Creative best practices rely on different and often contradictory metrics developed by Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms, but there is another way. CreativeX, an AI-powered technology company, recommends building a Creative Quality Score (CQS) into the review process.

A CQS is determined by taking the number of statistically validated and proven best practices for images and video content that a brand uses in a piece of content. It is then divided by the total number of defined best practices tracked.

The industry report — Insights From 1M Ads, $1B Media Spend, 1 Trillion Impressions And The Implications For Creative Effectiveness — found that by marrying creative data with ad performance data during a two-year period, a higher CQS significantly improves media efficiency, brand awareness, and engagement.

Using CreativeX technology, creative data on approximately one million digital ads was collected from some of the world’s best-known consumer product goods companies, as well as beauty and alcohol brands, representing 1 trillion impressions and more than $1 billion in ad spend across more than two years.

The goal was to determine whether creatives that met platform best practices — and had a high Creative Quality Score — led to better ad performance. The answer is yes.

The quality of data is of major concern, according to the report. Creative best practices have been built from long-tail research across many years worth of data where certain drivers have been consistently shown to drive creative effectiveness.

The report shows that insights from most campaigns will fall apart under the first test of longitudinal or statistical scrutiny. The insights are not scalable. This means brands are investing millions into creative insights that cannot be used beyond the campaign.

Some of the highlights from the report identify that the higher the Creative Quality Score, the cheaper the cost per million (CPM). Across all channels, a 10% increase in Creative Quality Score is associated with a 2% decrease in CPM — 822,000 observations and a 99% confidence level.

Ads with higher Creative Quality Scores, as it turns out, are more memorable. Across Facebook and Instagram, a 10% increase in Creative Quality Score is associated with a 2% increase in Ad Recall — 177,000 observations and 99% confidence level.

Engagement is also a factor because the higher the Creative Quality Score, the cheaper the cost per completed view (CPCV).

Across Facebook and Instagram, a 10% increase in Creative Quality Score is associated with a 4.8% decrease in CPCV.

Across Twitter and YouTube, a 10% increase in Creative Quality Score is associated with a 5.7% decrease in CPCV.