by Arnaud Caplier, TheContillery and Fernanda Pelegrini, Outbrain
Simply put, buying a car isn’t the same as it used to be: car buyers visit 4.2[i] websites on average, and consume 11.4[ii] pieces of online content before walking into a dealership. Successful digital campaigns and online communications as a whole is key to rise above the competition. But how can auto brands achieve this goal? And in particular how can they leverage efficient visual strategies to increase engagement with their audience?
Capturing audience attention
Standing out on mobile screens saturated with content is a headache for brands.
An MIT Research, “in the blink of an eye”, says marketers only have 13 milliseconds to capture the attention of their audience.
Aware of these challenges, TheContillery partnered with Outbrain – the leading recommendation platform for the open web – to provide data-driven insights for successful media campaigns using creative best practices and the most impacting visuals.
Impact of visuals on campaigns performance
What is the secret of highly performing ad creatives? What are the visual cues that are influencing – positively or negatively – the performance of automotive ad campaigns?
This is the question asked and answered by the research led in partnership with Outbrain, and presented in our coedited report “Global Insights to Speed Up Your Digital Campaign Results”.
Indeed, the new possibilities offered by Artificial Intelligence are changing traditional wisdom, which had considered that creativity could not be modelized, measured or understood.
By allowing to access thorough understanding of visual cues, computer-vision technology enables us to consistently describe image attributes on each car visual: model type, type of scene, vehicle display and framing, background, color of the car, presence of people, car dynamics, etc.
By applying these image descriptors on thousands of automotive campaigns, TheContillery and Outbrain divulge visual attributes that are influencing ads performance.
Getting in depth understanding of image compositions is a major competitive advantage. Performance KPIs can finally be optimized thanks to decisions made on visual content: AI is the link between the two. It simplifies the work of marketers by giving them detailed information on creative choices to make, saving them time, money and energy.
TheContillery identifies thirty different main visual themes used by automotive brands to promote their car models. Amongst these thirty creative options the top 9 themes displayed below account for 85% of the 5 000+ automotive campaigns optimized by Outbrain in 2021.
There is a lot at stake when choosing imagery for digital campaigns. Those decisions will have consequences — good or bad — on the reach, number of likes, CTR, and every other performance indicator to optimize. To illustrate, on average across countries, selecting proper image themes (“on the road” vs “lifestyle” vs “in nature”, etc.) will create huge spreads on CTRs: The top performing themes deliver 2 to 3-times higher CTRs than the least performing themes.
Market specificities
Cultural differences can also affect media performance of visuals. Some characteristics can be beneficial and drive high performing campaigns in one country and be detrimental in another one.
Taking the example of Germany and Italy we can notice that the most engaging theme in both countries is “range”. But when looking at car body color and visual attributes the 2 countries differ. Then looking at another country like Japan no common criteria can be found with Germany. This, showing strategies should not be developed around a region but rather by country to get the accuracy needed to develop high engagement.
Our research also made us aware that ads for electric cars are on average less efficient than ads displaying combustion engine vehicles.
The diagram below illustrates performance by visual theme for electric and hybrid vehicles. The most used category – charge port – is performing below average. But this result is not inevitable. Our research finds out how to outperform on electric vehicles by making the proper creative choices for this creative theme (presence of people, vehicle display, colors, etc.).
A huge lever on media performance
The starting point for your brand, selecting the best mix of visuals and the proper creative execution, will impact the performance of your ad campaigns by at least +30 to +50%, and potentially more.
We wish you a very good read !