We all enjoy a good ad. Well, we say we do, but when it comes to creating an advert that is sharp and effective, most businesses tend to dabble with dull. How can one say this? UK research house System1 found that an ad of a cow eating grass was more interesting than 50% of television ads of the more than 50,000 ads on its database.
Take a moment and let that sink in. One in two TV ads out of a collection of more than 50,000 is less interesting than watching a cow eat grass. The research revealed that creators of dull ads need to spend about $100bn more a year to have the same impact as their non-dull counterparts. If being creative for its own sake was not enough, what about wasted money to the tune of Kenya’s GDP? Every year. Just to make up for the cost of being dull.
It’s not just TV where dull rules the roost. Karen Nelson-Field of Amplified Intelligence shared a research study in 2023 that assessed 130,000 digital ads across more than 1,000 brands. The findings should give marketing departments, and CFOs, sleepless nights. Some 85% of the ads didn’t reach the threshold of holding people’s attention for more than 2½ seconds. That’s the minimum amount of time an ad needs to hold someone’s attention have any chance of landing a message in the consumer’s mind. Two and a half seconds — yet only 15% of ads got it right. The implication is that more than R8 of every R10 spent on digital advertising is going down the drain.
Similarly, a recent Ipsos research study across more than 500 brands, looking at 5,000 assets in 25 countries, found that only 15% of work being done used brand assets in a way that was distinctive. In other words, 85% of the time, the advertising creative isn’t distinctive to the extent that it is associated with the particular brand — resulting in a significant percentage of work that ends up doing a job for the category or possibly even worse, being associated with a competitor!
And yet, we should never forget that we have a choice — as Adam Morgan of Eat Big Fish says: “Dull is inherently a choice. We make it that way, or we choose and allow it to be that way.”
This choice starts with being intentional about creativity. It means putting creativity at the centre of our business and the problems we need to solve — it’s not just a marketing or communications tool, nor is creativity a solution to be rolled out only for proactive work or to be applied only to challenges that are not fundamental to the business.
To be intentional, we need to put creativity at the centre of what we do, how we solve business problems. That starts with understanding that the first step in creativity is strategy. This requires a shift from mere comms tactics to a clearly defined strategy for the brand. Are we clear on our brand story? Do we know what our core assets are that drive distinction? Do we have the most precise positioning in the market for our brand? Equally important, have we done a sharp diagnosis of the problem we are trying to solve?
Turns out telling a great story is more powerful than a giant call to action
— Laura Jones
As the industry is starting to prove the cost of doing noncreative work, we equally have an opportunity to prove the upside of applying creative excellence. Key to delivering this evidence is to spend time on the matter of diagnosis — or articulating the problem one is trying to solve. It is only in the sharp articulation of the problem that one can define the measures for success and clearly showcase the effectiveness of creative thinking.
In the absence of this key strategic step, we often develop a set of measurements that are not related to the problem we are trying to solve — so we end up measuring the wrong things and building case studies that tout success when in fact the commercial needle is not being moved at all, or if it is, it is often because of a happy coincidence. Global brand adidas famously turned off its performance budget in South America — by mistake — but its sales were unaffected. It turns out that it was misattributing sales to performance media when in fact it was coming from strong, long-term brand investment.
Speaking of long-term brand investment, Laura Jones, former CMO of Uber and executive at Instagram, recently emphasised the importance of brand-led growth at a talk she gave at the Cannes Lions festival. She shared her inspirational journey at Instacart, where she set about proving the power and importance of brand-building communication. Initially a hypothesis, she proved over a period, utilising marketing efforts that she would turn on and off in certain US geographies, the importance of focusing on brand-led growth and how this built business growth on top of product-led growth and performance marketing growth.
What I loved most about her case study was summed up in this one quote: “Turns out telling a great story is more powerful than a giant call to action.”
Being intentional about creativity requires focus, a clear strategy, rigour in how we diagnose and how we position, the tactics we employ, and what and how we measure. It’s not easy, but the high commercial cost of not doing it demands that we embrace this journey.
The famous old Apple ad spoke about “the crazy ones” in their tribute to people who embraced creativity — perhaps today we need to think about the crazy ones as those who don’t.
Jacques Burger is CEO at The UP&Up Group
The big take-out: “Dull is inherently a choice. We make it that way, or we choose and allow it to be that way.” — Adam Morgan, Eat Big Fish
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