Creative Effectiveness Playbook

You can't grow your business if people don't notice what's important in your marketing and customer experience. The Creative Effectivness playbook uses behavioral science and advanced AI to see what's being seen and what's being missed.

What are people noticing about your customer experience, packaging, or marketing messages, and what are they missing?
How many messages are we trying to convey to customers (hint: it's usually too many)?
How can you improve your marketing, packaging, or customer experience to make sure that your MOST IMPORTANT messages and elements are jumping off the (digital or physical) page?
What are the strategic salience principles you should adapt in your work moving forward?
What are some relatively low effort, low investment, high reward quick wins we can change right now?

01 How it works

Process
Deliverables
Outcomes
Frequently Asked Questions

Process

// Discover

Visual salience and gaze pattern audit using an advanced AI tool trusted by companies like Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Diageo and more
Creative effectiveness audit of competitors and best-in-class experiences across industries
Salience audit to understand what key elements your users are missing
Audit your brand's existing customer experience, perform a gap analysis

// Define

Messaging and creative gap analysis based on findings of the salience audit
Define custom creative insights and tactical recommendations based on the findings of your audit

// Design

Present lo-fi mockups with recommendations that combine salience and behavioral science-driven insights
High-priority prescriptive tactical recommendations (incl. mockups, messaging, and design where appropriate)

Deliverables

All documents delivered in 3 formats: PDF, PowerPoint, and Keynote

One deliverable document with three sections:

Competitive and best-in-class behavioral strategies document
Audit of your existing customer experience and gap analysis
Behavioral principles and step-by-step tactical recommendations document with prioritzed roadmap

Outcomes

Once we complete the Customer Behavior Playbook process and deliver your documents, here's how it will impact your business:

Measure whether the creative elements of your experience are working hard enough to grab attention, or if they need to be tweaked: Customer attention is a rare commodity, but by using an agile, science-based tool, we can increase the odds that a piece of creative gets noticed (while the campaign is still in development).
Ensure that during key moments in a customer journey, users notice and can find the “right” things: Whether that’s a CTA or a key piece of information, using an objective tool to look through your customers’ eyes can help you figure out if it’s attention-grabbing.
Diagnose why creative might be underperforming: Often it’s good creative, but it’s just not noticeable. Or the right messages and images are there, but they’re not easy to find.
Make creative choices based on science, not opinion: A salience audit can give you unbiased creative effectiveness feedback. That means fewer rounds of review, and fewer elements left to chance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the most common questions we get about the Creative Effectiveness Playbook:

Are Creative Effectiveness Playbooks best for marketing or digital experiences?

This project can be easily applied to marketing, packaging, retail customer experiences, digital customer experience, or a combination of channels.

Creative Effectiveness Playbooks generally focus on a single campaign or journey with multiple pieces of creative (ad hoc analysis of single creative or in-development creative are available, just get in touch).

We've created Creative Effectiveness Playbooks for many types of clients and projects, including:

App onboarding user journey (UX/UI, email, push notifications)
In-store customer experience (digital kiosks, posters, live video, packaging)
Multi-channel marketing campaigns (OOH, digital, email, in-store elements)

What elements will you analyze in the Creative Effectiveness Playbook?

We can analyze a variety of touchpoints, and will customize our analysis to fit your specific needs. Common elements for analysis include:

App and web user journeys (live and still) including checkout journeys and product pages
Digital channels: Social, digital display, email, Amazon e-commerce, and more
Retail channels: Posters, menus, standees, digital kiosks, packaging,
CPG (FMCG) focused retail: Packaging in-situ, wobblers, endcaps, stands, leaflets, in-cart ads, in-store displays
Product packaging
Out-of-home advertising: Billboards, bus stop ads, digital screens, events and sports advertising, sponsorship
And more...

Will the Playbook work for customers and users in different markets?

Visual salience is consistent across cultures with a small amount of variance. Our team has experience analyzing and applying visual salience across many global markets such as:

The US (all regions)
Canada
Europe & U.K.
South America
Middle East & Africa
Australasia

Are you and your team willing to sign NDAs?

Yes, of course!

How many pieces of content or steps in a journey will you analyze?

The scope of the Creative Effectiveness Playbook is generally limited to <25 pieces of content for a single project, but most projects fall somewhere between 5 - 15 pieces of content analyzed.

We can, of course, be flexible to fit your needs, timings, and budget - please get in touch with any questions.

How long will it take to deliver the Creative Effectiveness Playbook?

Timings will vary based on your individual business challenges and the amount of creative to be analyzed.

Generally this project takes from 3-5 weeks to complete, but your timings may vary.

How much does the Creative Effectiveness Playbook cost?

This will vary based on timing, available resource, what type of creative needs to be analyzed (and how much). We need to get to know your business, its challenges, and existing resources before we are able to scope cost.

Choice Hacking offers Startup and Scale-up discounts for businesses that are just getting started and/or growing.

Please email or schedule a call to learn more.

02 The Science of Creative Effectiveness

Have you ever spent weeks or months toiling over a marketing campaign, just to see it fall flat with customers when it goes live?

“What went wrong?” your team asks themselves, disheartened (and maybe a little tipsy at the office Happy Hour).

You might’ve missed measuring how attention-grabbing your marketing would be in the real world, and figuring out if customers even noticed your message or visuals.

What makes a piece of marketing or a customer experience attention-grabbing?

It’s down to a psychological principle called Salience.

// What is Salience?

Salience describes how prominent or visually striking something is. If an element seems to jump out from its environment, it’s salient. If it blends into the background and takes a while to find, it’s not.

Figuring out if a piece of marketing is salient is really about answering these two questions:

Do people notice what we need them to notice? (Marketing messages or CX elements)
Are they noticing the right things? (Calls to action, product photography)

If you want to learn more about Creative Effectiveness and the science of salience, check out the Choice Hacking article here.

// How Does Choice Hacking Measure Salience?

There are lots of salience measurement platforms out there, but the one I trust the most is called DragonflyAI. I used this tool with big global brands, like McDonalds and Adidas, and it works just as well for startups, too.

DragonflyAI is used by companies like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and more and has undergone rigorous independent testing for accuracy by MIT (Massachutsetts Institute of Technology).

You can read more about the DragonflyAI tool here.

03 Contact

If you're interested in learning more about how Choice Hacking and/or the Customer Behavior Playbook can help you grow your business, please: