Goodlife Meta Advantage+Creative Strategy

Balancing brand consistency with optimising for Meta Advantage+ 30 creatives per campaign. The art of brand extension and consumer behaviour underwritten with recent cognitive research in an always-on environment.

My role was to deliver effective creative while also improving efficiencies for Production and the other Marketing teams in the chain for always-on Performance media campaigns. While this seems like a production grind it was in fact genuinely interesting and the team and I delivered above expectation.

Responsibilities and Deliverables

Creative strategy & execution

  • Creative strategy answering multiple business and implementation problems
  • Creative process for experimentation in brand asset extensions
  • Presentation of what and why to senior leadership
  • Presentation to Production team of why and how
  • Creation of Production process: templating and other efficiency protocols
  • Lead role in creating a feedback-loop process of findings from the Meta platform to guide ongoing creatives.

Meta Advantage+ allows for up to 30 creative variations per campaign, using a variety of testing algorithms to compare-and-contrast creative effectiveness.

The Problem

The crux of this issue was to account for an ‘always on’  infinite number of Performance assets without creating such a visual familiarity for the audience that the assets are simply no longer noticed due to visual fatigue.

The Strategy

We aimed at delivering visual brand extensions, using trends and experimentation to generate ongoing styles. All based in the core brand, but evolving it.

The Approach

Acknowledging the visual trends in market and looking at our brand through fresh eyes we delivered a growing library of brand asset extensions. These were then folded in to the brand for all organic and paid social assets, giving a growing consistency.

This approach requires a strong brand sensibility rather than a codified, fixed view of the trad Brand Guide and is, in my view, how brands should be implemented. This approach is supported by systems such as Atomic Design and the Product world’s use of Figma-based brand systems or toolkits, giving building blocks rather than 100% fixed layouts.

The Research

Until recently it was thought that the brain sees the world through the eyes like a camera, observing and translating everything equally.

“It is now understood that we are in fact prediction machines, constantly matching reality with our expectations. We pay attention to the new or complex, we push the known or expected aside.”
The Experience machine, Andy Clark.

Our brain is a prediction machine, constantly matching reality with our expectations. We pay attention to the new or complex, we push the known, expected or simplistic aside.

“A foundation to our changed understanding of cognitive processing is System 1 and 2 thinking. System 1 is near instantaneous, using heuristics. System 2 is our slower, conscious and logical thought.”
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

Processing fluency
(Perceptual and Conceptual):

Familiarity through repetitive exposure builds the speed we absorb visuals and concepts. This pattern recognition could be exploited through repetition of a tagline.  However this can also lead to the brain thinking it has seen the information before and ignoring any new messaging or offers. The trick is to force the brain into seeing ongoing creative as new, requiring cognitive processing. 

Creative ideation and production iteration can be a time-sink. Processes I led allowed for exception efficiencies and effectiveness for this cross-department project.

Teamwork makes the…

This approach allowed for the entire production team to create designs which were then shortlisted by team vote. Then, when polished up were proposed to the respective marketing or brand manager. My role here was creative lead, art director and project manager.

Production efficiency

As well as creative strategy my responsibilities included improving the production team’s efficiency in delivering these assets, with most creatives requiring up to 7 different sizes. This was achieved using Photoshop templates using smart layers and greatly sped0up delivery while also saving the designers from production fatigue.

Effective & Efficient Success

This project is a success. It greatly improved engagement, which in turn improved ROI, it expended the brand’s distinctive assets and visual style and the process created reduced all involved team’s time to manage the campaigns.

Brand Sensibility for Stretch Extension

A skill I bring to this and other projects is a depth of brand history and experience. This allows me to truly understand a brand’s core and extend with a design system. This approach is relatively new, compared to traditional (pre-performance and social marketing) where a brand’s assets were stylistically limited.

Brand strength in this diverse omni-channel marketing environment requires a point-of-view and strong brand sensibility, which I believe I offer.