'Creative up to four times more important than the media plan' says comScore

The findings were based on extensive research conducted by comScore ARS into effective campaign execution for TV and digital advertising campaigns.

“Through our copy-testing measurement, we are able to quantify the quality of a campaign and show a 0.90 correlation between ARS Persuasion Scores and changes in brand sales,” explained Jeff Cox, executive vice president of comScore ARS.

“Based on our years of research in this space, we’ve determined that the quality of the creative is four times more important than the characteristics of the media plan in generating sales.”

Cox went on to say that creative is the single most important factor and accounts for over half the changes in a brand’s sales over time. He says that the importance of creative often gets minimised in the process of developing an ad campaign.

“Now is the time for advertisers using digital, as well as more traditional media, to get serious about optimising their creative on the front end so they don’t get a rude awakening when the ads don’t work and they are left wondering what went wrong.”

Steve Elrick, regional executive creative director at BBH Asia Pacific said, "I suppose as a 'Creative' one would expect me to leap at this as proof of our complete majesty over all things. And it does! But I can sympathetically imagine Media people shouting 'unfair' if the metric used is 'average' media buys. Doesn't this simply say that a strong, powerful message will resonate much more than a weak one? Based upon years of my research in space of common sense I can sort of agree."