Marketers spent nearly $1 billion on subpar ads in 2022

Advertisers have been wasting money on under-optimized creative, according to an analysis from creative technology company CreativeX. 

In a global assessment of the creative quality of over 2 million paid posts across Snapchat, Twitter, Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Russian social network VK, totaling nearly $2 billion dollars of media spend, data shows marketers under-optimized roughly 55% of their media budgets on suboptimal ads in 2022. 

Approximately $1 billion was invested in ads that did not meet basic creative best practices for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Amazon. Meanwhile, of the 2 million posts evaluated, 40% didn’t deliver commercial objectives, according to the report. 

Ads that didn’t put branding front and center or use sound experienced a “significant impact” on effectiveness, according to the study. 

By comparison, companies that consistently produce creative in line with platform best practices typically see a 17% lift in brand recognition, a 30% lift in sales and a 10% increase in impressions per dollar. 

At a time when inflation is rising and a recession looms, business leaders must prepare “by adding a layer of measurement to the creative production and media process” to make budgets “work harder and deliver increased ROI,” said Anastasia Leng, CEO and founder of CreativeX, in a press release. 

“As creative quality starts to increase, media budgets should be shifted towards those creatives that have a high creative quality score and are therefore more likely to cut-through,” she said.

In order to maximize budgets, marketers should also invest in their measurement systems to match scaled advertising production, Leng suggests, noting in the report that “instead of thinking about what to cut,” marketers should think about “which existing systems didn’t scale in parallel with the rapid growth of digital media.”

Marketers should look first to reduce production waste. According to the report, 85% of market leaders are let go during a recession. With the current state of the economy, that prospect isn’t too far off.