Creators are commanding more of brands’ dollars than ever. Companies are expected to spend $10.5 billion this year on influencer marketing, hoping they’ll reach young, finicky, and (somewhat) anti-consumption audiences by getting in with the cool kids.
And many of these companies are content to let creators do what they do best: come up with material their audience will enjoy. Now, to be clear, some brands do write scripts for the creator partners, and/or do things like mandate where an ad read should go in a video. But in a lot of cases, creators are making these decisions themselves–and, according to AI ad platform CreativeX, they’re doing it wrong.
The New York City-based company says it “powers creative excellence” for brands, helping them ” elevate creative expression through data.”
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We’re guessing some of that data is pulled together to create formulas for what works ‘best’ in ads, because CreativeX’s latest project is a report saying that nearly half of creator-made ads on TikTok and Meta platforms don’t adhere to practices that would make them successful.
The report analyzed 1.6 million ads, about ~$2 billion worth of ad spend, to look at how creator ads do on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
CreativeX founder/CEO Anastasia Leng told Adweek it launched this report because it saw more creator-posted content coming through its systems, rather than content posted to brands’ owned accounts.
“We became really interested in how brands were treating creator content differently from how they were treating their own branded content and how those decisions impacted creator content effectiveness,” she said.
So, how are brands treating it differently?
Well, CreativeX says brands assume creator-made ads don’t need to adhere to ‘best practices’ like mentioning a brand name in the first three seconds of the video, and that this assumption has led to a “false paradox between authenticity and suitability or effectiveness.”
49% of creator ads don’t mention the brand in the first three seconds, CreativeX found, while 51% of ads do. The videos that do mention the brand had a 16% higher video completion rate. Overall, only 14% of users watched any of these videos past the first three seconds, regardless of whether or not a brand name was mentioned. (This makes sense, considering all three platforms operate on a swipe mechanic that keeps users cycling through hundreds of videos rapid-fire.)
CreativeX said 55% of creator ads are also either too short or too long. It says the best practice is to make videos between 15 and 60 seconds long, and only 45% of creator videos it looked at are within those parameters. Videos 15-60 seconds had a 10% higher video completion rate, it said.
It’s not clear whether CreativeX only looked at short-form videos under a certain length, but TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook all allow longer vertical uploads. Obviously long-form content with an ad spot isn’t going to be <60 seconds, and being longer than a minute doesn’t necessarily mean it fails to abide by ‘good’ ad practices for longer videos.
Another thing CreativeX brought up is that creator-made ads often don’t adhere to ‘safe zones,’ aka the areas in the video that aren’t covered by the title, description, UI elements, etc. We have seen this be a problem across TikTok, YouTube, and more: Creators will show a product or put an affiliate code on the screen, but the product or code will be covered by overlay elements from the platforms.
Creators can’t control what UI shows up on their videos, and sometimes platforms make UI tweaks that can affect videos post-posting. But creators do need to pay attention to where safe zones currently are for the platforms where they intend to post. If the audience can’t see a crucial part of their ad, it will underperform, and could jeopardize their relationship with the sponsoring brand.
CreativeX found that only 3% of creator-made ads adhered completely to safe zones. (To be fair, though, brand-made ads didn’t fare well either; only 12% of them use safe zones properly.)
Leng told Adweek the point of releasing this report and pushing creators to abide by the rules is because there are “real constraints that are algorithmically determined for these platforms.”
“This is not about changing the creator’s idea or their message, it’s about putting in a container where the user can actually fully enjoy that message in a way that plays by the rules of the platform,” she said.
Brands want creators because they’re inventive experts in their niches, with audiences who dig what they make. For some issues, like safe zones and correctly disclosing sponsorships, creators do have to be mindful. But is a 16% higher video completion rate worth blasting the name of a brand in the first three seconds of a video? Will that turn off the aforementioned finicky audiences? Most long-form sponsorships we see on YouTube wrap the ad spot into the video, giving viewers the chance to sink into the upload before they’re hit with a brand mention, while most short-form ads are entirely about the sponsor, often with a namedrop midway through or at the end.
Leng said CreativeX doesn’t want creators’ messages to change, but pushing them to adhere to a timestamped formula decided by an AI might in fact make them feel constrained–and might make audiences feel like there’s less of the intangible magic sauce that is authenticity.
