Bold advertisements stop people in their tracks, and working with some of the most exciting brands in the live entertainment industry, I’ve seen firsthand that when ads get attention, it pays off. But, as AI enables us to take a more sophisticated approach to calculating the value of advertising, we’re fully understanding for the first time the financial benefit of using multiple quality creatives for multiple audiences across multiple platforms.

Businesses working in live performance and theatre are up against squeezed marketing budgets, and teams are faced with constant pressure to produce enormous volumes of ad content in short time frames, which can result in digital creatives becoming repetitive, formulaic, and well, dull.

Our recent research at SINE Digital has revealed how damaging boring, beige advertising actually is, costing the UK entertainment industry millions annually, and wasting 27% of media spend.

When the industry is faced with operating on razor-thin margins, inefficiencies don’t just mean wastage, but could make the difference between a show running or facing real difficulties.

An eye-watering price to pay

Over the past five years, we've been working to compile data on digital ad performance based on analysis drawn from more than a billion data points in a first-of-its-kind report in this field, which quantifies the financial burden of boring ads (or at least what the algorithm defines as ‘boring’).

The report, ‘MEH: The Cost of Dull in Entertainment Advertising’,  found that across the digital advertising industry as a whole, boring ads are costing £8.6 billion annually in the UK, and £145 billion globally. In real money, ‘boring’ digital ads equate to £70 million lost revenue annually in the West End, and $120 million on Broadway.

Be ‘boring’ at your peril

For the report, we researched the performance of 20,000 digital ads over five years using AI to tag data points from our own data stack, while applying diverse marketing and psychological frameworks. Combining this with real-world user data, we were able to uncover what is driving a ‘meh’ response to digital ads. In short, we defined what makes an advert boring to the point that audiences don’t engage with it.

The report’s findings, combined with insight into the way that advertising algorithms work,  are a strong case for investing in more, better quality creative. As far as the algorithm is concerned, it will penalise advertisers with higher prices for ads that it deems to be irrelevant, dull, or uninteresting to the selected audience. If the majority of viewers scroll past within two seconds, then, regardless of quality, the creative is judged as ‘dull’ by the algorithm.

We are trying to bring a scientific edge to advertising in entertainment, to help our clients move away from relying only on star power and big titles. Other industries have been using psychometrics for years, but now, with the help of AI we’ve been able to analyse our entire data warehouse through the lens of personality profiling to unpack exactly what ‘boring’ actually means to audiences.

Using data to understand what connects with people emotionally

The truth is that advertisers can no longer rely on the buying power of a big agency to get the best value from their media buying; it’s the data behind a campaign combined with great creative that reduces the cost of digital advertising. This report provides a solid business case for investing in campaigns that are built on data and that connect with people emotionally.

‘MEH: The Cost of Dull in Entertainment Advertising’ highlights the power of using data to influence advertising creative. It proves that uninteresting adverts cost more to serve in the digital marketplace, and that good creative is more important than ever. Using data to drive your creative decision-making is the only way to avoid the pitfalls of ‘meh’ and start delivering real results.

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