Kroger Forecasts E-Commerce Conversion From Ad Creative With 81% Accuracy

Kroger can forecast e-commerce purchase conversion from ad creative before campaigns launch, with 81% accuracy, according to a study conducted with data firm Vidmob and trade association MMA Global and shared with Marketing Dive.

The study combined Kroger's live campaign data, Vidmob's creative data platform and MMA Global's industry research standards. It evaluated creative across variables including messaging, narrative structure, branding and on-screen human interaction. The research used artificial intelligence to analyze more than 1,900 video and image assets from Kroger campaigns running on Meta and Google's DV360, identifying creative attributes tied to e-commerce conversion.

The findings show a strong link between creative decisions and business outcomes. Creative aligned with the model's recommendations generated an average four-times improvement in conversion rates. Reallocating media spend toward higher-scoring assets could potentially generate more than twice as many conversions from the same ad budget.

"[There are] two types of creative optimization. One is actually making changes, moving pixels around, changing the nature of the creative. But the other is just like moving dollars behind better creative," said Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman at Vidmob.

Kroger's test builds on a similar effort by Kellanova, also run with Vidmob and MMA Global, which connected creative decisions to view-through rates. The CPG marketer used view-through rates as a proxy for sales. The Kroger study forgoes proxies and demonstrates the connection to actual sales, offering a framework that could change how marketers optimize campaigns.

"Historically, people made [ads] and then, effectively, spent money blindly behind them, and then after the fact, looked to make optimizations once they saw performance," Collmer said. "The ability to get ahead of that and basically not spend behind assets that aren't going to work is a pretty big deal."

The work continues Vidmob's effort to prove that creative quality is measurable, which in turn makes investment in creative more practical. Collmer argued the industry has miscategorized that spending for years.

"For too long, the industry has existed in this world where creative investments are labeled non-working and media investments are working. That's just absurd," Collmer said. "Every marketer you talk to says creative is 50% to 70% of results. How on earth can the thing that's the far majority of results be the waste?"

Creative testing as content volume explodes

Predictive creative testing could become an even more important tool as marketers face tight budgets and an explosion in content volume, driven by generative AI adoption and the rise of creators as a media channel.

"Both of those things are leading to like a 10-times or 100-times expansion of the number of assets," Collmer said. "It's more important to have a signal up front because otherwise you'd be spending more and more money behind content before you know what it's likely to do."

To help marketers put these learnings into practice, Vidmob launched Vidmob360 in June. The tool lets clients connect their creative performance data to the AI tool of their choice, such as Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot. The company also offers a headless AI recommendation system that provides machine-readable recommendations for creative adjustments.

As advertisers across the market adopt the same AI tools, creative performance insights can function as proprietary data that differentiates ads. "Because they're all adopting the same tools, then using those tools won't actually be an advantage," Collmer explained. "It's not going to help Kroger or their competitors win market share if they're using the same tools."

Creative testing could also help advertisers and their creator partners refine content as investment surges but efficiency remains harder to gauge than authenticity.

"Creators are super hungry for data because their paycheck is based on how their content performs," Collmer said. "They see performance as a way to be more successful."

For retail media networks, the Kroger results point to a practical next step: scoring creative before activation, and shifting dollars toward the assets most likely to convert.