Avinash Kaushik’s Post

Update for 2024. #reality

As a massive fan of "winning before you spend" via Creative Pre-Testing, I get asked: Wait. What about live testing our creatives? Andrew asked this morning, I thought I would share my email with y'll as well... Live testing is always a viable option. The challenge we have is: 1. The time it takes to get a read (brand or performance creatives). 2. The difficulty in getting any read fast enough without spending loads of real money (brand measurement). 3. Impossibility of broader reads (something that works on YouTube rarely works on TV). So, I'm a big fan of live testing creative *concepts*, because it is vital that we get those right. That will take money, patience, time, but that is worth it. For creative *executions,* I use pre-testing. Like my fav Human Made Machine and Kantar. If I have very, very little money, I'll pre-test using the cheaper, even if not always perfect, AI-types solutions. For brand marketing creative, we don't really have a live creative testing option - it is so freaking hard to get good quality brand lift results in our success KPI in a timely manner. On the topic of live testing, a fantastic development in the last year for performance creative.... SKIP creative pre-testing all together! Platforms like YT, FB, others, will simply take one of your product images, a little video, make 10k versions of it using Gen AI with no cash or effort from you. (Yas, queen!) Then, and this is the nice part, use the conversion tag on your site to figure out which creative is converting/revenue the best. From that they'll narrow down the 10k to the 45 that are working well for the wide array of audience you are targeting. I like this. :) Live testing used to be a religion for web types. I was among active advocates of it, including in both of my best-selling books on Analytics. Events have overtaken that perspective. There is less and less need for live (with mass behavior-based customization available at scale). There is nearly no need for the old school A/B testing (pages, buttons, images). #liveonthebleedingedge #marketing #customercentricity #creativity

Dressed to root for the underdog! You? 🧡 #links #rechts

55% - 70% of the success of a campaign is the creative! Pre-testing creative is "winning before you spend." Or atleast, sucking less. In a recent pattern: > Me: "That creative is heartbreaking, you should have pre-tested it." > CMO: "You are right Avinash, the campaign failed. But. We did pre-test the creative, and it passed acccording to our vendor!" The root cause: > The pre-testing tool they were using, and the metric being reported for "this creative will be effective," and "this creative will not be effective." Each vendor was providing 59 slides of data (pukes) with "extensive and deep results of emotions", and more. The CMO (and you?) spent (wasted?) money on data, listened to the data, when the data did not do the one thing that they thought it did: Predict success. The fault is not the tool/vendor. Their business is to sell. The fault is the Agency/Analyst/Marketer. There are 650 creative pre-testing tools/vendors. Each touting their "sophistication" and "AI" and "450 emotional factors" analysis. It is important in all that coal, to be able to find the diamond. Do you know what your tool is actually measuring? My latest newsletter tackles this precise problem. Using the example of three real vendors, (two with fake names), I unpack what pre-testing vendors measure and the questions you should ask to interrogate exactly what they are predicting. As illustrated by the summary below, most pre-testing vendors don't predict the one thing you expect them to. Below, Human Made Machine (HMM), is an example of vendors who do! Check your inbox: "TMAI #416: 💎 Rock Creative Pre-Testing - The Right Way." Or, Premium: http://zqi.me/signuptmai #successiscreative #winbeforeyouspend #incrementalmarketing

Your brand lives in little things. Not the grand gestures. Not the TV ads. Please give many more fs about little things. One of my fav Steve Jobs tales is that he obsessed about the inside of a Macbook, even though less than 0.001% of the people would ever open the back cover and look inside. He wanted the inside to be clean, beautiful, to live the brand's external beautiful ethos. I don't know if that story is true, but it has inspired me to go further when it comes to the consumer experience. Companies get the simplest of experiences wrong. If are going to send unsolicited spam to thousands of people, why not spend just 15 mins making a good Unsubscribe landing page? The below unsolicited spam is from a well-known web company - they even run Super Bowl ads. Their landing page is literally saying "we give so few f's, we can't even be bothered to crack open html." Mistake one: Send Spam. (Undercut brand impression.) Mistake two: Heartbreaking landing page. (Kill brand impression.) Why not take some of that Super Bowl ad money and spend $50 making a nice Unsubscribe landing page. Make something beautiful that just says: "Sorry. We won't contact you again. Thank you for not reporting our emails as Spam. La vita è bella." Take an unsolicited spam moment, convert it into a small positive for your brand. #brandmarketing #customerexperience #caringtillithurts

Marketing's tried and true formula, in the British election: (65% of the success is the Creative.) + (Frequency, frequency, frequency, frequency.) = Success. There was an unending amount of non-positive commentary in the media, from all the Pundits, sneering at Mr. Davey's "stunts." At 63 seats, and counting.... Look who's laughing. It was a masterstroke at being able to capture attention, because in its sneering the websites/tv channels could not not show Mr. Davey having fun - which broke through all the noise. I've come to learn that Marketing only amplifies. If your product sucks, Marketing amplifies that. If your product rocks, Marketing amplifies that. Hence, it is important to emphasize that the Liberal Democrats have a good product to offer to the British people. Mr. Davey's approach to “creative” and “frequency shaping” ensured that that story was amplified - with remarkable positivity! So. As you reflect on your Marketing strategy... Is it executing Marketing's tried and true formula? It's the product. Then, creative and frequency. #winning

Capture + Conquest + Create. Is your Marketing working hard enough? There is so much to do in Marketing, and yet I find that CMOs (inadvertently) end up solving a small part of the opportunity. Then, we have a problem when I proudly come in riding on my pony, work hard to measure Marketing's incrementality. The issue: I end up proving Marketing's has little to no incrementality! Why? Narrow focus. :) I have several frameworks I use to spark this conversation. Below is one I used recently with a large client. Layer one: You'll recognize Performance (orange) and Brand (green). Layer two: Underneath them, channels (proxies for jobs to be done, creative to be built, audiences to be engaged). Layer three: Current Marketing "coverage." A simple way to spark a strategic reflection. Thought you might find it to be helpful in assessing if your Marketing working hard enough? #marketing #frameworks #toinfinityandbeyond

I've learned so much about what it takes to be an effective CMO from Sandeep Seth. The obvious things like how to imagine a radically better brand strategy, make long-term bets, manage the partner-people balance, and more. Additionally, what makes Sandeep even more special are the lessons around what it takes to function in any large ecosystem to drive change, what it takes to bring scale thinking in a multi-matrixed universe. I'll be eternally grateful to him for those lessons. That's not the reason for this post. :) I love Sandeep's office. So much style and grace. Makes me smile when I walk into our meetings at 10 Hudson. Thought I would share it with you. #inspiration Important Note: When you take a selfie with a wide-angle lens, the camera adds 20 pounds to the person on the very edge of the photo!!

This is how much Google is embedded in my psyche: When it fails, it is still such a big shock. We are watching Germany | Denmark (Go Germany!), my spouse turned to me and asked: Who won the euro cup the last time? I did not know. So, of course, I ask Google. I was shocked at how bad the results were. Take a look yourself. On the left. It is basically: "Oh, why don't you figure it out yourself?" I opened Perplexity in a diff tab, same question... The answer is above the fold. And, I also get a little nugget of the game: England lost on penalties. Honest observation: I felt sad. It was like an old friend let me down. I would have expected Google to get this right ten years ago. And, certainly now with all the infusion of AI into Google. PS: Two of my recently newsletters, #412, #413, focused on "AI Search," and the implications on our businesses (Paid & Organic traffic). In three clusters, profound change is on its way: Methodology. User Experience. User Behavior. Read them, ensure your business is not caught unprepared.