At Human Made Machine, we tell you whether your creative will be effective against your target audience. This is crucial, as creative contributes up to 70% of a campaign's success. Knowing how creative performs before investing your media dollars is winning before you spend.

Today we're looking at how effective the branding is for YouTube ads of some of the top spenders in the U.S., as defined by Ad Age (Ad Age Article).

In this article, we'll be sharing our insights on how the winning ad was branded to support incremental awareness.

Putting the Big Spenders to the Test

Human Made Machine measures creative brand lift with high-sample, in-context, control/exposed experiments - the gold standard of measurement. Our AI prediction tool develops a deep blueprint of creative, and compares it to thousands of historical brand lift tests, fueled with millions of datapoints of real audience feedback and their reactions to creative.

This enables us to assess these ads in a couple of hours. In addition, our AI prediction tool looks at branding, messaging appeal, and engagement - three key pillars of creative performance.

To Xfinity and Beyond

There's no doubt about it, this creative is not shy. The branding is borderline shouty, but some friendly banter helps engage viewers.

Our winning creative was the Xfinity ad, demonstrating a high likelihood of driving incremental awareness.

Creative Brand Lift Score

73%

Creative Pillars

We also automatically generate an assessment of the creative's performance against our three key performance pillars:

• Branding - as well as the usual best practices of branded front and end cards, the purple color scheme, consistent with Xfinity's brand, plays a key role. Audio and text are used frequently to reinforce the brand.
• Messaging Appeal - there is a clear focus on Internet speed, reinforced through dialogue.
• Engagement - the ad uses humor and relatable banter of two gamers. The visuals use multiple shot changes to maintain visual interest.

Lessons Learned

This creative is not shy - the branding is almost shouty - but by balancing this with friendly dialogue it still engages. The branding is rich and true to Xfinity, using their brand elements to reinforce existing memory structures to boost awareness.

The AI summary also picked up a potential area of improvement that may further support consideration of Xfinity internet. The ad lacks a clear demonstration of the benefit - a demonstration of the speed may support better performance - such as a high-resolution game being played.

Notably, some of the big brand advertisers that sit at the bottom of our ranking appear not to have adapted their ads for YouTube. Longer-form ads (20 seconds plus) are typically run against skippable inventory on YouTube. Their inability to drive brand performance is potentially due to their lack of upfront branding. In particular, the lowest-ranking ad was Amazon, where it's a full 8 seconds before the prime logo appears clearly. In contrast, 8 seconds into the Xfinity ad, they have said the brand twice and shown it four times.

Trust but Verify

At HMM, we're passionate about not just predicting Brand Lift, but also giving our clients extra confidence by verifying results against real in-campaign performance.

We do this by comparing the results of our creative testing with in-market brand lift studies measuring the same ads.

We are delighted to share that our clients see a giant 2x increase in successful brand campaigns when they optimize ads based on our recommendations.

Want to learn more about our Ad of the Month, or how to use HMM’s unique solutions to delight your CFO by winning before you spend?

To learn more, connect with us and request a demo.

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