Kroger, in partnership with data firm Vidmob and trade association MMA Global, has found that it can forecast e-commerce purchase conversion by using predictive creative scoring before campaigns are launched and media is activated, per a study shared with Marketing Dive. The study brought together Kroger's live campaign data, Vidmob's creative data platform and MMA Global's industry research standards to evaluate creative across variables including messaging, narrative structure, branding and on-screen human interaction.
The results find a strong tie between creative decisions and business outcomes, with predictive creative scoring able to forecast e-commerce conversion with 81% accuracy. Creative aligned with recommendations generated an average four-times improvement in conversion rates, and reallocating media toward higher-scoring media can potentially generate more than twice as many conversions from the same ad budget.
“[There are] two types of creative optimization. One is actually making changes, moving pixels around, changing the nature of the creative. But the other is just like moving dollars behind better creative,” said Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman at Vidmob.
Kroger’s test of predictive creative scoring follows a similar effort by Kellanova — also with Vidmob and MMA Global — that connected creative decision with view-through rates, which the CPG marketer used as a proxy for sales. The new study forgoes proxies and demonstrates the connection to actual sales, providing a framework that could change how marketers optimize campaigns.
“Historically, people made [ads] and then, effectively, spent money blindly behind them, and then after the fact, looked to make optimizations once they saw performance,” Collmer said. “The ability to get ahead of that and basically not spend behind assets that aren’t going to work is a pretty big deal.”
The study used artificial intelligence to analyze more than 1,900 video and image assets from Kroger campaigns across Meta and Google’s DV360 and identified creative attributes that are tied to e-commerce conversion. The work continues Vidmob’s efforts to prove that creative quality is measurable, which in turn makes investment in creative more practical.
“For too long, the industry has existed in this world where creative investments are labeled non-working and media investments are working. That's just absurd,” Collmer said. “Every marketer you talk to says creative is 50% to 70% of results. How on earth can the thing that's the far majority of results be the waste?”
Creative testing as content explodes
The effectiveness of predictive creative testing could make it an even more important tool for marketers who not only face tight budgets but an explosion in content, driven by the adoption of generative AI and the emergence of creators as a media channel.
“Both of those things are leading to like a 10-times or 100-times expansion of the number of assets,” Collmer said. “It’s more important to have a signal up front because otherwise you'd be spending more and more money behind content before you know what it's likely to do.”
To help marketers put its learnings into practice, Vidmob in June launched Vidmob360, a tool that allows its clients to connect their creative performance data to the AI tool of their choice, like Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot. The company also has a headless AI recommendation system that provides a series of machine-readable recommendations that offer creative adjustment guidance. In a landscape where advertisers are reaching for the same AI tools, creative performance insights can also serve as a form of proprietary data that could help them differentiate their ads.
“Because they’re all adopting the same tools, then using those tools won't actually be an advantage,” Collmer explained. “It's not going to help Kroger or their competitors win market share if they're using the same tools.”
Similarly, creative testing could help advertisers and their creator partners refine their approach to content as investment surges but efficiency is not as easy to gauge as authenticity.
“Creators are super hungry for data because their paycheck is based on how their content performs,” Collmer said. “They see performance as a way to be more successful.”
