It’s Time for Brands to Rethink the Measurement of Creative Impact

As brands navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital media, advertising creative and the environment where it is delivered is more important than ever. In the early days, ad delivery was all that mattered, then clicks, and eventually viewability became the industry standard. Today the success of a campaign is dependent on a variety of factors: impactful creative, delivery into the right environment, with the right message and yes… at the right time. As the ad industry evolves, so do the metrics that we use to measure the impact of a brand’s campaign.

PadSquad has collaborated with Oracle Moat to do just this. Together we are measuring the impact that dynamic creative has on advertising, and analyzing and optimizing each delivered ad impression to ensure delivery of high quality campaigns that meet or exceed brand KPIs. The results of this analysis look beyond surface media metrics and enable marketers to see the full impact of their digital creative. An increasingly more important part of campaign measurement in a world without third-party cookie measurement and attribution.  

The results prove two things: (1) high-impact rich media creative can drive meaningful results without sacrificing scale, and (2) viewability measurement only scratches the surface of complete creative measurement.

Scale and engagement aren’t mutually exclusive. 

For years, the ad industry has been lulled into thinking you can’t execute creativity and impact alongside scale and efficiency. If you want to run an efficient, scalable programmatic campaign, you are likely met with limited inventory availability resulting in standard banner activations. But that doesn’t need to be the case! (Spoiler Alert: PadSquad sees over 1 billion high impact, programmatic ad requests per day. And all our engaging rich media formats can be utilized programmatically. Oh yeah!)

In Q3 2022, Oracle analyzed PadSquad’s high impact creatives delivering over 446 million ad impressions, all of which beat viewability, engagement, and scroll rate benchmarks.

They also measured PadSquad’s total exposure time of its rich media campaigns and found that audiences exposed to brand messaging through its rich ad experiences spent 1.25 million hours viewing campaign creative. To put that in perspective, PadSquad drummed up 142 years of brand exposure for its clients!

The comprehensive analysis shows that scale and creative engagement aren’t mutually exclusive and can co-exist. 

Viewability is only part of the story.

Brand exposure is a meaningful performance metric, but many brand marketers place too significant of a value on viewability as a sign of campaign success. Ensuring your delivered ads are viewable is critical, but from a creative impact standpoint, that only tells us if your target audience had a fair chance of viewing the ad on their screen of choice. Wouldn’t we rather be able to see what happened after that ad came into view? Looking at viewability alone only tells part of the story. 

PadSquad’s Q3 in-view time for mobile web was 12.4 seconds. But through deeper analysis, we showed that its Oracle Moat-measured universal touch rate, the percentage of impressions where an ad was touched, is 35% within mobile web, which is over 290% higher than Oracle Moat’s US benchmark for mobile web, and a much more telling metric than whether the ad was simply viewed!

What is more valuable to an advertiser, when a prospective customer simply views an ad or if they indeed engaged with that ad? In our changing ad industry, it’s time to look beyond viewability metrics to truly measure creative impact. The key to moving an audience from viewing to engaging is an approach that combines high-quality rich media creative with the appropriate measurement solutions that tell the full story.

“We are doing just that,” says Irina Dzyubinsky, head of product, Oracle Moat. "We are building stories that look beyond viewability and potential for attention. We are studying and providing analyses based on intentional attention or meaningful engagement by digging into the metrics that matter to advertisers in terms of driving outcomes. Whether you’re interested in helping your advertiser clients understand how your creative assets drive upper funnel metrics such as brand lift or lower funnel metrics like sales lift, Oracle Moat is the right partner for you.”

Learn more about how we can help you execute and measure rich media creative at scale.