things we we were um one of the brands we work with very closely is No you were in one of the things they announced I believe just this week is that they're dropping the word normal from advertising we thought was was a pretty it was a pretty great move Um cause maybe Normal When you talk about people Like what is normal Right So yeah so we're seeing some brands make some some some strides in that space.

Eric Dickmann:

Yeah what's normal to you might not be normal to me. That's a very interesting point. Yeah, words do matter. The has been very fascinating. I'm so glad that we had a chance to have this conversation today. I'd love it if you could just tell people where they could find more information about CreativeX, about you on the internet, and anything else that you'd like to share with the audience.

Anastasia Leng:

Sure. Um, so you can find, you can find information about CreativeX at creativex.com. We also have a blog uh, where we publish a lot of this research that we hope will be applicable to brands big and small, about everything from diversity in advertising to data proven best practices that can help your ads be more efficient and hopefully ultimately more effective.

Eric Dickmann:

That's awesome. I will make sure that we have all of that stuff linked up in the show notes so that people can find it. And I really appreciate your time today coming on the podcast all the way from over in cloudy London. But its great to have these conversations and a really interesting perspective, one that we haven't really covered much on this show. So I really do appreciate you bringing your thoughts here today.

Anastasia Leng:

Thanks, Eric. It was great to be here.

Eric Dickmann:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.