Rob Murray, 3Q/DEPT CEO: “When you partner with like-minded people, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish. We help grow global businesses all over the world.”

The Silicon Review

Transforming brands into market leaders is 3Q/DEPT’s mission. 3Q/DEPT’s rallying cry, accept no limits, has enabled us to redefine the playing field and become the leading disruptive growth marketing agency. Performance marketing today often incorporates tactics that are executed in silos and driven by ad spend and ROI, but this approach makes it impossible to think bigger and take the next step. At 3Q/DEPT, the team decided to revolutionize the game and inject strategy, data, and innovation into everything it does. This is growth marketing.

Powered by a team of fearless innovators and predictive intelligence, 3Q/DEPT’s proprietary growth model helps marketers accept the next step. The company capitalizes on digital marketing opportunities, transform media approaches, and drive market leadership. In the display medium, creative is one of the most important aspects of a digital campaign. Our world is more distracting than ever, and attention spans have narrowed in all media. As a result, creative needs to be engaging enough to grab users’ attention amidst an environment eager to tear their focus in dozens of other directions. No matter the medium, regular creative refreshes are more critical than ever to ensure you’re appealing to your audience.

Creative Testing

Testing. Your design team has great ideas, there’s no doubt about it. But predicting what will or won’t work with audiences can be tricky. Is animation better than a static ad? What color should your call to action be? Do you even need a call to action? How should you change your creative based on your goal? Do these answers differ by platform? Some features may seem obvious, but you can never know how users will respond until you try them. When leveraged consistently and correctly, creative testing can help optimize your advertising’s performance and positively impact your brand.

Q. What Next?

Establishing an objective is one of the most critical and often overlooked aspects of testing. What do you want to learn, and what is the goal? Many advertisers have a habit of testing just for the sake of testing. You don’t want to fall into the pit of spending time and money on tests just to disregard the results. Make a hypothesis and decide how to measure it. What is the success metric? CTR? Conversion rate? ROAS? CPA? What data source will you use to measure success (platform data, third party, internal data, etc.)?

Another important pitfall to avoid is making too many changes at once. Multivariate testing is possible but requires far more data to reach statistical significance. Focus on one change at a time: Static or animated? Square or rectangle? Blue or red?

Once you’ve decided on a goal and have your creative ready, it’s time to traffic it out. Remember the success metric and tracking you decided on earlier. Make sure that you’re setting the test up in a way that will allow you to measure accordingly. For example, if Google Analytics is your data source, make sure you are tagging the ads with UTM codes that enable you to evaluate them individually. If you’re using platform data, some platforms have built-in testing tools to ease some of the burdens of analysis (e.g., they may indicate when a test has enough data to declare a winner, may alleviate some trafficking, etc.). For example, Google Ads offers Experiments, and Facebook offers built-in A/B tests.

Q. I Have My Results, Now What?

Roll out the winning ads on a broader basis and incorporate any learning into your creative strategy moving forward. Creative fatigues quickly, especially on social platforms, so you should always be thinking about the next set of ads to introduce. This includes your next round of testing. You may not need to test every month – or even present new ads every month – but it’s a good idea to plan to have new ads introduced regularly. How often you need to refresh your ads will vary based on targeting, budget size, frequency, the creative itself, etc.

A Future-Focused Strategy and Holistic Approach to Media and Measurement.

Growth Labs is 3Q/DEPT’s internal research and development powerhouse, and leads its clients into the next generation of digital marketing. They are exclusively dedicated to promoting innovative practices, providing ongoing education and knowledge sharing for 3Q/DEPT’s internal teams, and methodically experimenting and testing. Growth Labs shapes 3Q/DEPT’s holistic strategy and fosters a culture of collaboration to ensure that its clients receive the maximum return on their digital media investments and become industry leaders. The status quo is never enough for 3Q/DEPT’s clients. They’re always looking for new strategies, new ideas, and new advantages over the competition – and that’s why they come to 3Q/DEPT.

Experts collaborate across numerous channels to bring a unified approach to media buying and optimization. Clients benefit from having senior expert resources dedicated to creating innovative strategies for their campaigns. Growth Labs cross-pollinates across channels to bring new, creative thinking to media. 3Q/DEPT develops audience strategies, creative best practices, and durable measurement solutions that support all clients, whatever their needs may be.

Meet the leader behind the success of 3Q/DEPT

Rob Murray, CEO was brought into 3Q/DEPT to grow and scale our offerings, talent base, and geographic footprint to meet the needs of our disruptive high-growth and enterprise organizations. Previously, he was Global CEO of iProspect, an agency he grew to $250M and to 1,700 employees in 55 offices in 40 countries around the globe. He led iProspect to be named “Leader” in the first three Forrester Wave reports and served many enterprise clients including P&G, Sears, Walgreens, and Hilton Hotels. Rob is passionate about building winning teams, leading transformation, and aggressively scaling organizations. Rob earned a master of business administration from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science in management from Boston College. He lives in Boston with his wife, Stephanie and two sons, Chase (11) and Grant (6) as well as his teddy bear dog, Milo who is 13.