Labatt: Why Every Marketer Should Be Rushing to Test Their Digital Ads

Editor’s Note: Every year, participants in the GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Report survey vote for the most innovative companies in market research. In Insights That Work, these top companies share the real-life challenges and solutions of their biggest clients.

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Challenge

A marketing trend that’s impossible to ignore is the growing value of digital and social content. According to PwC, digital advertising is increasing by 20% year over year while nearly half the world’s population is on some type of social media platform. Despite this, we continue to see many brands:

• Ignore testing their digital creative while still investing heavily in TV ad testing
• Struggle with understanding their digital audiences
• Put TV ads on digital channels, expecting the same effectiveness

The result? Huge budgets being wasted on ineffective ad campaigns. That’s why it’s become extremely important for marketers to produce campaigns that not only capture people’s attention, but also help foster long-term relationships with the brand.

Labatt is one company that’s way ahead of the curve, understanding the significance of employing a ‘channel first design strategy’ in marketing. They also know the importance of ascertaining customer feedback and, as such, focus on creating the right content for the channels that best reach their audiences—existing and new.

To create digital content that is more personalized and relevant for their audience, the Labatt Insights team sought a way to quickly uncover customer insights and motivations. Ultimately, they were looking for a cost-effective, agile research solution that could offer visibility into what’s working and what’s not with their digital content in a way that allowed them to produce better content, faster.

Solution

Working with Methodify, the Labatt Insights team introduced a methodology for testing the potential impact of digital content before it goes live. After all, research has shown that pre-testing digital assets and subsequently optimizing them deliver higher returns on investment. The ability of Methodify to customize research and deliver results in less than 24 hrs. has allowed Labatt to create unique approaches to asking research questions. Specifically, results show:

• They are able to determine if their creative meets one of Facebook’s ‘brilliant basics’ criteria for effective content
• They are also able to test the content in its entirety, asking questions about the ad, the brand, and the respondent’s overall likes/dislikes about the content
• They are able to identify the ability of the digital content to go viral.

Outcome

By testing digital content on Methodify’s automated research platform, Labatt has been able to garner insights within one day of the survey being infield, optimizing their creative and having their content go live a mere 48 hours later.

Early results have shown an increase in digital effectiveness, an overall 17% improvement on digital best practices globally within Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) (from 83% to 100%). In fact, Labatt’s digital content being tested on Methodify has proven to be some of the strongest performing assets across ABI globally, (ranked in the top three for the past four quarters among all ABI countries) and on Facebook and YouTube—with content like Budweiser’s Gold Olympic Red Light with Wayne Gretzky winning YouTube’s ads leaderboard award for Q1.