On Wednesday in Cannes, Andrew Tindall, System1’s senior VP of global partnership, alongside Les Binet, former effectiveness boss at DDB and Sarah Carter, Adam & Eve DDB’s global planning director, delivered a fascinating talk on the compounding effect of creativity on brands’ commercial performance.
In fact, fellow marketing scientist Mark Ritson would describe it the next day as “the most significant thought of the last 10 years in marketing”.
The analysis examined individual ad performance in System1’s series of tests to determine the emotional impact and brand recognition (or salience) of the ad while it was playing. This was combined with the brand and business effects as reported in the IPA Data Bank and the Effie case library.
“We found there are three ways a brand can be consistent,” said Tindall.
“There’s the creative foundations; a team stretching a campaign and an idea as far as it can go [and] a culture of consistency, a team stretching an idea across time and space; and consistent execution – keeping the same brand look and feel as long as you can.”
If you have a good ad and a team willing to commit to consistency, keeping your campaigns looking and feeling similar will have long-term positive effects across the entire business that compound as every year rolls into the next. The benefits multiply, rather than continuing linearly. These ads need to be good and distinctive, however. Shit ads don’t get better results over time, good ones do.
But the trick, as Binet, Carter and Tindall explained on the Forum stage in the Cannes Palais, is to stick with it over the years, not months. That isn’t cool, sexy or exciting, but it will help you sell more stuff. Ritson was speaking on Thursday at The Marketing Academy’s invite-only session at the Carlton hotel.
“Baileys is a great example,” continued Tindall.
“Baileys realised adults weren’t treating themselves anymore, so they repositioned themselves from a cream liqueur company to an adult treat company. They worked with Mother for five years to bring the ‘Don’t Mind If I Baileys’ campaign to life and grew revenue by 40 per cent. During that time, they won a silver IPA Award. It’s no surprise because brands that have consistent creative foundations build more mental availability. We see brands with higher creative consistent foundations report significantly more brand effects in the IPA Data Bank – awareness, sales, all the stuff you guys should care about.
“But what about the stuff that your CFO cares about? They also report more business effects in the IPA Data Bank, price gain, share gain and all that good stuff… If a brand chooses one or two associations and then hammers them again, again and again, you help with memory encoding… In fact, we see brands with a high consistency in their creative foundations report seven times more in differentiation gains in the IPA Data Bank. Consistency is how brands grow,” Tindall said.
Another exemplar brand is Britain’s Great Western Railway. It hooked its creative, again with the help of Adam & Eve DDB, on the idea that while you might arrive faster by flying or driving (considerably so given the rather hapless state of Britain’s railways over the last few years), there is a real sense of adventure when travelling by rail. It paired this with art direction styled after Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series of books.
“Their star rating [System1’s overall score of emotional response, saliency and likeliness to build long-term brand impacts] goes up over time. The ads get more and more emotional. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds contentment,” said Tindall.
“We see the most consistent brands report higher average star ratings in the testing. Their ads are more emotional, but the last consistent brands see a steady decline in how emotional their work is year-on-year… The gap between you and your most inconsistent competitor only gets larger over time… The most consistent brands see their media spend work twice as hard.”
This is the difference, rather than simply having good ads perform better than bad ones, consistency with idea and execution means that good ads perform exponentially better over time compared to competitors. Over time, the effects of your consistency grow larger, your creativity resonates better, your media works harder, and you sell more stuff. Those benefits multiply, too, rather than continuing linearly. Essentially, the gap between you and your competitors widens.
This consistency also extends to client-agency relationships, too. “We found that if a brand sits with a creative team longer, they report more very large effects and report more very nice business effects,” said Tindall.
Oddly, however, CMO tenures report the opposite, though Tindall said he wasn’t willing to make any “outlandish” claims on that stat.
“Are we rewarding marketers more and more on short-termism and not building brands over the long term? Or do good marketers, good CMOs, get hired and move on too quickly because there are too few of them? Spencer Stewart recently showed some data that 70 per cent of CMO moves in Fortune 500 companies are actually internal promotions. Third, do CMOs get bolder as they work on a brand and change more things, and does the work stop working? Lots to think about,” said Tindall.
How to compound your creativity
Binet then took the microphone and started unpacking Peter Field and James Hurman’s work on creative commitment. In short, the more committed you are to a particular campaign and the wider you spread the message over media and the more you spend on media, the more you sell.
But the compounding impacts of consistency were not as appreciated or understood. Now they are.
“Put all those things together, and three really important things happen to your business results. The first is that base sales start to rise year-on-year, the more you run. The less obvious is that your performance marketing starts to work harder, the spikes, and the short-term hits you get from performance get bigger. The third effect that everyone ignores, nobody cares about, and nobody thinks about is the effect on pricing. Long-run consistency and commitment reduce price elasticity and increase your pricing power. For many brands in the long run, that’s where the big profit lies,” he said.
Binet pointed to British cat food brand Felix. In the 1980s, it was a small brand, struggling to compete. It took “one last throw of the dice” and created a campaign, again with DDB. This campaign, with Felix the cartoon cat, ran for 22 years and is still running in a variety of forms today.
“Sales and market share in the first 10 years alone increased by a factor of five; it went from 5 per cent market share to over 25 per cent. You don’t normally see things like that, but the really interesting thing was that price sensitivity, price elasticity fell by half and that enabled them to move from being a cheap brand to being one of the more expensive brands,” he said.
McCain oven chips, again in the UK, saw a similar thing happen when it decided to stop “promoting its way out of trouble” with margins and profits shrinking. It plumped for an ad campaign based on evening meals with real British families, with emotional resonance, and sales started to rise.
“Price elasticity fell by half again, same as Felix. Put it another way, they doubled their pricing power. The real benefit of that came when we hit the cost-of-living crisis post-pandemic and inflation started rising. They had to push through price increases, other brands could not do that,” said Binet.
“Price is where the long-term profit from advertising comes if you do it right.”
The key to making the pre-requisite good ads to enable creative compounding is to find a good brand character, slogan, jingle or other creative device and keep repeating it and tweaking it, rather than ripping it up and starting again. Or in Ritson’s words, “do nothing”.
That may sound boring or inherently uncreative, but for Carter, this is where real creativity shines.
“Our brains love repetition, but they only love it up to a point. That’s why great songwriters aim for something called disguised repetition. It’s a really helpful phrase for us because that’s where creativity comes in… Some of the world’s greatest creative minds positively relished the creativity of disguised repetition. Monet dedicated 30 years of his life to 250 paintings of water lilies. Van Gogh would return again and again to painting himself. Warhol and Marilyn. In lockdown up in Normandy, David Hockney painted over 200 pictures of the blossom that was outside his window,” she said.
This idea has been put to use in Adam & Eve DDB’s work on Marmite with the ‘Love it or hate it’ platform, which has been running for more than 30 years. Here’s one from 2000.
And one from a couple of years ago.
Perhaps the golden exemplar of this globally is Specsavers, something Shaun Briggs, the Australian marketing boss, told us very proudly as part of our CMO Power List with its long-standing and super-effective ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ brand platform.
“Young Tindall has come up with this idea of compound creativity. It pains me to admit, it’s the most significant thought of the last 10 years in marketing. He’s looked at hundreds of advertisers and he’s rated them on how lazy they are. Where lazy is a good thing. Lazy is a cigar-smoking, more sexy, more attractive thing,” said Ritson.
To be sexy, more attractive and lazier, you need to do the hard work upfront. First, use emotion. Pull on emotional heartstrings in your creative, use seven brand codes in your work – logos, mascots, taglines, jingles, music and more – and, in Ritson’s words, “hold the wheel” not for four, six or 12 months but more than two years.
“When you do that, you get better advertising. The definition of better advertising is that it makes you more money,” he added. And that’s why we do it, really.
