What is the value of beauty? Of creativity? Of seeing something that makes you feel something? It’s hard enough to put these ideas into words. Try assigning a hard dollar value to them.
And yet.
The quality of images is baked into the currency of digital advertising. Creativity, beauty, emotion – these things that have always lived in the ether of human experience – turn into dollars every moment of every digital campaign every day.
The digital world can feel like something we have little control over – or at least not as much control as we’d like. But users play a significant role in the cost of digital advertising. If users scroll past, ignore, or in the worst case, affirmatively close, a digital ad you’ll see that in the overall cost of the campaign. You’ll still pay what you set out to pay, but you’ll reach fewer people. Fewer people will do the thing you are paying for them to do (click, watch a video past three seconds, etc.) and the amount you pay per action will go up.
Conversely, if users like an ad – especially if they share it – the cost per action goes down and your marketing starts to market on its own. You’re not even paying for it.
Every platform measures the details of this process a little differently. Meta, for example, assigns the images and video of your campaign a “relevancy score.” They don’t really assign it; your campaign earns that score through the interactions of users.
Meta ad and Twitter buying are auctions, so the quality of your image is baked right into the success of the ad. Poor images or video can cause you to lose the auction to better-looking, more evocative images, which also drives up per-action costs.
What does this mean for you? Buying a digital ad doesn’t begin when your ad starts running. It starts with the idea and continues through the full development of the ad – what it looks like and what it feels like. It makes sense (cents?) to spend a little more money on the look and feel of your AD upfront.
You will be earning that money back.
