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Today, we’re excited to announce General Availability of Civis Creative Focus, our online message testing tool. Now, users in any industry can build better messaging, create more focused advertisements, and generate positive brand perception to improve advertising ROI.

The Problem with Messaging Spend Today

Whether you’re thinking of creative content or wording, motivating your current and prospective customers to act on a message they encounter from you isn’t as simple as it seems. It can be hard to deliver the right message to the right audience on a consistent basis, and marketers need to know with confidence that budget and resources are well spent.

Currently, over 40 percent of ads have no impact on a person’s behavior, and one in ten actually causes a negative reaction — whether or not your brand is helped by an advertisement is literally a coin flip. Combined with the time-consuming process of message testing, and platforms that currently encourage buying more ads, and not necessarily the best ads, marketers are facing a handful of challenges.

The Evolution of Creative Focus: Better Messaging for Any Industry

Today’s announcement reflects an expansion of Creative Focus’s capabilities to meet the needs of marketers, communications and insights professionals in any industry.

We introduced Creative Focus earlier this year to meet the needs of progressive campaigns that wanted to conduct effective and actionable message testing. We quickly discovered that the insights derived from Creative Focus could serve not only political and non-profit organizations — but any organization looking to make the most of their marketing budget.

Animated gif of a user setting up a Creative Focus test

Create a test

Why Creative Focus?

Our proven message testing solution offers you the chance to test your ads before spending the money to put them in market, and ensure they will be the most effective.

Animated gif of a user choosing an audience for their tests

Choose an audience

Creative Focus tests the message efficiency among key audiences and subgroups, enabling you to make data-driven targeting decisions to further engage the right people. You can optimize creatives by audience to tailor messages effectively and decide which to promote in new campaigns. The tests are quick, affordable, and automated, so you can spend more time developing strategies for future campaigns.

You’ll receive actionable results based on KPIs (i.e. brand favorability, brand awareness, and intent to purchase) that will move you closer to your business goals instead of reporting on vanity metrics like click-through rates or shares. Brands have been using Creative Focus to identify the most effective ads for their key audience, so they can reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

Animated gif of a user uploading their creative

Upload your images/videos/text

How It Works

Creative Focus is built on the gold standard of scientific research — randomized control trials. This means that it randomly assigns respondents to either a treatment group or a control group. Those in the treatment group will see one of your creatives, and those in the control group will see no ad at all. By measuring the opinions of each group and comparing them against one another, Creative Focus minimizes noise and directly measures the impact of each ad on the outcomes that matter most, like purchase intent and brand favorability.

How did my creative perform?

View your results

Within a few days of the original request, see how your messages performed overall, measure any potential backlash, and understand which subgroups were most receptive to each creative.

Creative Focus can also help you optimize targeting across digital channels. Once the test is complete, leverage the results and use Civis technology to activate a list of individuals who are most likely to be persuaded by each creative, and target them accordingly. Based on your results, you’re able to use Civis tools to generate a custom model to predict persuadability, score the consumer file to find similar individuals, and then generate a list of your best targets. Then, pass the list to data onboarding partners (i.e. LiveRamp) for activation. Most importantly, this creative-first targeting means that you are delivering your best messages to the most receptive audiences.

Getting Started

Creative Focus is now available for demos and testing — if you’re interested in learning more, reach out today!