Parabolica #28 - The Scientific Method 🧪

Fundamentals of Creative Strategy Part 1/?

Creative Strategy is a multi-disciplinary approach. You don’t learn Creative Strategy in school. You need experience creating, testing, and iterating ads. You need to learn from what the data is telling you rather than make subjective decisions.

The market is constantly changing. What has worked for the last 5 years doesn’t mean it’ll work the next 5 years. Knowing the fundamentals helps you succeed in this capacity.

So where can you find the fundamentals of Creative Strategy? They lie in these disciplines:

• Scientific Method

• Psychology

• Cognition

• Statistics

• Chemistry

• Natural Selection

• Systems Theory

• Virology

• Economics

I’ll go through examples for each of these disciplines in future posts to help you create a mental model of Creative Strategy. We start with the Scientific Method.

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Scientific Method

source: Wikipedia

I see too often that opinions get in the way of the creative testing process. Having assumptions about what your audience might like or dislike without having any data to back that up is like standing on a house of cards.

I enjoyed reading this post by Marpipe - “the average marketing professional can only predict winning digital ad creative 52% of the time”.

Even sadder, but still true, is the fact that marketers actually fared worse than non-marketers who were able to predict the winners 53% of the time.

Ego and misaligned incentives at the individual level in a company gets in the way here. Myths about ‘brand loyalty’ and the importance of performance creatives being ‘on-brand’ harms your top-line growth. Ask why Facebook grows despite low trust.

So why constrain your ads to a set of colors or fonts? It’s like boxing Mike Tyson with one arm tied behind your back.

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Takeaways

If you’re a business or marketing leader all I’m saying is to align your team with the Scientific Method if you want your paid growth to scale.

The same method that took us to the moon will scale your business.