Individuals have a profound appreciation for narratives in all their forms, including digital storytelling. Annually, approximately 2.2 billion books are sold globally. A narrative can be as extensive as the Harry Potter series, with the fifth book exceeding 760 pages, or as concise as a 30-second digital advertisement. For brands aiming to differentiate themselves in a saturated market, digital storytelling serves as a potent advertising strategy. However, executing it effectively requires a specific set of skills.
Through Outbrain’s technology-driven storytelling approach, brands can establish a unique presence that resonates with their intended audience. To begin, as with all compelling narratives, it is essential to start from the foundation.
What is Digital Storytelling?
Storytelling is a timeless craft that intricately weaves narratives that engage and resonate across various cultures and generations. Contemporary digital storytelling mirrors traditional storytelling in essence, despite its different appearance and feel. Consider the latest Instagram Story from your preferred yoga studio or the Super Bowl commercials, where brands convey their messages in under two minutes during the year’s most costly advertising slots. While the financial investment for an Instagram advertisement and a Super Bowl ad vastly differs, both exemplify digital storytelling’s significant impact on brand recognition.
Advancements in technology have transformed digital storytelling into more immersive, interactive, and quantifiable experiences. Today, brands possess unparalleled opportunities to cultivate deeper connections with consumers by discerning the narratives they wish to engage with and delivering compelling stories that maintain their interest.
How does this process unfold? Digital storytelling merges artistry and analytics—creativity and data—through a methodology known as “data-driven design.”
Data-Driven Design: Crafting Impactful Digital Narratives Through Data
The foundation of successful brand advertising campaigns lies in the creative elements—the combination of visuals, text, and sound that constitutes the advertisement experience. Research from Nielsen indicates that the quality of creative content accounts for 65% of effectiveness.
Ad creatives possess significant power when they convert mundane information, such as details about a new product or feature, into engaging experiences that captivate, educate, and motivate viewers.
This potential can be further enhanced through the implementation of data-driven design.
Data-driven design involves utilizing historical analytics and insights derived from data to inform the creative design process.
By assessing creative interactions and analyzing both engagement and emotional responses, brands gain a profound understanding of their audience. What types of digital narratives resonate with them? Which ad creatives evoke strong emotional reactions? Data-driven design empowers audiences to become active participants in the ad creation process, marking a transformative shift in the digital storytelling landscape.
Leica case study: Implementing data-driven design
Leica, a leading brand in the camera industry, aimed to develop tailored advertising experiences that integrate video storytelling with product-focused narratives to promote their CINE1 entertainment system.
To achieve this, they collaborated with Onyx Brand Studio, innovators in data-driven design and digital storytelling, to initiate an interactive, creative-first campaign.
Over 38% of viewers expressed a preference for the interactive experience that combined engaging visuals and video content over traditional static ads. Consequently, respondents were 1.5 times more inclined to select Leica after their exposure, and 33% were more likely to express an intention to purchase the CINE1 entertainment system.
As illustrated by Leica’s approach, centering users in digital storytelling enables brands to establish a unique identity and cultivate a dedicated audience, ultimately leading to superior results.
How to Implement Data-Driven Design with an Expert Partner
To effectively engage in digital storytelling through data-driven design, it is essential to collaborate with a partner who possesses substantial creative talent, extensive data access, and robust technical skills.
This combination creates a formidable alliance for data-driven design, enabling you to excel in the realm of digital storytelling.
Not all organizations have the necessary data and expertise to accurately identify which creative components will yield optimal performance and efficiency in achieving specific campaign objectives.
Onyx Brand Studio possesses this capability. This digital storytelling design firm utilizes data and insights to enhance creative development, demonstrating that innovative approaches can lead to remarkable results and establish new benchmarks within the digital advertising sector.
So, how can you collaborate with a data-driven design partner to attain maximum brand success?
The process begins with a clear understanding of the campaign objectives and target demographics. Subsequently, develop advertisements featuring interactive digital elements that resonate with the audience, ensuring alignment with those objectives.
Whether the aim is to capture attention, foster engagement, or drive sales, brands can leverage data-driven design to refine their strategies for distinct audience segments, including variations in gender and age.
Brands that effectively utilize digital storytelling to connect with precisely targeted audiences can experience a significant enhancement in their influence, brand recognition, and intent to purchase.
Creating memorable experiences is crucial, as is selecting the right partner who can provide guidance and support throughout this journey.
Elvie Case Study: Partnering with a Data-Driven Design Expert
Lifestyle brand Elvie collaborated with the experts at Onyx Brand Studio for an in-person workshop aimed at sharing audience insights and user behavior data, which was vital for initiating the campaign’s creative process. This collaboration was instrumental in driving audience engagement.
The award-winning partnership resulted in the development of a data-driven design for an interactive digital advertisement that enabled users to engage with Elvie’s new ‘Stride’ product.
Data-Driven Design: Uncovering Valuable Insights into Audience Behavior
Data-driven design emphasizes the importance of involving users in the creative process. In the short term, this approach enables brands to comprehend and utilize elements that resonate with their target audiences, thereby enhancing immediate outcomes. Over the long term, it facilitates the collection of significant insights regarding audiences, which can inform future creative strategies.
The level of interactivity within the creative content directly correlates with the depth of tracking and analysis possible. Examples of such interactions include:
– Engagement with customizable hotspots (e.g., the specific video selected or item clicked among various options)
– Video plays or completions
– Interactions with animations, canvases, or games
– Click-throughs to landing pages
– “Add to cart” actions initiated from within the advertisement
Interactive formats enable advertisers to monitor custom events like these and gain a more profound understanding of consumer preferences with each impression.
This illustrates the integration of data-driven design: digital storytelling crafts a compelling narrative that captivates the audience, interactive experiences foster engagement and interaction with the advertisement, and robust tracking capabilities provide real-time data on audience responses.
This encapsulates the essence of data-driven design, empowering digital advertisements to achieve measurable results.
Doritos Case Study: The Impact of Data in Data-Driven Design
In a mobile campaign conducted with Onyx Brand Studio, Doritos explored swipe-and-click creatives, which indicated that swiping was more effective in engaging consumers. The swipe-and-click interactions resulted in engagement levels that were ten times higher than those achieved through simple clicking.
Additionally, Doritos experimented with an opt-in video format, which yielded a 68% start rate and improved video completion rates compared to automatic video playback. This finding suggests that audiences prefer having control over their choice to view content.
Through the utilization of data-driven insights, Doritos is now positioned to make informed decisions regarding creative design, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of their digital advertising campaigns.
Final Thoughts: The Impact of Data-Driven Storytelling on Emotions
Data-driven design transcends mere impressions and viewability metrics. It enables advertisers to assess genuine user interactions with advertisements and gain insights into the audience’s emotional reactions to creative content. It is essential to recognize that emotions are the catalysts for actions. A digital narrative that inspires an individual to swipe, watch, play, or click has successfully evoked a powerful emotion that compels them to take action. In the fiercely competitive digital landscape of today, this information represents the most valuable asset for brand advertisers.
Such insights have allowed a prominent broadcast television network to achieve a remarkable +36% increase in brand recall, +38% enhancement in brand positivity, and +68% rise in purchase intent through their Onyx Brand Studio interactive creatives. In a post-campaign evaluation, users characterized the ad experiences as “exciting” and “cutting-edge.”
These insights, among others, would not have been attainable through traditional advertising methods.
The ongoing evolution of data-driven design enriches the creative process and equips advertisers to test hypotheses, uncover user emotions and behaviors, and optimize the effectiveness of their digital campaigns.
