Creativity matters in advertising, says Andrew Tindall, author of The Creative Dividend, a new book published by System1. But to work, it needs media support.
System1 specialises in predicting sales and growth by measuring the emotional response to advertising. The book is designed as a practical guide for making advertising not just predictable and effective, but a priority investment.
“We really wanted to write a playbook for creative effectiveness,” says Tindall.
To that end, it worked with Effie, organisers of the global advertising effectiveness awards, in a partnership that combined System1’s consumer creative data with Effie’s vast awards data set.
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“Sytem1 measures the emotional response to advertising and Effie has information about thousands of campaigns, what they set out to do for a brand, what they did for that brand from a business results point of view, what the ad was, and what the media spend was. So we combined all that to build a new global playbook,” says Tindall.
Before starting, he also undertook extensive primary research, interviewing marketers about why the industry seemed to have lost its creative confidence.
“The majority of marketers have a lack of confidence in creative impact,” he says.
“That led us to this beautiful insight that, even if advertising is great, it often doesn’t get the media support it needs to work in the first place.”
The book aims to resolve that issue. “It’s about bringing creative and media back together to make advertising reliable and predictable, because the industry has had this massive gap since the 1960s, when creative and media split up. So yes, you need creativity, but you also need media, and the two need to be planned together,” he says.
The book “brings them together, shows what creativity is and how to grow it, and then brings media into the equation to show that you also need enough reach, in the right kind of channels, for advertising to work,” says Tindall.
“Once you do that, advertising can be very reliable and predictable, and every business should be doing it.”
Investment or cost
The problem is too many businesses see advertising as a cost, when in fact, it’s an investment whose “returns compound over time” says Dave Winterlich, host of the Inside Marketing podcast.
Industry figures such as Paul Dyson have already shown the return on investment is 12 times greater for ads with good creative quality than poor-quality ones, so why is industry is still so risk averse? “Why is it so much advertising is kind of average, and not brave?” asks Winterlich.
Tindall appraises advertising through four lenses: emotion; distinctiveness; showmanship; and how consistent it is. Far from a risk, when looked at this way, advertising effectiveness becomes predictably good, whether for revenue growth or market share.
Unfortunately the industry still errs on a binary choice – a cruddy ad, “and a billion pounds worth of media”, or “the world’s best ad, and an okay media budget”, he explains.
Both choices are wrong. The answer is “somewhere in the middle but we don’t have the language or tools to get any more nuanced than that, to find where the actual middle is,” says Tindall. It’s why the book tries “to bring those two thinkings together”.
While some marketing mix modelling (MMM) econometrics do use creative measurement data, very few do so at scale. Moreover, Tindall adds, “no one is planning up front with creative and media together.”
The book includes practical case studies such as a household fragrance brand that had a high media spend for an ad that scored poorly for creativity. It showed lack of emotion compared with its brand category, as well as lack of distinctiveness, entertainment value and consistency. In the end, despite the high media spend, it tanked.
Next time around the brand went with a better creative but less media spend. The ad smashed it, winning not just an Effie, but surpassing its business goals and generating a much higher return on investment all round.
Despite this, Tindall refuses to say that either creative or media has the whip hand. “Each multiplies the other”, he says.
Harder to cut through
The fact that 70 per cent of the industry’s budget is now typically spent on lower-attention media channels, and only 30 per cent on high-attention media channels, hasn’t helped.
Work is getting less emotional and the use of distinctive brand assets, such as characters and jingles, has reduced, while the use of celebrities has boomed. The latter are not so good at delivering profit outcomes, Tindall cautions.
All in all, “work is getting a lot more left brained, a lot less entertaining, and brands are becoming a lot less consistent as well. So not only is our media diet changing to less attentional stuff, but creativity is going down,” he points out.
On top of that, “the way the world works has changed,” he adds.
“We’ve become more digital, which means decisions are made without physical availability impacting them. Even 10 years ago, walking down the high street and looking at shopfronts, or whatever was in front of you, was probably influencing your behaviour,” he says. Today, it’s all done online.
So we’re spending more on media and advertising but it’s doing less because our media diet has changed, and our creative output has got worse. “But what that means is that brand building has become more important.”
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