😆How to improve your team’s creative hit rate – with Gabe Kwakyi, co-founder and CEO at Incipia📍

Our guest today is Gabe Kwakyi, co-founder and CEO at Incipia. I am excited for today’s episode as I have been following Gabe’s blog for years now where I have learned invaluable information and skills with regard to mobile marketing strategies.

Today, Gabe and I will discuss the concept that they call the creative hit rate and how to define quantifiable goals for a creative team. Additionally, we discuss how Gabe’s team has adapted to this way of focusing on hit rate as a company-wide goal and how it has been essential for driving very many creative wins.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

⚡️Creative as the most important factor that influences scaling – and how that inspired Gabe and his team to define quantifiable goals around creatives.

🤔What is the creative hit rate – and what is a ‘hit’?

🧠How to think objectively about the hit rate given that algorithms do strange things.

💫Base hits, Grand Slam hits, and high performing assets.

⚙️Elements of creatives that have been shown to produce hits so far.

📍Having a hits-focused target ensures that the building blocks that produce hits are in place.

🏷The importance of tagging themes and sub-themes.

👯‍♀️How creative hit rates fit into an organizational performance evaluation process.

🎯How designers’ targets differ from those of marketers and art directors.

💭How round tables with ad network reps can help brainstorm and drive idea generation.

💢What team process and infrastructure has had to change due to focusing on hit rate as a team KPI.

⚖️How to negotiate the balance between branding and performance aspects of creatives.

🗝The importance of being hypothesis driven in creative production.

KEY QUOTES

What is a creative hit rate

We define the creative hit rate as the percentage of creative assets that end up becoming a hit divided by the total number that we’re producing.

Identifying a hit creative

You see that hits also hog spend, you’ll see all the spend starts to go to this one asset. When that happens, and it pulls away from everything else, you know you probably have a hit if you’re looking at daily and even hourly trends.

The formula for a great creative

Some of the things we have found are that they’re very engaging, they have a really good pace to them, they very quickly start to bring animations or eye catching items to the very front of the asset. A lot of them have the phone and the profile in the ad itself. There’s this idea of what we call visually satisfying or some element that not everything is moving across the phone and changing at the same time. It’s kind of cinemagraph style, where there’s just a smooth, single focus visual that’s moving like you’re scrolling through items. Those are a few things that we’ve seen produce hits so far.

Building a foundation for the production of hit creatives

One of the things that we changed was making sure that the building blocks that support producing hits are in place so that we’re focusing there rather than going straight for let’s achieve a certain hit rate percentage right now, as that’s a very big change.

Why assigning metrics to a team produces results

Art directors and really, the marketers – they own the ‘what’ that is being produced, and the designer makes it come alive. We figured that placing the hit rate with the art directors and marketers was more of a successful outcome. For designers, we want to be able to produce a certain number of concepts or once we find a hit, especially a Grand Slam hit, produce a certain number of iterations within a certain timeframe, so that we can extend that lifetime as long as possible.

The way to discuss brand considerations with clients

We’ve had a lot of discussions with our clients informing them a little bit more that we’re focused on hits and generating scale creative assets. These are some of the things that we really need to do, so we need your support to help us push the boundaries of what branding is okay and we’re okay with the fact that there are boundaries and there is guidance — that’s the purpose of the branding team. We want to have discussions around where we can innovate, and getting guidance from brand teams is one of the most important things for us as well as working with clients and building allies with them and getting them excited about testing new things.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Gabe Kwakyi to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Gabe, welcome to the show.

Gabe: Thanks, Shamanth. Great to be here.

Shamanth: I’m excited to have you, Gabe, because I read a lot of your writings on your blog for years now since 2015-2016 — definitely admired a lot of the writing you’ve done and, of course, the work you guys have done as well. So definitely excited to have you here today. And today, we’re going to talk about how to improve your team’s creative hit rate. We’ll talk about what that means. Before we dive into the specifics of that, can you tell us about the circumstances that inspired you and your team to focus on the creative hit rate as a North Star Metric for your team?

Gabe: Yes, so really, it’s driven by performance. We’ve been having a series of retrospectives to understand what the factors are that really influence whether you can scale a digital advertising campaign, a mobile advertising campaign, and creative just continually comes up as the most important thing. We’ve talked about creative droughts and how you extend performance when you don’t have a win, but it’s critically important to make sure that you do pursue and achieve creative wins. Just looking at the data, knowing what the industry has said as well about creative being the most important single factor besides data pipelines led us to this point of trying to define a quantifiable goal around it.

Shamanth: What is the creative hit rate? Why do you choose to define it the way that you do define it?

Gabe: So

the creative hit rate we define as the percentage of creative assets that end up becoming a hit divided by the total number that we’re producing.

Currently, we’re looking at the asset level and are moving more towards the theme or group of iterations of very similar creative. The definition of a hit is something that’s worth looking to define by different app types, levels of budget, regions, channels. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or $40,000 on an individual creative asset once you’re able to scale past the four digit thousand numbers into the five, then you start to think of this as a hit.

Shamanth: It sounds like a creative hit is something that can scale significantly — it’s understood that it’s profitably scaling. Now, whether that kind of scale is unlocked or not can oftentimes be a function of algorithmic behavior. There can be false positives and negatives. I’ve certainly seen, and I’m sure you have, instances where Facebook spends a lot into something that’s not going to take off and the other way around — it just doesn’t feed spend to something that could perform. Given this, how do you think objectively about the hit rate that you’re talking about?

Gabe: My philosophy is that you have to learn to work with the algorithms. They’re the arbiters of the auction, how much of the auctions you can tap into — sometimes algorithms do strange things or they have false positives or negatives. By and large, this is how we optimize for the algorithms.

On the ASO side, for instance, you see a certain keyword result, and there’s some things you can improve to grow, but ultimately, you’re optimizing against what the algorithm allows you to achieve. So the same thing on the advertising side, where ultimately Facebook’s algorithm is going to tell you whether it likes a creative asset and makes it a hit or not. You just have to keep trying until you do get that hit.

You may have some times when you have high confidence in an asset, and you restart the ad set where you set it in a different campaign, you try to give it as much potential to scale and become a hit. But at the end of the day, if Facebook doesn’t scale it, if Google doesn’t scale it, if Snap doesn’t scale it, then you’ve got to keep trying. So we have this kind of strict definition of a hit because at the end of the day, if you don’t have a hit, you’ve got to keep looking. You can’t stop and try to turn a non hit into a hit for the vast majority of times — just keep looking.

Shamanth: Do you find that hits are platform specific? So if something scales massively on Snap or TikTok but not on Facebook, how do you think about that in terms of your framework of hits and non hits?

Gabe: Of course, everything kind of does depend, and all the auctions are very much in flux these days — algorithms are reacting to just constant change. We found that we actually classify hits in a couple different ways — a base hit and a Grand Slam hit. There’s also high performing assets. From bottom to top, there’s a high performing asset where it’s got good engagement metrics, sky quick performance against your KPI, and it starts to scale a little bit. It’s the highest spending with good performance asset. Unless it’s achieved that five digit spend level, then we don’t really define it as a base hit.

Once you do achieve that huge spend, and hits also hog spend, you’ll see all the spend starts to go to this one asset. When that happens, and it pulls away from everything else, you know you probably have a hit if you’re looking at daily and even hourly trends.

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You can see that this spend is rocketing up within a day or two. So it is kind of like you know a hit when you see it. So there’s the base hit where it starts to scale up. Those, more often than not, do translate cross channel if you’re running similar optimizations, and your campaigns have been set up and running for a while.

Then there’s the Grand Slam hit, and that just has the potential of scaling millions of dollars in this asset or this theme of assets. That absolutely does translate from what we’ve seen. We do see some nuances in what works for Snap versus other channels — that has a little more uniqueness to it as well as TikTok that has a few different characteristics too, especially the creative burnout rate. In addition to does it scale cross channel, how long does it maintain scale is something where we’ve see more variation between our high performing assets and base hits.

Shamanth: Once you do identify something as a hit or a Grand Slam, are there certain commonalities that you have seen among what are the Grand Slams?

Gabe: That’s something we’re still trying to divine. Part of the reason that we did define, hit yes or no, is so that we can make our analysis easier. It’s hard to do creative ad analysis and multi factor analysis. Part of where we struggled early on was we were trying to analyze everything — What makes a good performing asset, what doesn’t work — just everything in between. There are a lot of, as you mentioned, false positives. Some of those are related to when was the asset launched? What’s the status of the audience? Is it fresh? Is it saturated? What are your bid levels at the time?

So part of why we created this definitive hit level is so we could say these are the hits. Let’s just look at them for a minute — what are the commonalities they share? That really winnows things down a lot, so we were looking at a lot fewer assets. Now we’re at the stage of we’re building more hits. We’re trying to understand what it is that these hits do have in common.

Shamanth: So focusing on hits, I imagine has been a change in the way your team really looks at the creative production process — both your marketing team and your design team. How does this change of focus impact your team, and how they look at their work, and how they look at their day-to-day processes?

Gabe: I want to give a ton of credit to our creative team, our marketing team, and our analytics team as well — we’re a very cross functional organization. There have been a lot of discussions across teams to think about how we make progress generating hits, and it’s making progress as opposed to what we initially thought of let’s just achieve a certain hit rate of 10%-15%. Those were through some conversations with industry folks as well as just wanting to plant a flag somewhere.

But our creative manager, senior art directors said, we’re coming from a place where we’re not very close to that number currently, and we want to make progress against that. It’ll help the team be motivated to think about making progress against this. In your reviews, it’s going to be – are you producing the things that we know help produce such as new concept generation, iterating after you found some good legs on something, pulling in research from ad network discussions as well as competitive research.

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We have our North Star as you mentioned is hit rates and that’s what we look at at the team level and the company level. For individuals, it’s a lot of focus on more concepts than iterations to begin with. This actually goes a little bit contrary to some of the ad network suggestions that you build out every size, every dimension, multiple iterations before you start, but you have limited ad slots in some cases, and you have limited spend in other cases. As you mentioned, the networks will start picking things up, it may not be a good performance on all the dimensions or assets or iterations at first.

Another step has been more concepts testing broader before we start to really iterate. Another is really just having more discussions with our clients and planning our process so that we’re trying to establish a monthly cadence for brainstorming new ideas and then a weekly basis. We’re trying to launch and then analyze creative performance. Using metadata tags is also important, where we tag the theme, and then within that we have the sub theme, which might be iterations, and just trying to improve the metadata that gets passed through to the analysis stage. So there’s a few things that we’re doing to improve our infrastructure and team process for generating hits.

Shamanth: How is this structured organizationally in that is this a part of your OKRs, quarterly targets? Where does this lie in terms of how your teams are evaluated?

Gabe: Yeah, so we are rolling out a new performance review process. Our managing director has done a really good job over the last number of months of establishing quantifiable specific key results that we can measure and say we did meet the goal or we didn’t meet the goal, we exceeded the goal or not. As mentioned, our first iteration was, can we ask our art directors to achieve a certain hit rate? Does that make sense?

Through conversations, we realized we want to make progress to that, so we’re going to double the hit rate this quarter versus last quarter. We’re going to make incremental progress. For designers, we thought about what makes sense there as well.

So those are a couple of different roles in the depth of creative production, and they’re different OKRs

Shamanth: I think that is a fairly subtle distinction around what the art director and the marketer are most responsible for. I like the way you think about it and structure people’s responsibilities accordingly.

Gabe: Just to round it out, we also do want the whole creative team and marketers to have quarterly meetings with ad network reps. This is something that just benefits everyone. For us to have brainstorms and for us to use ad intelligence in part of this discussion, because while the art directors and marketers may hold the hit rate, everyone has ideas. Everyone can think about how to make this concept the best it possibly can be.

Shamanth: I would imagine, now that you are focusing on the hit rate as a team and organizational KPI, I would imagine that there has to be some change in the team’s workflow. I would imagine the processes or even the infrastructure might have to change.

So what do you see are some of the things that have had to change other than what you just said, which is you’re making more concepts and less situations. Other than that, are there other fundamental things that have had to change as a result of adapting to this way of doing things?

Gabe: Yes, and it’s led to a little bit of innovation as well as expectations and relationship alignment with our clients. So a few things. One actually, this concept of hits and hit rate initially began as a monthly meeting, where we would go through all of our assets and just see how many hits we saw, where, and just look at those hits and try to have discussion around more than hypothesis generation. That’s something that’s continuing on, but that was the first shift in our process and infrastructure.

Then with our clients, sometimes we’ve had, I’m sure everybody regardless of whether you’re an agency or consultancy or direct, has this balance between brand and brand guidelines and desires versus exploration of tons of new concepts. So

we’ve had a lot of discussions with our clients informing them a little bit more that we’re focused on hits and generating scale creative assets. These are some of the things that we really need to do, so we need your support to help us push the boundaries of what branding is okay and we’re okay with the fact that there are boundaries and there is guidance — that’s the purpose of the branding team. We want to have discussions around where we can innovate, and getting guidance from brand teams is one of the most important things for us as well as working with clients and building allies with them and getting them excited about testing new things.

Then again, making sure we’re having discussions and analyzing the data.

One of our clients has actually pushed us to be more hypothesis driven, so sometimes creative can feel like you just sling stuff at the wall, see what sticks. Similar to if you have a hit with a quantifiable thing you can back and assess whether you achieved it or not. With hypotheses, It helps you prevent your hindsight. Of course, this would do well where you say this is what we assumed at the time is going to perform, and then you go back and say, “Well, we thought it would, but it didn’t,” and try to just have a little bit of hubris or understanding that you’ll rationalize. But if you can develop that muscle of hypothesizing, that’s something that we’re trying to get better and better at. I think that’s one of the major infrastructure process changes as well.

Shamanth: What I liked about that way of thinking is that, oftentimes, I hear that you don’t know what’s going to work with creatives, and we don’t know why. Even if it works, we just take it as an article of faith. I really like how you and your team have built this structure around creatives and have such a methodical way of thinking about it. Gabe, all of this is very, very impressive to me, and I certainly have learned a lot just from listening to you today. This is perhaps a good place for us to wrap. As we do that, could you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you, your team, and the work you do?

Gabe: Sure thing. So incipia.co — head over there. We’re trying to really put a lot of good content out on our blog. That’s something that we’ve seen a lot of good engagement with, and it’s just something that aligns with our values. So, go check out our blog, we have a newsletter too.

Shamanth: Excellent. As I said, I’ve read your blog for many, many years. I highly recommend it. We’ll link to that in the show notes. It was a pleasure having you — excited to put this out into the world very soon.

Gabe: Absolutely. Thanks so much again for the chat and deep dive into creatives.

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