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This edition of TMAI Premium is free for Standard Edition subscribers.
With economic uncertainty, recent Premium newsletters have focused on urgent profitable strategies. We now know how to rapidly juice your Revenues in 30 days. #449 shared key strategies to win with Analytics. Effective Data Visualizations can convert data pukes into insights, we covered how to. Waterfall budgeting can ensure higher marginal returns, and you know that now. Finally, tough times call for all of us to lead, #452 shared ten things every manager should know about nonverbal behavior to transform your impact. | | TMAI #453: High-Impact Creative: Early Pre-Testing FTW!
| If your Brand Marketing campaign failed, the culprit is the Creative you birthed into the world.
Sure, it could also be the campaign’s media weight (below media minimums). Or, targeting tactics (demo vs. intent). Or, channel selection (why not put 7% into Snapchat?). Or, lack of using AI (or, use of AI!). Or, surprisingly common, a lack of clear purpose for the campaign (we want “brand love”). Or, kiss of death, poor budgeting (spike and silence!).
Brand Marketing is hard.😢
Still... I say it is most likely your Creative smells because the Creative contributes between 60% to 70% of the campaign’s success.
Avinash’s Third Law of Marketing Dynamics:
A great Creative can, often, overcome a poor Media Plan.
A great Media Plan cannot overcome a poor Creative.
Dem are the rules. :)
Central to the business results driven by effective Marketing is inspiring leadership and a singular vision. It is paired with a modern Brand Marketing playbook, turbocharged by consistently great Creative committed to one value for four years (and counting!). Unlocking all that in the real world is a Creative development process that leverages Creative Pre-Testing to systematically combines inside-out with outside-in.
A great opportunity for all of us to learn.
[Win More: TMAI Premium members, please review TMAI #446: Brand Love Is Not A Helpful KPI and TMAI #436: Creative Strategy: Performance vs. Brand Ads. Check your inbox, if you can’t find them, just reply.] | Foundational Elements for Glorious Success.
Profit delivering Brand Creative has three broad patterns that lead to success: Deeply researched human insights, powering the Brand’s purpose.
The courage to commit to that aspirational purpose year after year!
Creative Pre-Testing (CpT) integrated across the development lifecycle.
The first is an entire book, and Coach’s secret sauce.
The second is super rare – Coach’s now five-year commitment to “Courage,” with stories exploring different dimensions of that purpose through the lens of Gen Z.
The third piece, the final story you see above, leverages Human Made Machine’s Creative Pre-Testing (CpT) platform. I started working with HMM a decade ago as a client, and am thrilled to be a part of the team now.
While we all might not be in the super-desirable leather goods business (check out the Empire Carryall, in Maple), we can all emulate the win before you spend power of CpT. SAAS, yes. Rock Climbing, yep. Insurance, absolutely. CpT FTW! | The Creative Go-To-Market Lifecycle.
The final story you see in the ad on TV, Instagram, YouTube, gets there through a go-to-market (GTM) lifecycle that typically looks like this: |
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For a specific campaign, step one, Campaign Strategy, is kicked off after element #2 above (clear Purpose). Different leaders, teams, lead each step of the lifecycle. Each green box has its unique set of tasks to be done (all details in future TMAI Premium editions).
The time dimension (t – x) gives you a sense of the thoroughness and thoughtfulness necessary. In your specific instance, time might stretch or shrink. What’s crucial is ensuring that none of the steps are skipped – or you risk losing before you spend.
There are two terms to be intimately familiar with.
Creative Concept, represents the core underlying idea, purpose, framing, ethos. For my peers at Coach, it is Courage. For GIECO it is making you smile about everyday situations. For Cadbury’s it has been making you cry, the good kind, for like 80 years. For IBM, I loved the old Watson concept. You get the concept wrong; you are dead. Dead, fin, bye bye budget.
Creative Execution, represents multiple expressions of your Concept. If you are an American adult, you’ve seen atleast 100 Executions of GIECO’s core Concept of trying to make you smile about everyday situations – on TV, Radio, Magazine, Tiktok. For us at Coach, each year, you’ve seen a new set of Creative Executions of the same underlaying Concept (the two links to Wear Your Shine and On Your Own Time above).
Avinash’s Fourth Law of Marketing Dynamics:
A great Creative Concept can, often, save poor Creative Executions.
A great Creative Execution cannot save a poor Creative Concept.
When you work with HMM, or competitors, there are four key opportunities to leverage Creative Pre-Testing (CpT) to win before you spend: |
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Pro, leverages true test < > control high-sample organic humans, :), to predict real-world brand impact. It is special because it does so using your actual media/target audience (vs. gen pop), in the actual media channel environment (vs. isolated ads). Outcome: Deep quant AND qual analysis of human feelings on business results.
AI, leverages a proprietary dataset of tens of thousands of trust, but verified global ad effectiveness studies. Like all such CpT solutions, it intelligently assesses the creative elements. Uniquely, it layers on the brand impact outcome – rather than be tricked by, literally, shiny objects in the ad. Outcome: High scale quant analysis, really fast.
As of 2025, organic humans are still (!) the platinum standard of real-world predictive power, and hence you’ll use Pro for pre-testing Concepts and high-media weight Executions. Consistently hit home runs.
For now, algorithmic assessment can operate at massive scale with a strong this will most likely fail signal and a variable success signal. Hence, you’ll use AI for large numbers of low-media weight Executions, and for in-flight optimization.
You can see these smart choices reflected in the Creative GTM Lifecycle.
During the Pre-Shoot planning lifecycle stage, you use Industry / HMM / Company norms drawn from comprehensive learning from learnings (aka meta-analysis, pattern matching), to ensure a lot more (all?) of your Creative Executions stand a chance to pass when tested.
[Win More: Premium Members see: TMAI #265: Winning YouTube Ads | Learning From Learnings. If you can't find it, please reach out.]
Why obsess this much about your Creative? If I tell you 70% of your next job promotion will be decided by the shirt you wear… Would you worry more about your actual job output, or your shirt?
Without the 70%, the 30% matters a lot less. | Elle: On Your Own Time.
From here on, I’ll focus on how at Coach we went through the Creative GTM Lifecycle for the Elle story (along with Naza, Yong-ji – love her!). | Win the Creative Concept, Win Everything.
At lifecycle step 2, Elle’s Coach story, like all others, will start as a storyboard - a schematic representation of Creative Concept/s. | By pre-testing concepts as storyboards with HMM Pro, the Creative team at Coach can get an early read on the resonance, translability, understanding, and key dimensions of the story.
The testing is against a very high sample of the actual target audience, B2B C-Suite Decision Makers. Kidding. A specific subset of Gen Z.
The first helpful bit is to reflect on is the aggregated Concept Score. | Scores in aggregate are only surface-level helpful, ex: how do all our concepts score directly compared against each other.
Understanding the Diagnostic Metrics helps understand why a certain concept might have resonated more (scored 83) or less (scored 53), when it came to communicating the core ethos we were trying to.
There is so much science behind this assessment, you can go two levels deeper and understand the Influencing Variables of each Diagnostic Metric! |
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At the storyboard phase of a Concept, you are not really looking for perfection, you are not looking for scores that are close. You are seeking wide swings, you are looking for outliers, you are seeking patterns. A key unlock is in comparing the ability of one concept to do xy better than the other concept.
[Premium members, review: TMAI #448: Get KPIs Right! And, Metrics + Influencing Variables.]
The sexy bits start with assessment of the ad narrative.
Which are the high recall moments, which specific storytelling element is standing out, at what point do people really lean in and pay attention, where are we rushing by too quickly… |
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For obvious reasons, I’ve deleted/changed/hidden all the specifics that our team at Coach received. Imagine that one of these is when time slows down. The sub-creative-elements cover little things like notification swipes, human movement speed, etc. etc. Super precise breakdown for the Creative team to reflect on, and iterate.
Finally, our stories are in the business of communicating an inspiring message. Something that survives time. Do they?
Yes, and more… |
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The qualitative analysis sourced from test participant reflections shared specific themes that punched up the core message the concept was trying to communicate. It also helped identify that for some people, two adjacent messages were the takeaways. This provides the Creative team a choice if those are helpful, or how to tweak the concept to ensure that does not happen.
Imagine just how much cheaper and more effective it is that you know this before you spend $$$ and $$$ and $$$ making executions that put mixed messages into the world… And then blame Meta for being a crappy platform that does not deliver brand impact.
The final bit of concept analysis is related specifically to emotional resonance.
It is composed of Positive Resonance and Negative Resonance.
The influencing variables that explain the why include: Content, Visuals, Appealing, Product, Clarity, Content, Detail, Annoyance.
It is a pretty report. 😊
Building good creative is a mix of art and science. It remains that today.
Testing Creative Concepts, super early into your Creative GTM lifecycle, ensures that you let an art and science assessment to be a helpful input. It will join the judgment, good taste, and genius that your Creative team will natively possess. The end result will be a competitive advantage! | Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
A worrisome bolt hurled at Creative Pre-Testing: I’m willing to yield that this might be fair for poor CpT methodologies. It is not for ones based on years of research and sound analytical approaches.
I’ve appreciated HMM Pro’s ability to quantify the qual. What I love is its ability to extract the intrinsic human beauty.
Ex: I smiled as I read this in the pattern exposed from the data: Using statistics for analysis, algorithms, and AI to identify high-value patterns, how incredible that we can learn that the butterfly landing is the optimal place for the tagline? (For Coach: On your own time.)
This is just one of numerous examples of helpful insights that come to the fore from Pre-Testing, that would otherwise either be invisible or be reliant on a hunch by our Creative peers. I’m extremely sensitive about numberifying creativity.
There is something deeply emotional, and effective, that any assessment of a Creative’s effectiveness needs to capture. Especially for Creative Concepts, and HMW Executions. It brings me such joy that we at Coach have a solution that does that. | Next Week.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll learn how to optimally use CpT during stage two and stage three of the Creative GTM lifecycle, to ensure your chosen Concepts translate into effective high and low-media weight Creative Executions.
At each stage, we’ll reflect on: KPIs, Metrics, Influencing Variables, Quant and Qual Analysis.
You want to win the 70% factor influencing your Brand Marketing? See you next week! | Bottom line.
Building an effective Creative, to deliver long-term Market Share increasing outcomes, remains a deeply human endeavor. Original ideas to tell stories about an authentic purpose will come from the human mind (at least, for now).
Coach’s example shows how Creative Pre-Testing contributes by providing deep analysis to help get the authentic original stories more right.
Carpe diem.
Avinash. | Committed to investing in your professional growth? | |
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