Our Bigfoot is the clear proof that creativity makes ad campaigns more successful in hard business terms (things like sales and share of market – the stuff that makes accountants swoon). Effectiveness is turbo-charged by creativity. We sort of knew it anyway, but the link was largely intangible and anecdotal; a case of faith rather than fact.
The new proof comes from launched this week by the IPA and Thinkbox, in conjunction with the Gunn Report. We compared the creative performance of campaigns, as determined by The Gunn Report, with their business performance in terms of the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank.
Among many things revealed in the report was – and I’m paraphrasing here – that creatively awarded campaigns generally have less media spend behind them and a lower share of voice, yet still generate greater business effects than non-awarded ones (who generally have more media spend). With the same levels of excess SOV, the creatively awarded campaigns would have driven twice as much market share growth as non-awarded ones.
This is remarkable and there are two ways of using this new information. The first is to conform to the current orthodoxy which is to laud communications which don’t require much investment: social media, PR, virally distributed films etc. Don’t get me wrong; those are all excellent channels to explore, but not at the expense of delivering big business effects for advertisers.
You can practically hear the corks popping in the advertiser’s finance department when the agency says: We can cut the media budget, because this ad is working really well. I could weep when I see wonderful films available only online getting just a few million views (numbers which seem to impress creative people) when they could be seen by the entire 65 million population of the UK a couple of times each.
Depressing stuff.
The second option is to realise that increasing your investment will increase your growth. Aim high, increase your market share. Spend more, make more profit. Why cripple a brilliant piece of work by not investing behind it? With sufficient media spend, you’ll also find that the free stuff works better too: more column inches, online buzz and forwarded links.
Focus on making your clients more money, not saving it.
I urge agencies to make this case to any penny-pinching advertiser and to use this new research as the hard evidence they need to convince them. This is not an argument for inefficiency, before someone distorts what I’m saying. But at the moment too many brands are wasting their opportunities to get ahead of their competition, particularly when they have excellent creative work.
I’ll leave the final point to the incredibly clever Peter Field, who did the analysis and wrote the report:
The takeout from this report should be that creative campaigns are more effective when they have more, rather than less, budget put behind them; and that creativity helps drives long-term business success, providing a powerful antidote to the short-term nature of so much activity today.
Tess Alps is chief executive of Thinkbox