Get the most out of your creative with a modular approach to production

There is one question that every client is asking our creative department these days: what about modularity?

It’s a popular question, and with very good reason.

Modularization is the process of building an additional set of scenes, or alternate scenes, that aren’t included in your core commercial, but are built in to the creative and production process as additional assets to leverage for testing, regionality or fatigue.

Best of all, modularity can provide you with a number of creatives without breaking your production budget – leaving you more room to test, optimize, and drive response with your media buy.

But where do you start, and what kind of modulation is right for you?

Here are the top 5 ways we are using modularity to better serve our clients:

1. Let’s Get Testing

Modularity provides you with a great way to test the market with specific variables and continually optimize your results alongside media testing.

With a new product, it can be difficult to know which key features will play best in the market. With modularity, you can test a unique scene for each key feature that can be mixed and matched into the base spot to measure which features and combinations drive the most response.

This can be replicated with several factors, including various and seasonal offers, testimonials or market targeting.

2. Regional Variations

Product regulations, availability and costs can often vary by state, province or region, which can leave you with two things: too much information and/or graphics copy in your spot (e.g., unique legal copy for every state), or the need for each region to provide their own creative for market.

To serve all your markets with a new creative, we can strategically build your scripts to allow for regional variation in a key set of scenes. We can provide a one-stop, one shoot day solution that will simplify your creatives to better speak to the consumer in each specific region.

3. Campaign Integration

Modularity no doubt allows your creative to go further, and that includes to other markets. Gone are the days of taking your TV spots and throwing them into the digital space as-is. You wouldn’t use the same ad copy, so why should you use the same commercial? With modularity, we can make a few small changes that will make a big difference when speaking to digital consumers directly.

If you’re already on your way to producing a new TV campaign, why not move forward with a few small, but vital, changes to make your commercial do double duty and perform on digital as well?
Go ahead and revise your CTA to include only a drive-to-web, take a few extra close-ups (think for mobile: small screens) and update your CTAs to apply directly to the medium.

We need to make it easy for the consumer: tell them the easiest way to get to your product. Why tell a consumer to type in the website, when on YouTube they can simply click right on the video? These are a few simple and efficient ways that you can make your TV commercial web-friendly without adding all that much to your budget – just a few simple modules but a lot towards your response.

4. Fatigue? Forget About It!

Lastly – but certainly not least – is reducing fatigue.
While factors are widely varied on what causes fatigue, there is always one clear solution: changing your creative! No matter how much we hate to hear it from our media buying colleagues, sometimes it is the creative that needs a changeup.

Producing a modular commercial, and testing that commercial, will undoubtedly reduce a creative’s fatigue by refreshing the spot through every new test in market.

How long you want your creative to run will also be a factor in how you engineer your modularity. You can provide scenes with alternate characters, test two separate USPs, or even produce your creative with two hosts to test a male host vs. female host.

Without a doubt, no matter how you update your modulation, the modulation alone will help keep the fatigue at bay.

Modularity gives you the opportunity to plan ahead, execute efficiently, and put more budget towards your media spends in the long term. Modularity will give you multiple creatives to test, reduce fatiguing, and have a stronger set of data and creative tests to factor in during your next creative campaign.