Case Study: Core Digital Media

Core Digital Media Standardizes on Innervate to Unlock Creativity, Innovation & Boost ROAS

Innervate selected to breathe new life into the creative optimization process via faster creative production and sophisticated segmentation

With a directive of driving digital advertising for industry powerhouses LowerMyBills, Policy Pilot, and others, Core Digital Media (CDM) is on a digital advertising mission: drive quality leads at scale with maximum efficiency.

As a performance marketing company, creative effectiveness is one of the most important levers CDM employs to achieve their goals, and they’re always on the lookout for new ways to improve their advertising performance. According to Barry Forbes, Vice President of Marketing, CDM wanted an Ad Experience partner and platform able to meet three key criteria: “1) To make creative ideation more expansive, 2) to make creative production seamless, and 3) to make creative optimization more powerful.”

“As the digital advertising ecosystem gets both more competitive and more consolidated, protecting our competitive advantage in creative optimization is very important,” commented Forbes.

For over a decade, display advertising has remained a key focus for CDM, and although they had home-grown adequate tools, they were looking for ways to breathe new life into their creative optimization process – while enabling faster creative production and more sophisticated segmentation options.

After careful review and considering other technology partners, CDM chose Innervate because it met all of their key criteria.

COMPOUNDING PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

MAKING THE LEAP

Switching to a new advertising platform can seem daunting – and for good reason. Making the transition to a new platform can sometimes disrupt existing processes and threaten near-term goal attainment. To mitigate these concerns, CDM tapped Innervate’s Customer Success team to provide “white glove” onboarding services.

“RevJet [Innervate] created and organized a structured and thorough onboarding process,” said Forbes. “The RevJet [Innervate] team made it a priority to bring each CDM team up to speed and tackle any specific training they needed to accomplish their particular tasks. They were able to do this while not slowing down CDM members who were further along in the onboarding process. The RevJet [Innervate] support team was, and still is very responsive when we need any guidance or training.”

Going above and beyond is just a normal day at the office for Innervate's Customer Success team. Often a new Innervate client may not be utilizing the latest protocols to optimize their creative. This is one of many places where Innervate will step in to bring customers up to speed. “From a creative design perspective, we didn’t have much HTML5 coding experience. The RevJet [Innervate] team stepped up and helped our designers develop html5 creative to take full advantage of the creative builder and all of its capabilities,” says Forbes.

BENEFITS

CDM has benefited since adopting Innervate in numerous ways. There is better transparency among a wider set of teams working on creative optimization, trafficking has become easier in that all placements roll into one experiment, and with Innervate's reporting they’re easily able to evaluate creative across a broad set of attributes, including device, browser and more. The move to RevJet has increased CDM’s overall creative production bandwidth, inspiring new creative ideas. As a result of increased creative efficiency, CDM has been able to scale their display spend helping to diversify their media mix and drive overall improved performance. “RevJet [Innervate] helped lead to creative wins that we very likely would not have had without it, due to the creative builder and some of its advanced capabilities,” said Forbes, “RevJet [Innervate] allows more of the team to build their own creative, which reduces friction from idea to execution – and the optimization flexibility delivers everything we wanted.

SHOW ME THE $$$

“We’ve been able to significantly grow our display spend and efficiency while using Innervate, and we’ve directly attributed that success to creative wins we had in Innervate that we wouldn’t have otherwise created,” Forbes explains. “One creative win utilizing some of RevJet’s dynamic creative features was one of the largest individual creative wins in years in our display channel.”

SAVE ME TIME!

Since adoption of RevJet, CDM has seen a reduction in the amount of time spent producing, resizing, and optimizing creative – giving time back to their team members to think more creatively and develop new and innovative creative tests. CDM also saves time with Innervate by running multiple placements and sizes from one experiment – allowing more time for campaign managers to set up meaningful tests and to thoroughly analyze insights. Speaking of insights, for CDM’s LMB product, they discovered that specific creative concepts did well on certain ad sizes. CDM then set up an experience group that served those winning concepts to the sizes that performed well.

EMPLOYEE REACTION

Employee reaction to RevJet at CDM has been very positive. CDM team members love the ease and capabilities of RevJet’s creative builder, which among many advantages, facilitates the testing of a much larger realm of creative elements. Elements that were technically impossible to test until CDM started working in the RevJet platform. In the future CDM plans to build innovative ways of using data that comes from Innervate to serve the best-performing creative to more granularly targeted segments They also appreciate the constant support they receive from the Innervate team members. “Innervate's onboarding team is knowledgeable and diligent, and they speak the same performance marketing language as us which very much helps,” said Forbes.

IN THE END - A NEW BEGINNING

“Innervate is a powerful platform,” said Forbes, “and their team understands the importance and power of making great creatives and the impact it can have on any performance marketing group. Innervate helps unlock the creativity and innovation of our marketing team.”