07 Apr The Case For Creative 

TL;DR
In advertising, there’s no way around it; creative matters.  Below are 4 compelling findings to prove this point.

Creativity Matters

700 marketers were asked what the biggest drivers of advertising profitability were. They ranked the media mix (multimedia) as their #1 choice.  Audience targeting followed closely behind.

In contrast, econometric analysis of real campaign performances show that after the size of a brand, creative is the best profit multiplier. Interestingly, a campaign’s creative is more powerful a multiplier than the combined impact of budget setting, media mix, audience targeting.

Emotion Drives Profit

There are lots of ways that creative can work to drive revenue and profit. However, campaigns that leverage emotion (surprise, humour, happiness, sadness, etc) are almost twice as likely to drive very large profit growth over the long term. 

From The Long & Short of It by Binet & Field.

The Problem? Most Ads Are Boring

System1 tested a 30 second video of cows chewing grass, much like the one below. Not surprisingly, 56% of those tested felt nothing. It was emotionally neutral. In System1’s 5 point emotional response score, the cow video scored 2.8. 

Here’s the crazy part.

System1 compared the cow video to 27,000 other ads in their database. The video of a cow chewing grass outperformed 50% of the ads in System1’s database

Amplify Attention

Emotion is one hack to improve creative. The use of Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs) in the creative is another.  

A lot of ads are placed in digital formats where formats are quick and attention spans are short. Poorly branded creative assets end up paying an  ‘attention tariff’. We run the ads but don’t get credit because people scroll to quickly or skip past the branding. The result is mountains of wasted impressions. 

In this way, poorly branded ads are like a self-imposed tax on our media spend.  By building a flexible palette of distinctive assets for different mediums, we can turn these wasted impressions into millions of small memory drivers that compound over time.  Even better, well branded ads shrink the time needed to capture attention by 2.5x which helps with improving our ability to make memorable impressions.

New research from Karen Nelson-Field reports that the use of a brand’s distinctive assets (logo, tagline, colours, characters, jingles, rituals etc) are hacks for speeding attention and building memory.