Show Notes
- The definition of a program is a defined objective, for a defined audience, with no definitive end date.
- When the objective or audience changes, we should create a new program.
- The definition of a creative change is when the “bones” of the program stay static but the ad creative needs to be refreshed.
- There are two types of creative:
- Branding Creative – used to reinforce the brand in peoples’ minds. Not trying to evoke a measurable, response.
- Direct response – used to drive a response, gather and measure data.
- The truth is in the data when it comes to identifying when a creative change is necessary.
- If there are frequent changes in audience, there will be a lot of program changes. But, ad creative can last longer.
Charity of the Week:
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The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the smooth but not sneaky Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: I’m doing great. Anything new in your world these days?
Elizabeth Earin: Oh! Yes, yes. This morning, I downloaded my latest obsession. So for those of you —
Steve Robinson: And what is this?
Elizabeth Earin: — that do not know, I am a bit of a Broadway fan. In fact, I went to New York one weekend with my sister and we saw four shows in one weekend. So like most of America who is familiar with Broadway at all, I am obsessed with Hamilton and I just downloaded the Hamilton soundtrack this morning and I want to listen to it, but it’s not really background music because there’s a whole story there. And so while I love work, I’m kind of counting down the hours until I am done so that I can put my soundtrack on and just nerd out to some Hamilton. Do you know what Hamilton is? Are you familiar with this?
Steve Robinson: I am familiar with Hamilton, the production. I have not really read a whole lot about it. Obviously haven’t been to see it, so I don’t know a ton about the storyline or the music, but I’m excited for you.
Elizabeth Earin: Well, if there’s anyone out there who’s looking for a marketing speaker in New York, I’d love to come because then I can get some Hamilton in, so email me, let me know. And I also do not recommend sharing this with children. My nephew is a huge history buff and I thought, how fun! Something we can share together, but it’s not exactly PG, so not, not, not going to happen.
Steve Robinson: Got it. Well, this is a PG podcast. So since we can’t talk about that, what are we going to talk about today?
Elizabeth Earin: Today, we are going to talk about new creative or new program and what the difference between them is, and how you know which one you need to make a change to.
Steve Robinson: And we are talking about this today because this is something that we have actually struggled with here at Brilliant Metrics as we work with clients, right?
Elizabeth Earin: It is, it is. It’s hard to know where the edges of one program and another program begins, and so — and also kind of how the creative changes work within that — within those programs and within the Iterative Marketing process as a whole.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and it’s also important to talk about, because I think that how Iterative Marketing handles creative changes is one of the biggest benefits of running an Iterative Marketing program. So if you are simply changing out creative on schedule, you introduce waste and you introduce waste on one of two angles. You are either wasting your creative production resources because you are creating creative before it’s really needed, or you are wasting your media and your audience’s attention because you are delivering creative that’s already stale. By optimizing the timing of your creative delivery, you are able to help on both fronts.
Elizabeth Earin: And we get questions about this a lot, because most of our clients and people that are new to the Iterative Marketing process, they are coming in from more of that traditional campaign thinking and so we know that the programs take a step away from that. It’s a very different mindset that we are getting into, and so we do get a lot of questions about that and why we thought this was appropriate to talk about now. And so in today’s podcast, we are going to talk about when we do creative refresh within a program versus starting a new program.
And we are going to start by tackling what a program is and what a creative change is, and then we are going to get into when it’s a new program versus when it’s a creative change as well as the metrics that you need in place to measure that creative change, or when it’s time for a creative change.
Steve Robinson: So I think that’s great. We’ll jump right in. What is a program? How have we defined a program in the context of Iterative Marketing?
Elizabeth Earin: So we have defined it as an intersection of a defined objective for a defined audience with no definitive end. And I love this because, for me, it’s so clear. Defined objective, defined audience, no definitive end.
Steve Robinson: So for example, if you were a dating site, you could have one program that is focused on recruiting women and another program that’s focused on recruiting men. In that instance, your audience might change between the two programs but your objective is the same: You are still trying to get more singles on the site.
Elizabeth Earin: Another example when we are talking B2C is if you are a non-profit, you might have one program designed to get your core audience to donate money and another to get them to donate time. And again, in this instance, we have the same audience but now we are asking or we are trying to achieve different objectives.
Steve Robinson: On the B2B side, you could have the example if you are a company that sells time-management software, you could have one program targeting healthcare industry and other one targeting the insurance industry where you are going to have to very divergent audiences with different needs, but ultimately, customer acquisition is the same objective in both cases.
Elizabeth Earin: Another example of the same audience but different objectives on the B2B side is actually something that we are doing. And we are in the process of launching a program to recruit agencies that will help us in spreading the word about Iterative Marketing while we are also looking to identify agencies that want to partner with us on the Brilliant Metrics side to help add value to their clients. So again, same audience, agencies, but two very different objectives.
Steve Robinson: You are not just limited to two programs. I mean, an organization could have only one program because they really only have one core audience that they are working with, and customer acquisition is the name of the game, or you could break things out further. So for example, I have done some work in the past with healthcare organizations. You might have one program that’s working on recruiting patients that are young families, and you are really trying to grow the pediatric practice. And then at the same time, you have got another program that’s working on trying to get more of an older generation in for cardiac programs and other things like that. And maybe a third program that’s entirely different, that’s focused on getting your new mothers in for OB and the birthing center. Very different, very, very specific audience with a specific outcome.
Elizabeth Earin: So in each of the examples that we just gave, the objectives are not tied to the creative or to the big idea. The objectives are tied to the bigger picture, what it is that we are trying to achieve and support the business overall.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, exactly. So if that’s what a program is and that’s what makes a program a program, what is a creative change? When is it just changing out creative within a program?
Elizabeth Earin: So a creative change is when the bones of the program stay the same but the content that we are using in the program changes. And so it’s going to be — the same tactics are going to be used to support the delivery of that content and we are going to use the same metrics to measure the success of that content. It’s just that actual content, the actual creative is changing out.
Steve Robinson: And we change that content because the data tells us that it’s time, right? The data is telling us it’s no longer effective. We have saturated this audience with this creative and it’s not doing whatever we have decided that that creative needed to do.
Elizabeth Earin: And this is really where it ties into the campaign thinking versus programs.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, because it’s — we are separating the idea of creative from the idea of the program that is using that creative, right? So your creative is one thing, your program is another thing and the two can be worked on independently. And we’ll talk a little bit later about how to recognize exactly when that timing is right to move that creative out and move new creative in but for right now just know that that’s the mechanics of that.
Elizabeth Earin: So for a content marketing program with regular blog posts, you could be changing a creative out once a week or more than once a week. It really depends on what those metrics that we are going to talk about later say.
Steve Robinson: Whereas for an outbound, more of a traditional paid media type of advertising program, sometimes creative can run for years. I can think of an example where I was working again with a healthcare organization with that objective of recruiting new moms to their birthing center. Now if you think about it, a new mom is only in market for a birthing center once every year and a half at most, more like two to three years. So in that instance, they are going to be blind to any content that is targeting that “Think” or “Do” stage outside of that window. And so, you can keep the same “Think” or “Do” state creative running for one to two years at a time before you see any drop in effectiveness because you are constantly changing the audience that’s tuned into that content and that’s exactly what we saw. We were able to run the same creative for a very long time with the same degree of effectiveness based on the metrics.
Elizabeth Earin: And there are other markets that have a similar situation like that, where your audience is limited. Buying siding not something you do very often. Buying wedding ring, hopefully not something you do very often. Those types of things, those types of purchases that may only be happening once in a lifetime or maybe even once every few years.
Steve Robinson: The key is that the creative is changing because the creative isn’t working. So if it is working, you keep it out there. If it’s not working, then you swap it out, but when you swap it out, you keep everything else the same. So that includes the targeting, the distribution, the measurement, the optimizations. Your goal is to keep all of that stuff, if not the same, as close to the same as you possibly can.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, we have said that your distribution and measurement are going to stay the same but any format changes in content may require small changes in distribution and measurement. And we are going to get into this a little bit later but if you had a white paper and now you are switching over to video, how you are delivering that and how you are measuring that is going to change. But again, you are trying to keep those changes down to a minimum and what makes sense for the content that you are using and your program objectives.
Steve Robinson: So I think now is a great time for us to take a quick break so why don’t we take a couple minutes and talk about how we can help some people.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I’d like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Nereus Dooley from Doubleberry. Nereus asks that you make a contribution to Teen Challenge, an organization dedicated to providing youth, adults and families with life controlling problems the opportunity to become established through faith-based mentoring, education and job training. Learn more at teenchallengeonline.com or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So before the break, we have got kind of in-depth as to what a creative change was, what a program was. So when exactly is it a creative change versus a program?
Elizabeth Earin: So we go back to our definition of a program which is the intersection of a defined objective for a defined audience with no definitive end. It would require — for the program to change, it would require that either our objective or our audience has to change. And so if we are changing who we are targeting or changing, what it is we are trying to accomplish, and we are not talking about downloading a white paper, we are talking about overall program objectives, then it’s time for a program change. But if those are staying the same, if your objective and your audience have not changed, then it becomes a creative — and a creative change occurs. As we said before, where the bones of the program are staying the same but the creative or the content being delivered is changing, that’s when it’s a creative change versus a program change.
Steve Robinson: And can the bones of a program change?
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, we touched on this earlier. This is part of the iterative process and it’s a little bit off-topic from what we are talking about today and I believe we are going to address this in a future podcast. But as your program matures, you should not only be experimenting with creative but also experimenting with the tactics that support that creative so that you are continuously working towards continuous improvement and always making that program better.
Steve Robinson: And when we talk about making one of those changes, when we talk about changing those bones, we call that a program update. And it’s very different from changing creative because now you are updating the mechanics of how that program works. So you still have the same audience. You still have the same objective but how you accomplish that objective with that audience is going to change beyond just the content that’s involved.
Elizabeth Earin: So that leads to a question: Could a creative change cause a program update?
Steve Robinson: So you are talking about an instance where, like, the old creative was a graphic and the new creative is now a video.
Elizabeth Earin: Um-hmm.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, I think that that can happen. And the last thing we want to have happen is the Iterative Marketing process to stifle creativity, so a part of that is giving your creative resources the flexibility to think outside of the constraints of whatever is running right now and that means possibly changing mediums. And when you do that, that may necessitate making some tweaks to how you are delivering that creative. You are not going to be able to use exactly the same channels to deliver video that you were able to deliver a static image. You are also going to have to change your measurement slightly because you are not going to be able to measure everything in exactly the same way. So yes, that can happen. You want to be mindful about it and you want to make sure that you update your measurement to match, but at the same time, you don’t want to stifle creativity for the sake of being rigid and staying within the confines of the program.
Elizabeth Earin: But again, just to reiterate, this is a program update and not a new program because the audience and objective have not changed. It’s just the mechanics that have changed.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. I think we definitely need a podcast on the topic of program updates or program expansion because that’s something that we really haven’t addressed to the extent that we should have in the past, so we’ll have to get that on the schedule and make sure we get that out.
Elizabeth Earin: So we mentioned earlier that a creative change should happen because the existing creative is no longer effective, but how do you do that? How do you know when it’s time to make a change to creative?
Steve Robinson: Before we get into exactly how you know, I think it’s important to note that there’s actually two distinct types of creative. When we talk about creative, you have a branding creative where the objective of the creative is really to reinforce the brand, to keep that brand top-of-mind, attach the brand to some emotional feeling or concept but not trying to evoke any sort of response that’s measurable in the audience. Whereas direct response creative is really focused on driving in action within your audience. It’s a lot easier to know when your direct response creative is stale, when it’s time to make a change there because you are really going to be able to know that based on measuring the response to the direct response creative.
Elizabeth Earin: So if you are measuring the response rate of the creative over time and you are performing experiments and optimizations like you should be under the iterative methodology, then you are going to produce a graph that looks something like a half-pipe. Do you want to go into a little bit more detail on that, Steve?
Steve Robinson: Yeah. And this is hard because we are audio, right? So how do you explain this visual? But if you can picture a graph along the X-axis, the bottom, you have over time. So as we move to the right, we were moving — we are progressing through time. And then on the Y-axis, we have the effectiveness of the program, so this could be the conversion rate or it could be the cost per action, right? And depending on which way you have at the half-pipe flip — so we’ll look at it from a cost per action, we are trying to drive down that cost, drive down the cost per lead or the cost per sale or something along those lines. At first, you are going to be flat because your optimizations aren’t going to have taken any effect yet, so you are going to just be gathering data, trying to get a baseline for how well does this creative perform? And then you are going to start implementing the changes that you are learning from your experiments and you are going to drive down that cost per action. So now you see a steep decline in your cost per lead or your cost per sale as you start to implement your optimizations, but over time, you are going to hit some diminishing returns on those optimizations and for two reasons: 1) It gets harder to find those really great optimizations as you have run longer, and 2) your audience starts to saturate. And so there’s a finite number of people within your target audience to see your ad. And as they have seen this or whatever creative it is, whether it’s some other format, but there’s a finite audience just to see your creative and it’s going to eventually saturate. Everybody who has seen the creative that is going to take action on the creative will have taken action on the creative at some point and that’s where your half-pipe starts to bottom out. And at some point, it starts to go the other direction because now there’s a smaller and smaller and smaller subset of the audience left to take action on the ad and really the only people that are taking action are the people who have generally moved within their customer journey to the point where now it’s time for them to take action. That’s when you need to start considering making a change. And so that’s where, if you are getting — if you are looking at the half-pipe, we go flat, then we have a steep decline and then we start to climb back up. Eventually, the slope of that line, as it starts to creep back up, starts to get steep and that’s when it’s time to swap out the creative and start the next optimization process on the next set of creative.
Elizabeth Earin: And our listeners may be wondering at what point in that slope do you know when it’s time to switch out creative? Because we don’t want to switch it out too early. There’s costs associated with that, but we don’t want to leave it in market too long. And so it really depends on what you are comfortable with, how long you can leave that, for better words, stale creative in market without negatively impacting your brand. As you have been reviewing your data, this is something that you are going to be able to — you’ll have a better understanding of — you’ll know when it’s feeling wrong. And I know that doesn’t sound very scientific but as you are reviewing the data, it’s going to become clear. You may have a cost in mind that you don’t want to get above or below a certain point, or you may have other indicators that, from within your brand, makes sense and that’s what you are going to be looking for. And we see this with clients all the time. In fact, we had a client that we work with who had an industry white paper out there that was targeted at “Think” state and we started to see diminishing returns after a few months of being in market. And so, we pulled the creative, and new creative was in progress but not quite ready at that point, so we had some brand ads that were in market that were running at the same time, and that kind of helped fill that gap until we were able to get that new content out which was a comparison tool again targeted at that “Think” state that was compelling and of enough interest to this audience that we kept that momentum going for the brand.
Steve Robinson: And it was a hard call because that new creative wasn’t ready yet and there was a lot of back and forth of is it the right time? Is now the time? And at the end of the day, you looked at the numbers and you looked at the trajectory of where this was going, and yes, it was definitely the time to pull that creative, even though the new creative wasn’t quite ready yet and we had to fill that space with some brand advertising.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think that’s where our reporting makes it a little bit easier to make that decision because we all have limited budgets and we all have limited resources. And so, to know that you are seeing diminishing returns, I think it makes it easier for – I know in our experience with our clients, to be able to say, yes, it’s time to pull that creative because they know that may not actually be the best way to spend those marketing dollars at that point in time.
Steve Robinson: This does mean that to be most effective, you can’t wait until that time to start producing the next creative. You really need to always have something waiting in the wings, ready for when the creative they are running runs its course so that you can swap that out with the next thing. And in the case of this client, we weren’t quite ready yet and that will happen, but if you can be on top of it and have something waiting in the wings, it’s definitely the best way to go.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think that’s a really great point and I just want to touch on it again because we don’t know how long this creative is going to run. Again, we stepped away from that big campaign thinking of, “We are going to run it from X to Y.” We don’t know when we are going to start seeing those diminishing returns so it is important to have that ready to go so that we don’t have to have a break in content.
Steve Robinson: Breaks in content, short ones, aren’t that big of a deal but a long break in content if you are waiting for that next piece of direct response can be really detrimental to your efforts. Because now, you are really limited in the types of experiments you can run because you aren’t getting that feedback of your audience responding to that direct response creative. You are also not refreshing any cookie pools or first-party data or to building your database. All of that stuff sort of goes on hold while you are waiting for that creative refresh as well. And you are not able to gather insights by your audience either with your experiments because, again, you are not getting that feedback loop. So you really want to avoid certainly big gaps. Short gaps happen because, well, it’s a bit unpredictable how long it’s going to take some creative to run its course.
Elizabeth Earin: And so I think — would you say that the cookie pools and the length that those pools are active, that’s something to keep in mind as you are considering your new creative and how long your brand can go between new creative?
Steve Robinson: Yeah. A lot of times, if you are heavily relying on first-party data from an advertising standpoint, you’ll find that, for example, Facebook limits any custom audiences to 180 days. So if you take an audience that you are working with and trying to nurture and grow and stay in front of and you don’t give them a reason to click on anything for 180 days, that audience goes poof, goodbye, and that can be really detrimental to your efforts.
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely, all that hard work that you have done, the months leading up to it have kind of gone by the wayside.
Steve Robinson: So to sum up for today, I think there’s a couple of points that are really important. First, there are really three types of changes when it comes to a program. You can throw out the whole program and start a new one. In that case, you are looking at changing your audience or your objective, right? So that’s when one program ends and another program begins. You can introduce new creative, and that’s where the bones or the mechanics of the program stay the same but the content that’s flowing through that program to your audience might change. And then finally, there’s this program update idea that we didn’t dive into completely in the context of this podcast but we will in a future episode, I promise. And that’s where your mechanics change. So your objective in your audience are the same but now we are going to change the tactics, the measurement and exactly how we get that audience to their goal.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think the last takeaway here that I want to make sure our listeners are walking away with is that the data is going to drive these creative updates. We are not going off of our gut. We are not going off of, it just feels like it has run its course or it feels like it should be out there longer. We are going to make that decision based on what the data is saying and what that half-pipe chart looks like.
Steve Robinson: So I think that’s a wrap for this week. I want to thank everybody for making time for us this week yet again, and until next week, onward and upward!
Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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