The Case for Creativity
The Clemenger Group invited clients and employees to attend its Effectiveness Summit yesterday afternoon to showcase global learnings around the effectiveness of creative campaigns. This was supported by some very interesting, innovative case studies.
Peter Field, world-renowned researcher and authority on creativity as a key driver of effectiveness, kicked off the event with a deep-dive into his research, which tracks the relationship between award-winning communications campaigns and business success.
His first slides were a number of graphs (which he apologised for in advance). At first glance these appeared to be boring, state-the-obvious slides showing what organisations try to achieve with their advertising campaigns – however, they actually revealed surprising insights into which types of campaigns generate the greatest business success, and which measures of success are responsible for the greatest amount of profit gain.
For instance, organisations tend to focus on getting the right message out there, playing to the rational side of the argument. In contrast, the data shows the most successful campaigns that lead to the greatest profit or market share increases are those that tug on the emotional connection people have with a brand or a product – making them feel. He warned us not to discount TV advertising as an important medium (despite the naysayers in the industry claiming TV is a dying medium) – the statistics show that the mix of traditional and online channels combined have the greatest impact.
Peter's strongest point was that campaigns that are famous, or give the brand fame, are far more successful than those that focus on image or awareness. His definition of fame is a campaign that creates buzz and talkability, and is driven by word-of-mouth so everyone knows about it or wants to know what it is about (an essential element of great PR can create). Some examples he shared which meet this criteria included the T-Mobile flash-mob in Liverpool Street Station campaign and Cadbury's Gorilla ad. He was quick to let us know that the Yellow Chocolate campaign (a fully integrated campaign we worked on with Colenso and Aim) is the pinnacle of his presentation and fits very well into the fame category, being a great example of using multiple channels and ways of communicating creatively to gain huge talkability and positive business outcomes. This reiterates what we as an agency have come to live by – integrated campaigns with engaged PR support is more important than ever before for building successful and deep creative campaigns that deliver measureable success.
(He also noted that all of the most effective campaigns used strong, emotive music, which I found interesting as I've always linked music from ads to brands, or remember songs from ads, but can't tell you what other ads I've noticed. "I'm an utter peanut butter nutter...")
Bringing us back to creativity – the key point of Peter's talk was that the more creative a communications campaign (often the ones that win awards), the greater the business benefit. He uses Effectiveness (share of voice minus share of market versus market share growth) as an overall measure of success for campaigns. The plot graphs he shared with us show (with 99% confidence) campaigns which receive creative awards are much more certain to be effective.
To support this idea of awarded creativity resulting in the greatest gains for a company, James Hurman, Strategic Planning Director for Colenso BBDO and author of "The Case for Creativity", shared his research with us. There appears to be a direct relationship between winning the Cannes 'Advertiser of the Year' Award and the stock prices of those companies – with very obvious significant jumps in profit over the years that the campaigns are active.
The case studies he shared included the Air New Zealand safety videos, which while fun and engaging for consumers, were designed to engage staff in what Air New Zealand stands for, so they embody the brand on a daily basis. Another campaign he shared was the DB Export Gold campaign where DB Export Gold was not advertised. Instead, they created a history for the ailing brand which involved a limited addition brew of the original DB Export beer and online videos telling the story behind its creation.
I couldn't resist reading the first few chapters of his book when I got home, and he makes a very interesting point about the amount of advertising we are exposed to on a daily basis – how many of the ads you saw or heard yesterday can you recall? Personally, I couldn't remember any. Throughout the book it becomes immensely clear that creativity (stating the obvious here) is more engaging, but also leads to great profitability for a brand or organisation – and this creativity often seems far removed from "selling" a product. As one attendee pointed out, some of these examples seem like experiments that have worked really well, but which also could have fallen short.
My overall take-away from the Summit is that communications campaigns should focus on being as creative and individual as possible to generate buzz, talkability, viral reach and all those other buzz words we use in our industry – focusing more on the creativity and less on the product/brand/organisation message. I look forward to trying to create some of these "famous" campaigns for our clients in the future.