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Elementally Human - Episode 1

[00:00:00] Hamish McPharlin: Hi, welcome to Elementally Human. I'm your host, Hamish McFarlane, and today I'd like to talk about a new release from Element Human called Stopping and Stain Power. This is a new reporting feature that has been designed specifically to help brands and agencies quickly understand how their social or creative campaign is going.

It's proven particularly popular with influencer agencies for a very particular reason, and I'd like to explore that and also take you under the hood to show you how it works. Before we do, I think it's important to to first get some background on how Element Human's measurement actually works. So let's quickly dive into that and then see how our measurement has unearthed a problem that stopping and staying power has been designed to solve.

This is essentially the way that Element Human does its testing. We test all kinds of digital advertising, but social media is particularly where our system is quite powerful and the reason is it's a test that is in context of a social media feed. So whether that's TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts, it is going to be able to gather metrics on the impact of each of the creatives in your campaign and how it's performing in the feed, which are essentially a four part methodology.

So the first one is attention. Our system is going to measure the attention of the target audience in the feed. How many seconds they're spending looking at the post. It's going to use a camera. Obviously, it's going to get their consent before it does so. And it's going to gather that attention data. You can see the heat map on the right hand side there.

So that's one of the particular aspects of attention that we're measuring there. But we also have something we call attention in feed, which is part of the stopping and staying power calculation. So I'm going to show you that later. At the same time that we're observing the face to gather attention data on where people are looking and how long they're looking for.

We're also gathering data on their emotional state using something called facial coding. Are they smiling? Are they feeling surprised? Are they feeling sadness? We're really interested in getting right down to the creative level and seeing what makes great content. Bottom left there. This is a third part of our methodology called brand memory.

This is called an implicit association test. Probably do a whole episode on that another time. But what it's really measuring there. Is whether the brand that has been observed, has that brand gotten itself into the memory of the audience? Will they remember it? Don't forget, not every product is designed to be purchased as soon as you see it added.

Most advertising needs to be memory banked to be purchased at a later date. Particularly if you're a car brand, travel brands, finance brands, not everything is an instant product for an instant click, so brand memory is really important and is often a substantially overlooked part of methodology. And bottom right is something that is pretty common in measurement of campaigns and creatives, which is called Brand Uplift.

So this is essentially a test and control methodology, where we have a sample of an audience who see the advertising in the feed. We have a sample who do not. We ask them a whole bunch of questions about the brand, their awareness of it. whether they like it, whether they would consider it in a buying situation, whether they would purchase it.

And then we essentially compare the results and the differences between the exposed group and then control group who didn't see anything are our uplift. And that essentially tells us was their movement in awareness of the brand and the other metrics as a result of seeing that particular content in the feed.

So that's essentially how the element human test works. Now, It's quite comprehensive, as you can see. And one of the interesting things about it is it shows not just what works in advertising, but what doesn't work. And one of the things that sort of showed us in the last couple of years is this, which is a real problem around attention.

Problem with attention is we see time and time again, particularly in the creator and influencer marketing space, just because you got a lot of attention does not mean the brand cut through. And don't forget when you move into creative marketing and influencer marketing, you're now moving into an area where you're not really in control of the storyboarding anymore.

When you work with creators, they are now the storytellers, they are now the producer, the writer. Um, and you know, brands, of course, want to make sure that they're controlling that as much as possible. You kind of can't because creators. Are the [00:04:00] storytellers for their audiences and you kind of got to let them do it.

So there is this interesting conundrum now, which is that creators can do a great job of getting attention, but that doesn't mean they nailed the brand cut through and we will see situations like the one you can see on the screen right now, a lot, which is a credit. I got a lot of attention in the feed.

It was eye catching. It was exciting and people watched it. But when you looked at. What was the brand that the creator was talking about? There was all sorts of issues. And actually a lot of cases it was creator B that actually did a better job of it. And so if all you do is look at attention, you're not actually getting the real story.

At the end of the day is all the eyeballs in the world are great, but not if they're not able to get that brand into memory. So it's getting right down to the real ROI that brands are asking for. Now, let's talk about creative. If you talk to agencies about what's important in measurement, you might hear, as I do, that actually the creative is not very important.

It doesn't actually matter if, uh, an ad is good or bad. The real lever is how much money you put behind it. Where you put it. So it's all about media planning. I hear this a lot. And feel free to jump in the comments and argue on this if you like, I would love to have a discussion about this, but I do hear quite a lot that the creative is kind of just an asset.

It's not actually very important when it comes down to the real ROI. I think this is wrong. And there's a study that I'm showing you here from Nielsen in 2017. Based on 500 campaigns that measured all the variables that go into advertising across a lot of digital formats. It looked at the contribution of the creative itself, the actual quality of that creative in the driving of the ROI against that ad spend.

And the creative actually is number one. It was 47%. I've seen some other meta studies that have it about 40. The answer is still the same. The creative is a lot more important that I think agencies give it credit for. I think the reason that it's minimized is because they don't have good measurement on it.

There isn't good ways to measure the power of individual creators, and that's why it's kind of left out. People know about the levers that they can pull. They can pull the cost lever, they can pull the budget lever, they can pull the placement lever. We need to appreciate and measure the quality of creatives because they are a number one contributor to ROI.

More so with influencer and creator marketing, I think this is even more important. We all know about the window of attention that we have with audience these days is tiny. You have a few seconds of people's time. Your Creative has to stand out in the infinite scroll. It has to gather attention to stop people in their tracks.

And so this is really the groundwork for where stopping and staying power came from. It was sort of identifying these problems and really thinking about the power of the creator and the creative and how important it is to measure that. Stopping and staying power came about through the kind of conversations that we have with our clients, many of whom are influencer agencies, and it really boiled down to, can we just answer these two questions?

Is the content stopping people in their tracks? Yes, but as we saw a little earlier, we also must know is the brand stopping Cutting through and getting into memory. If it's not doing that, the creative attention isn't worth what it, what it should be to the brand. So how do we do it? Well, stopping power is an attention metric.

So we use our attention in feed score. This is how many seconds are being spent looking at the content in the feed, whether it's on Tik TOK, whether it's an Instagram, our system using the webcam and eye tracking is able to calculate that. We then rank it against the feed. The global benchmarks for that platform that we have, of which we have thousands.

So that's stopping power. Now, as you can see, that is a top of the funnel metric, right? Then we have staying power. This is now about brand memory. Will your brand be remembered? This is a middle of the funnel metric. We are dealing with the engagement with the brand. We are creating an emotional connection to that brand and the implicit test, which tests brand memory is what's going to power this one.

And I've put this little arrow here downwards. And the reason for that is that. Our data shows us that [00:08:00] doing better in the middle does drive lower funnel goals, such as purchase intent, and I'll show you evidence of that shortly. Okay, so the way we do it is we take our stopping power score and we take our staying power score and we Plot them out on an X and a Y axis.

And then what we do is we show you where each of the creators videos are living. And the key here is that the higher you are across each of these axis axes, the better your ranking against those benchmarks. So if you are at the top, let's say. Up here, you're a superstar. You are performing above the benchmark for both stopping power and staying power.

And trust me, not every creative video can do this. In fact, it's the real notable ones that are pulling it off. If you're in the top top box, you're in the top quartile. Each of these four boxes is quartile. So you're in the top 25 percent for stopping power and the top 25 percent for staying power for your platform on TikTok or Instagram, things like that.

If you are over here, well, it means you are above average for stopping power, but you're below for staying power. So this is content that is eye catching, it's stopping people in their tracks in the feed, but it's actually not achieving brand cut through. So if creative number three over here, That's an interesting one for us, right?

We would now look at that inside the campaign and say, okay, this is a creator that's doing a great job of getting attention, but it's actually not overt enough about the brand. Is it mentioning the brand? Is it showing the brand? Is it showing the product? Is it taking too long to talk about the brand?

I've definitely seen situations where The brand cut through didn't work because the creator took too long to mention the brand. And if you take too long, you're losing attention. Don't forget, attention over time is a curve. As the seconds tick by, less of your audience is still there, right? So you kind of need to elegantly get the brand in early at the top of that curve.

In the first, you know, let's say 5 or 10 seconds when your audience is at its maximum. Then conversely, we've got The opposite issue, if you're a creative is falling into this little blue pocket down here, what's this telling us? Well, it's telling us that our staying power is good. So now here we have a very high results for brand memory, but stopping power is underperforming.

This means that the content is not so much standing at the feed. It's got more of a niche audience, but for that audience, it's doing a great job. So it's, it is, uh, the. Other side of the coin really in that it's not getting attention, but it is getting brand memory. So that's kind of how it works. And if you take a look at it as stopping a staying power chart, it would look like this.

So in this particular campaign, you might have eight creatives here. They are mapped and you can see the stopping power is the what we call a percentile rank against our attention in feed score. And you can see that it is divided up by platforms. So in this particular case, you've got some green and some pink dots.

The green ones are TikTok creatives, and that's how they rank against the TikTok benchmarks. And then Instagram has the Instagram creatives there in the pink, and that's how they rank against the Instagram creative. So that's stopping and staying power. So we needed to validate this against that data.

And of course, because we have so much, we're able to do that. So the first one was as you move up the quartiles of your stopping power score, What does that do to awareness of your brand? And we're happy to say that as you move up those quartiles, we see a very direct and linear movement in the positive direction for awareness.

You can see as you do better at stopping power and move up those quartiles, you can expect Better top of the funnel performance and similarly for staying power as you move along the quartiles for brand memory, you can enjoy better intention to purchase your product no matter what platform you're on.

You can expect a, uh, uplift in purchasing intent of about 43 percent or so, but the evidence is there that doing better on the stopping and staying power chart has real meaningful results at key parts of the funnel. So we have on our website a place for you to go and play to explore the stopping and staying power chart.

So if you go to elementhuman.com, you'll get to see something we call the SSP Superchart, which we make [00:12:00] available to our clients. So you can see, first of all, you can turn on and off some of your creatives, so by platform. So if you want to turn off Facebook and TikTok and YouTube shorts and just see your Instagram, there you go.

Jacques Cousteau with Wacky Upstart Brand is the top performer on Instagram for this particular agency. All right, I'm going to turn those back on. Um, and then the other thing is that, you know, I can choose, for instance, the beauty category, or I can choose entertainment and streaming. And it's going to basically show me, uh, all of the tests that I've ever done inside that category.

So I can understand who are my top creators inside the category that I can then put forward for my new pitch, um, or my renewal or anything like that. The second one is I can look at my creators so we can take a look at how they have performed across the various campaigns that they have been running as creators.

What categories are they best at? What categories are they driving the best results at? And the other one is, of course, brand. The idea here is you can, as an agency, take a look at your testing that you've done for that particular brand and you can see how have we delivered for them and what other creators that have delivered for them.

over campaigns to give them what we're looking for and to help us optimize and learn over time what makes great content, what makes creative content enduring, compelling, exciting, memorable, and what are the secrets to success for creators inside a category. And of course, you've got country, so you could divide it up by various markets to see what, what other content that are working in a particular market and of course, month and year.

So hopefully this has been a good example of stopping and staying power. We consider this kind of a brand performance currency. Um, so if you would like to read up more about it, you can go to element human. com and follow the links through to SSP. Uh, you can have a play around with it just as I've done now.

Thank you for your time and see you on the next episode of Elementally Human.