Ad revenue invested behind creator-generated content is expected to top $180 billion this year, up 20% for 2024, and could more than double by 2030, per a WPP Media forecast. Yet despite the rapidly growing investment — increasingly driven by major CPG marketers — a vast amount of creator ad spend may not be effective. About half (45%) of creator ad spend on Meta failed to deliver brand impact due to missing logos or branding in the first three seconds, and just 7% of creator content on TikTok is watched more than 25% of the way through, per a report from CreativeX.
The discrepancy between high investment and low efficiency led CreativeX, the analytics platform that provides a “credit score” for creative effectiveness, to launch a creator content benchmarking tool that allows marketers to compare creator content against industry norms and branded content.
“Brands spend a lot of time perfecting the science of their own branded advertising and thinking about what some of the best practices and creative elements that can be integrated into content to make it perform better,” said Anastasia Leng, founder and CEO of CreativeX. “But all the creator ads seem to be completely devoid of those same best practices. The learnings they painfully uncovered over the last decade around what makes effective content just weren't getting applied to creators.”
CreativeX’s new tool enables advertisers to compare creator content performance against industry benchmarks, see where media spend is delivering impact and where it is being wasted, and gain insight into how creator content compares to their own branded content. CPG giant Danone is an early adopter of the tool.
“Creators are assuming a more central role in how we create and deliver content at Danone,” said Christophe Mazel, global culture, PR and influence director at Danone, in emailed comments. “As our investment in this space scales, ensuring we have the right solutions in place to maximize our brand impact becomes paramount.”
Breaking a false dichotomy
CreativeX’s development of the creator content benchmarking tool grew from its findings around the type of ads it tracks and measures for major advertisers including Bayer, Mars, Heineken and Unilever. The company found that the prevailing wisdom among brands was that creator content should not look like an ad, even if it would eventually be boosted with paid media.
“The status quo for many remains the belief that ‘creators know best, we should leave them to it.’ However, we are moving toward a process of co-creation between our brands and the creators, ensuring that brand guidelines and effectiveness principles are accurately reflected in the final content,” said Mazel.
CreativeX set out to test whether creator ads that are tailored to a specific platform perform differently than creator ads that aren't. It analyzed best practices like audio and visual branding in the first few seconds, adherence to platform “safe zones,” presence of a call to action, video length and use of additional elements like sound and subtitles. CreativeX then looked to isolate those variables to determine how they affected performance in metrics like view-through and click-through rates. The findings were clear.
“There is no justifiable reason why creator ads, once they become a piece of advertising, should not play by the same rules of the game that traditional brands have established,” Leng said. “We need to break this false dichotomy between authenticity and effectiveness and help people start to think about, how they can have the best of both worlds.”
Using CreativeX’s new tool — which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning — is in line with Danone’s other work with AI. The company uses the tech to shorten the creative development process and has a partnership with Microsoft to bring AI to its supply chain, Danone North America CMO Linda Bethea previously told Marketing Dive.
“These data-driven insights are vital, helping us to take action on changes that maximize our effectiveness and directly inform our decisions on optimizing influencer and creator spend,” Mazel said of CreativeX’s AI-powered tool.
