DIY or AI? 4 Benefits of Alison Creative Technology

With AI-powered ad solutions, marketers can optimize creative, target niche audiences, and deploy successful campaigns on a global scale.

Creative optimization is the key to performance marketing, but how do you test and optimize at scale? Some marketers review their campaigns manually, A/B testing assets linearly while making necessary improvements. Others invest in AI-powered marketing platforms that analyze campaigns and offer creative recommendations. Overall, the latter approach is more effective, but not only because it surpasses gut instinct — rather, because it allows you to investigate more variables. As a result, AI also surfaces more data-backed insights so you can apply your expertise more effectively.

To illustrate this dynamic, let’s examine the pros and cons of each optimization technique to better understand how modern marketers leverage them in digital campaigns.

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Identifying Creative Fatigue

Knowing What to Optimize

Making Creative Recommendations

Evaluating Software Cost and ROI

How Alison Brings DIY and AI Processes Together

Identifying Creative Fatigue

The difference between declining performance and creative fatigue is not always immediately apparent. Declining performance can occur for any number of reasons — the creative may be targeting the wrong audience, be poorly localized, or simply fail to encapsulate a consumer need. The drop could even be temporary, caused by a seasonal fluctuation that will adjust after a brief period.

Creative fatigue, on the other hand, happens when audiences have viewed your ad far too often for it to be effective. There isn’t necessarily something wrong with the ad; it may just need to be refreshed to recapture attention. Creative fatigue appears similar to a standard decline from a performance level, but fixing it requires a slightly different strategy.

The problem is by the time a human being confirms that creative fatigue is occurring, it’s almost always too late — ROI has dropped and the best option remaining is to start a new campaign. That’s why Alison, yellowHEAD’s creative analysis and ideation technology, uses machine learning to spot the subtle distinction between creative fatigue and other declines. More importantly, Alison can spot fatigue early enough to refresh the creative with subtle changes, restore performance, and sustain engagement among target audiences.

Want to look under the hood? Learn more about Alison and request a demo here!

Knowing What to Optimize

The goal of optimization is not to recreate an entire advertisement but to refine and perfect each asset to increase its performance within a target market. Of course, that’s only possible if you know what needs fixing. There are countless combinations of creative elements in every advertisement, and marketers cannot be sure where the problem lies. Is it the color scheme? The choice of artwork? The call to action copy? Whether the product features prominently in the ad, or if it even should be featured at all? Marketers must evaluate each variable and many more depending on the nature of the brand and its audience.

The problem is that while a human being can identify a performance decline, pinning down its precise cause is something else entirely. Marketers may conduct a survey or host a focus group, but these efforts are usually time-consuming. If the ad is available on social media, marketers can dig into comments for the audience’s reaction, but other placements force them to analyze raw data. The best manual approach is preventative — by conducting A/B testing on a small, representative audience, it’s easier to understand how larger groups of users are likely to engage with the ad.

Alison’s AI-powered marketing solution, however, can analyze campaign performance “in the wild,” comparing and contrasting creative with content from similar advertisements. This process offers a more precise picture of the ways characters, colors, sounds, and other elements contribute to the success of a campaign. Then, when a performance decline occurs, Alison can detect which creative variables need optimizing instead of relying on intuition and guesswork.

Making Creative Recommendations

Despite the advantages of automated optimization, there is one area algorithms don’t trump human marketers: creative recommendations. Human beings understand the subtle context around a business or its market that machine learning technologies cannot fully grasp (yet). This perspective lets marketers pursue unique messaging opportunities or simply avoid the missteps of an entirely automated platform.

That said, an AI solution can radically accelerate the ideation process. At yellowHEAD, we use Alison to narrow the focus to specific creative elements, generating data-backed recommendations in real-time. But even here, human insight ensures that marketers can apply fixes that are consistent with the themes and messaging of your campaign.

Evaluating Software Cost and ROI

For many marketers, the primary factor for any advanced ad platform is cost. If you work for a startup or have a limited budget, optimizing campaigns manually and saving funds for ad spending may seem easier. In practice, however, AI-powered solutions enhance performance, contributing to higher conversions, larger returns, and more incoming revenue for the brand.

Consider the performance benchmarks for a major channel like Facebook. As of writing, the average conversion rate (CVR) for eCommerce ads we manage on the platform is 6.09%. However, after applying Alison’s creative insights we’ve seen CVRs as high as 10.38%. Instagram sees an even greater shift from 6.67% to 14.35%, while the Facebook Audience Network grows from 2.71% to 6.13%. (For more benchmarks, check out our latest guide!)

In short, brands using Facebook’s advertising channels can see anywhere from 1.5 to three times the average conversion rate. So if marketers optimize for performance and revenue, they’ll quickly discover that an AI solution soon pays for itself.

How Alison Brings DIY and AI Processes Together

The best marketing results only occur by pairing machine learning with human expertise. While optimizing creative manually is always an option, it’s far more scalable to use an AI marketing platform. At the same time, the human touch still matters when accounting for audience opportunities and contextual knowledge.

That’s what makes yellowHEAD’s creative analysis and ideation technology, Alison, the ideal marketing solution. It brings together the best elements of both approaches to drive campaign performance to its highest potential. Alison’s machine learning algorithms can monitor KPIs, identify ad fatigue, and make creative recommendations. From there, your marketing team — or our in-house creative experts at yellowSTUDIO — can refine creative to maximize campaign performance. Throughout the entire process, we will apply our expertise and knowledge of your business to identify unique opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden within your data.

With Alison’s technology and yellowHEAD’s creative expertise, we can drive higher performance while ensuring that your audience never grows tired of your ad creative. Get in touch with our team today to find out how yellowHEAD can enhance your performance marketing campaigns.