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. “In the advertising industry, attention is a key resource, but it’s hard to find a good solution that measures and illustrates it in a scalable way,” explains Pernille Vermedal Høgh, Head of Insights & Effects at Schibsted.

Solution

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

“Neurons has really hit the note with its attention scores and user-friendliness. Now we can advise our clients on optimizing their ads effectively. Neurons is both a tool to boost engagement on our sites, but also a tool that makes us better 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.

“Our advertisers have really fallen in love with Neurons and ask for as many pre-tests as possible. With each iteration, we are saving them time and money spent 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

Pernille and her team quickly adopted the use of Neurons and rolled the tool out to the rest of the teams 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 has made us a more relevant partner in discussing creatives than ever before. We have always had opinions on how the creatives worked or didn't work, but now we have a great tool to illustrate it, which creates valuable conversations with clients. It gives instant prediction of metrics that are really 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.

“We have onboarded our entire Sales and specialist teams, and today a total of 150 people use Neurons at Schibsted. The tool has helped us boost our capabilities in advertising consultancy and campaign reporting. Our goal, together with our advertisers, is to continue using Neurons to better understand how creatives can achieve the best possible effect in marketing campaigns,” said Pernille.

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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