We saved Ogilvy and British gas 8 to 12 months of multivariate testing by starting with the right creative route, here’s how:

The route to creative excellence has to date been based more on intuition and gut feel that rigorous scientific pre-testing; we hope our recent agreement with Ogilvy will change the process for ever.

How the Creative Process Was

The creative agency comes up with several routes for a campaign. At a large meeting the Creative Director presents the routes and explains the motivation and goals for each one. He then sits down and looks thoughtful whilst waiting until the most senior person on the client side speaks up and says which one they prefer. There is some discussion and the route is thus chosen.

How the Creative Process Will Be

The agency comes up with several routes for a campaign. At a large meeting the Creative Director presents the routes and explains the motivation and goals for each one. She also presents how each route was actually engaged with by consumers who were eye tracked on each one. The eye tracking shows if two key goals were met:

1. Did the creative get attention?

2. Did the creative deliver the intended message(s)?

The client and agency then have an informed discussion about how each is performing and may select one of the routes or to choose elements from individual ones that are performing well to iterate into a new optimised design.

Simple, scientific, common sense, and you don’t have to take our word for it, see what Skip Fidura, email marketing guru at DotAgency, said,

“We first used eye tracking to indicate which of three design concepts were the best. Interestingly, the one that came out on top had not been the client’s or the agency’s favourite.

We then used these initial results to optimise the design and tested it again; further optimising the template from this second round of analysis before putting it in the field with a robust testing strategy to improve it further.

We estimate that even if we had picked the right design in the first place, it would have taken eight to twelve months of testing to get to the version that we put in the field on day one.” Continue reading →