Schibsted is a global media group providing online marketplaces, building world-class media houses, and helping companies scale their advertising. The company offers online advertising services like display and native advertising across media platforms in addition to print advertising and helps its clients increase the impact of their campaigns.

At Schibsted Marketing Services, Insights teams, Sales teams, and Concept Designers work together to optimize, distribute, and evaluate client campaigns and their creative assets.

Challenge

While providing broad online exposure, Schibsted also aims to give strategic advice to help clients and advertisers make their ads more relevant, appealing, and attention-grabbing. Schibsted works with a wide range of creative assets designed by third-party agencies, built by clients, or created by designers in-house. When working with ready-made assets, there is often very little time for Schibsted to give recommendations, let alone make adjustments to impact campaign performance positively.

Schibsted wanted to get involved earlier in the ad design and distribution processes to achieve better results for their clients. Therefore the media group needed to gain buy-in from advertisers to leverage creative discussions. To do this, Schibsted sought effective ways to objectively evaluate the creative assets to qualify discussions on how to optimize them.

At the same time, there is unprecedented pressure on the media landscape to design ads that draw attention and stimulate consumer action. However, the metrics attempting to measure attention have had minor relevance in gaining valuable insights for marketers so far.

The Insights team at Schibsted emphasized that in the advertising industry, attention is a key resource, but finding a scalable solution that measures and illustrates it accurately has long been a challenge.

Solution

The team saw strong potential in Neurons to inform both creative and strategic discussions with clients and to forecast advertisement effectiveness. Neurons' attention metrics became important deciding factors in assessing creatives at any stage of the design process.

Neurons’ attention scores and user-friendliness allowed the Insights & Sales Teams to advise clients more effectively on ad optimization. The platform became not only a way to boost engagement on Schibsted’s sites but also a tool that strengthened their role as trusted advisors.

Schibsted uses Neurons throughout the entire creative process, from pre-testing to reporting. Multiple teams adopted Neurons, using the tool to understand, predict, measure, and affect asset performance.

Advertisers began requesting as many pre-tests as possible, as each iteration saved time and money on their campaigns.

During pre-testing, Schibsted uses Neurons generated heatmaps and fogmaps to predict how attention is spread across image and video ads and to suggest adjustments to campaign creatives. Neurons also measures the visual complexity of the assets and unravels how attention is focused on any specific element of the ad.

Outcome

The Insights team quickly rolled out Neurons across the Schibsted ecosystem. As a result, Neurons boosted in-house expertise and empowered Sales Representatives to become better advertising consultants who give more accurate design and strategic recommendations to clients.

Neurons made theteam a more relevant partner in creative discussions than ever before. Now they had a clear, data-backed way to illustrate their insights, sparking valuable conversations with clients. Neurons provided instant predictions of key metrics that are highly sought after in advertising.

Neurons now helps internal teams and external advertisers better understand the effects of campaign assets and optimize ads to specific distribution channels. The new tool surfaces actionable predictions on behavioral metrics such as attention and brand memory just at the click of a button. These results helped eliminate subjectivity from creative discussions with clients and helped Sales Representatives make suggestions independently.

In addition, Neurons was easy to implement into existing workflows as new users were introduced to the product through interactive onboarding sessions. The tool was also quickly adopted due to its intuitive design and ease of use.

Today, more than 150 people at Schibsted use Neurons across Sales and specialist teams. The platform has helped boost their capabilities in advertising consultancy and campaign reporting. Together with their advertisers, Schibsted continues to use Neurons to better understand how creatives can achieve the best possible effect in marketing campaigns.

Simple adjustments, powerful impact

With Neurons, Schibsted helped increase CTR by 29.5% for Norwegian electricity supplier Ztrm. The company approached Schibsted to run an ad campaign on their digital channels. After running Ztrm’s creatives through Neurons, the team at Schibsted suggested simple adjustments to the assets to ensure better advertisement attention. The few changes included:

• Centering text, button, and brand logo
• Making the CTA button wider
• Adding the brand name to the CTA copy
• Reducing background noise with simpler shapes

These simple adjustments boosted click-through rates from 0.17 to 0.22 of Ztrm’s display ads.

Summary

Introducing Neurons across the Schibsted ecosystem proved to be crucial for Sales Representatives to predict and interpret campaign performance independently. As a result, they use the tool to leverage creative discussions and design adjustments, adding value for clients.

Neurons is used as a pre-testing tool to measure consumer attention before the launch and for post-campaign evaluations as part of Schibsted’s insights toolbox. In combination with survey-based campaign effectiveness and brand lift tests, Neurons also adds an illustrative dimension to interpreting campaign results and delivering a successful analysis.

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