Give your next digital campaign laser death beams
While continual optimisation is admirable, Ryan Sproull argues marketers and agencies need to look to do something radical to really evolve.
I’m a big fan of X-Men.Yes, this is going to be one of those digital-strategy articles that start out talking about comic books. You know the ones.
Sproull
The idea in X-Men is that “mutants” are people who were born with a particular gene, called the X-gene, which gives them superpowers. Pretty much any superpower you can imagine, as long as you can come up with a pun for a name to go with it.
WHAT
Thanks for the article.
Agree – great to have the wild card in the mix. This is what I love about optimisation – a safe way to play the wild card – use it only with a subset of traffic to begin with, and see how it does.
More incremental A/B is still great. Knowing what small changes make a big change is still really valuable. But, it is nice to give the creatives some love and test out the big hairy idea and see how it plays.
The problem with introducing the hairy wild card – It is hard to figure out ‘what’ about that version is what people to respond to, and still need work to sort out ‘why’ it worked.
This article really confuses me. I’m with Wendy…
Completely agree, Scott. We only need to keep the door open to wild cards; definitely don’t want to be pursuing them exclusively.
Regarding the danger of taking the wrong lesson from a happy accident, excellent point. I guess the best answer is more testing – test hypotheses for why something worked before declaring it a magical learning.
The last thing you need is to think a landing page worked really well because people respond well to red and green together, only to discover that actually it’s just that colour-blind people happen to adore your product for some reason.
Visionary!
I kinda figured some agencies were already tinkering in this area? In another life, before I saw the light and mutated into a digital copywriter, I was an above the line guy. I remember the creatives at BAM saying they always presented three ideas to the client: two being safe and the third way out there, with the hope of doing great business and maybe bagging an award or two. It was all about where they could take the opportunity. Since then I’ve worked at stacks of agencies with a similar attitude. Again, it’s searching for what one can do with opportunity. Done right, it’ll be the client that thinks you’re the super hero!
Nic,
Yep, plenty of agencies do the two-safe/one-brave pitches, or some other variation on including a bit of madness in the mix.
There are some important differences between that and A/B/X testing, though.
Firstly, the tactical objective of each. In your scenario, the tactical goal is to produce something good, perhaps great, and maybe win an award. In A/B/X testing, the tactical goal is to learn about the audience, the market, the environment. In both, the strategic objective (bigger picture, beyond the success or failure of a single project/campaign/action) is the business doing well.
In your scenario, most of the learning is about the client – what they like, how risk-averse they are, etc. If nine times out of ten the client picks a safe option, nine times out of ten you learn nothing about how well or badly new things work in the field.
Secondly, in your scenario, all of the eggs are in one basket. If the client trusts you with a risky idea and it falls flat, that’s a big deal and you’ve only learned a few things. In A/B/X testing, you’re putting a tenth of your eggs in a basket that’s ten times smaller and you learn 10 times as often. Or something.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. A/B/X testing is about formalising a regular habit of low-volume high-risk actions for the purpose of learning (while continuing mostly with the safe testing, as Scott mentioned above), and that can be going on during and within campaigns/projects whether they’re considered safe or adventurous overall.
Interesting article Scott that is clearly written and easy to understand.
Whilst I agree with your overall point and conclusions, you could also interpret the results from the example you gave in a different way.
f the e-commerce site had more insights into the user experience, they would have a better handle of what areas of the site are more likely to contribute to the overall conversion rate. If they then did A/B testing on those areas first, I would argue that they would have got more significant improvements quicker as a result. Otherwise, you need to do A/B testing on everything with the occasional x testing.
There are many other types of testing that they could have done both qualitative and quantitative to give them this insight.
Whilst I agree with X testing, I don’t think it should substitute for insights.
Trying and testing not only new creatives and buy types; but entirely new challenges is, in my opinion, the key to successful optimisation.
The truth is; we are no longer living in a single channel, or even ‘multi-channel’ digital age any more. Where marketers should be moving towards is a true cross channel approach, because this is the age we are now living in.
Where in times gone by, running multiple digital channels was the norm; the insights and audience habits learned in activities in each silo’d channel were only really played out in future optimisations to each of those channels.
However, running digital channels not in isolation; but truly fusing the data and audience insights from one channel to another; this is the way forward and this is what I’d call true cross channel.
I’m also a huge advocate of this concept to ‘allow 10% of your buy budgets for investing in new things’; because it ensures you are always adding new channels into the mix and learning from these trials.