Diminishing Returns on the Need For Speed: Where’s the Limit?

The holy grail of creative testing – faster cheaper and better – has become an even more pressing need in the era of COVID-19. Technology, and in particular AI, has enabled us to cut the time it takes us to deliver results on one of our copy testing solutions from 24 hours a year ago, to just two hours today. The pressure for speed and innovative technology in research is growing, and we and many others keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

But can we continue to add value to research carried out at pace as we work to meet our clients’ need for speed in insights and decision making? Can we afford not to?

 

Should we meet the need for speed?

For us, the challenge in the ‘faster, cheaper and better’ research scenario has always been about delivering the ‘better’ part. As consultants, we want to bring value. But value isn’t always driven by speed or even low cost – it’s a function of quality over price. And in this case, it’s a function of quality over speed.

The key to maintaining – and improving – quality is to use technology to make us all smarter, and not to replace human intelligence. Data fast doesn’t guarantee quality. If your tool doesn’t assess the bigger picture – whether an ad actually grabs consumers’ attention in a real-world context – then what good are the results, no matter how fast you get them?

At a certain point, the benefits of going faster are lost if speed is the goal itself, and not a means to make better decisions faster.

 

The risk continuum

With marketing budgets cut on average by 57% in the UK in 2020, no client wants to risk their remaining investment on failed advertising campaigns. So getting a read on the success of creative quickly and efficiently is even more important. Will a surveyless, AI-powered solution answer every question that a survey can? No. But sometimes you don’t need all the additional bells and whistles because of what you can accomplish with the prediction of the performance in-market. Sometimes you need a screening tool to give results quickly to give confidence in the next steps.

As consultants, we’re used to advising our clients on which approach is best suited to meet their objectives. What I’m seeing more now is a move to a ‘risk continuum’ where we advise clients to leverage a broader toolkit that delivers varying levels of guidance and direction based on their learning needs, and the amount of budget at stake. With research and advertising budgets expected to be as tight as 2021, the risk continuum approach will be as important as ever to help clients navigate the road ahead.

 

Using tech to ride the risk continuum

We recently had a client come to us with 100 pieces of aired creative. They couldn’t identify the key themes of top-performing creatives from their behavioral metrics, and they needed MetrixLab to help them uncover some key creative best practices which could be used to develop strong-performing ads in the future. In the past, this type of analysis would have been time-consuming and expensive, but AI and human enrichment tackled the analysis and our team of experts provided the much-needed nuanced learnings. This type of work is just one way that we can take advertising learning to a whole new level: Big picture, actionable learnings at scale and speed.

Whatever technology, tools, and techniques we use, we need to remember that it’s critical for insights to fuel growth. Whether that is human intelligence, or artificial, so long as we work to deliver this vision, then we all have a role to play.

Photo by gustavo Campos on Unsplash