The multiplier effect of creativity

0:09Hello and welcome to The Work Podcast. I'm Ann Marie Kerwin, America's Editor. So throughout this series of podcasts talking about our report, The Multiplier Playbook, we've explored the financial and organizational steps needed to align brand and performance marketing. But today we are talking about the work itself. The playbook outlines the importance of creativity depowering long-term growth and also makes the case for bringing creative and media back together to drive the best returns. To unpack the role of creativity in powering the multiplier effect, I'm going to be talking to Andrew Tyndall from System One.

0:41Among other things, Andrew is the author of The Creative Dividend, a study published by System One and Mork's sister brand, Effie Worldwide, earlier this year. It's based on the analysis of over 1 ,200 case studies and offers deep data-driven insight into creative effectiveness. But first, a word from our sponsor.

1:27with clarity and confidence. Lions Intelligence is where groundwork becomes great work. Insight, strategy, creativity, execution, all in one place. To learn more, check out intelligence.lions.co.

1:45We're back and I'm welcoming Andrew Tyndale from System One. Hello, Andrew. Thanks for being here. Hey, how are you doing? Great. It's good to see you. I wanted to start by putting into context the business need for creativity. So the Multiplier Playbook, we emphasize the importance of building future demand among the majority of category buyers who are out of market at any given time. But that can only happen if brand is able to build positive memory associations with consumers. So why is creativity so important here and how do we connect it with business outcomes? Of course. I mean, let's not breeze over how smart that future, building future demand versus capturing current demand really is.

2:26I think the person that's been championing that for years is, you know, James Herman, who's actually just, I think, released a book literally called Future Demand. And I think it's one of those smart heuristics that marketers must kind of conquer to become effective. the understanding that 95 % of your audience, I mean, the numbers change per category based on purchase cycles. But yeah, 95 % of your audience don't care now, but they might buy your brand in two years' time. So you need to talk to them. So then why does creativity, what does that mean for creativity? I think there's, God, there's three principles there.

3:04I think that's super important. One is the industry moved on from all impressions being equal a few years ago with great learning from the likes of Karen Nelson Field at Amplified Intelligence and the team at Lumen. All these attention experts really showed us that not all impressions are equal when you think about attention. Now I think the initial is moving on. And why I think this research that we've done together is important as well. And there's some new research coming out at Cannes, which will really hammer this from a lot of big platforms that I've been seeing previous to this week. We need to move on from every second of attention being equal to the next stage.

3:52Not all seconds of attention are equal. It's about brand memories. is advertising has to build memories that changes behavior to grow our brands. I mean, that's the job of marketing. We've got a finite set of cash. How are we going to change consumer behavior in the favor of what we want? It doesn't always have to be profit. It could be charity or government messaging or stopping smoking, ETC. So then what does that mean for creativity? So my second point would be, you have to be broadly interesting. That has a lesson on the style of the idea that you choose and the positioning and the execution itself.

4:40You have to be broadly interesting. You have to attract everyone's broad attention. Because if you're not doing that and you're relying on and assuming the attention of the viewer or the listener, you're only ever going to speak to those people who are in market and catch your current demand you're only limiting yourself to short-term effects the five percent of people who are in audience and then finally then from a uh a more memory point of view it also means that if you're going to have long-term effects if you're gonna be able to to talk to the once you've talked to those people who are out of market to create future demand you need to create lasting memories so the best way to do that is to create emotional work um the more intensely emotional in a higher emotional state and we build more memory structures and then if those memories are positively valenced if they make us feel good it starts to tap into heuristics that will actually impact our behavior like the affect heuristic which is if something comes to mind it feels good it feels like a right choice and influences our system one buying pathway so that framing of current and future demand is super important because if you don't understand that then you know those creative implications don't become very obvious if you understand the fact that we need to be talking to customers influencing customers building memories specifically and that i'm going to work for years, then it changes the whole creative brief.

6:15We suddenly need to focus on being, you know, entertaining, interesting, broadly interesting, broadly engaging, attracting broad attention, and leaving people feeling something about our brands so that, you know, once we've got their attention, we're doing something useful with it. Yeah, that's so important, that emotional component, isn't it? So one of the things I hear from CMOs is when they talk about future demand, they're afraid it gives the impression that creativity is only useful for the long-term benefits that it offers. But System 1 is research that shows that it also pays back in the short term.

6:53So can you talk a little bit about how that works and the idea of creativity is an investment for tomorrow, but not today? Why that's wrong? Yeah, of course. I mean, this is a key finding of what we saw in the multiply. In fact, the first publication, right, that, you know, it's not just about performance and, you know, all brands doing it together, and that leads to higher returns. And then, again, from a creative angle, yeah, we've talked about the benefits of creativity to grow that long-term demand, but in my research with the massive Effie data set, we found that, you know, no matter how long you run your campaign, if you're more distinctive, you're more emotional, you're using more showmanship, you'll be more entertaining.

7:40You do get a lift and a short-term impact as well. The thing is that the difference between the benefit that creativity affords you gets exponentially bigger the longer a campaign runs or the more you wait. In fact, creative metrics explain more of the variance in marketing profitability that when you look at a longer and longer time horizon and stuff like emotion becomes more and more important. However, it does still have this massive short term impact. I mean, I can think of two data points there. One is from all the work of Orlando Wood, our chief creative officer at System One, where he's really looked at salesmanship versus showmanship.

8:27And he's shown that if you actually lean into, if you know that you're doing a performance campaign and you know you need to drive demand now, he's shown that leaning into a certain style of creativity, salesmanship, is actually better at capturing that demand. So one, you need to be aware of your objective in the first place. and even when you're thinking about these short-term campaigns. The second kind of data point that's salient here is all the work I've been doing with my team and the great guys at TikTok and all their data. We wrote this piece of research called the long and short form of it where we actually looked at brand lift studies and conversion studies on short form for like 1 ,000 campaigns.

9:12And it's true, the more distinctive, emotional, entertaining, consistent work as well, drives an immediate brand lift that then lasts. So we need to shift our language from the long and the short and even brand and performance. And really, comms does a job. Marketing comms. Advertising does a job. it changes behavior. That will have an immediate effect or an immediate and lasting effect. So, and creativity impacts both of those. It's just that the value of creativity becomes more apparent when you're looking in the longer term. And the longer term has so much more value for us because it compounds.

10:07If you're having a lasting effect, that means it layers and compounds and that's how how brands grow and that's what makes our jobs as marketers easier it means we can go home earlier clock off at four o 'clock go for a long walk you know our jobs are getting easier we're doing lasting long-term brand building so i think yeah creativity is useful for both immediate and lasting but the lasting effect is what marketers and businesses should be more invested in and creativity has a much larger impact on those lasting effects as well and i know a lot of marketers tell us that one of the big blockers to employing a creative strategy is the idea that it's too risky that uh their company might see something that's a big creative idea as a risk so we've actually found though that it's actually more costly to not take the risk what did what does system one find when they work with your clients about like being bold as opposed to being dull yeah i saw um i saw this data myself when we uh start of the process when we were writing the new creative dividend book with all of FE and System One data.

11:35We did some research of marketers first because, you know, we live in a strange world where we do research about research before we release research, then do research about the research. So we asked a load of global marketers, I think it was 300 marketers across um APAC and Europe and the US you know what are um the biggest blockers to creativity and yeah the the biggest one 41 % of them I think it was um said that creativity is seen as a risk you know it's risky as a chase creativity because it it might backfire or it might not pay back etc so you're right um there's a massive the biggest risk is not being creative that's so clear in our data now we've done some work on research and with eat big fish um adam morgan brilliant uh brilliant marketing thinker called the cost of dull and we found that um i got there's loads of headlines about this basically it it costs you way more to achieve the same effects with a campaign, it is duller versus an interesting campaign.

12:45What do I mean by a dull campaign? Well, it's just something that doesn't engage anyone interestingly. It doesn't get them to lean in at all. So it truly is like a good definition of dull and anti-creativity. And we actually found in that one study that it costs brands about, brands are wasting nearly$200 billion of media spend when we looked at this massive cohort of brands because they're being too dull and having to spend more on media to make up for it. So, yeah, you see this all the time. I've worked in businesses like this, especially publicly listed businesses. I think one of the most interesting things that you're going to see coming out over the next decade in marketing is why this happens and how to get around it.

13:36And the fact that there's been a few articles about this already, but I reckon I'm going to write a book on it soon. Founder-led businesses often grow much more than publicly listed businesses because they can take the risk and, you know, creativity is seen as a risk. They feel like, you know, there's a sense of ownership and they're not just trying to go after incrementality. Whereas if you work in these publicly listed businesses, which I have done, The aim of the game is to increase your share price a couple percent and to beat inflation, right? That does not lead to the right kind of environment where creativity and what we know about good brand building thrives.

14:23And often we even take the wrong parts of that de-risked environment where, and we think the safer thing to do is actually get on the marketing treadmill and make an ad every year. Whereas, you know, we take the worst parts of this de-risked environment and not really want to say anything worth, you know, what might actually be interesting to everyone. So you get this kind of very rational, very safe conveyor belt of content. Whereas in these founder-led businesses, they're actually making stuff and doing things worth remembering and worth talking about. So, yeah, I think we're going to see more and more on this.

15:02That's great. Yeah. I wanted to also talk a bit about the creativity stack, which is something that you've written about in your Effie's book. The creativity stack has four layers and you've referred to one of them already, showmanship. But the four layers are consistency, showmanship, distinctiveness and emotion. So can you explain those layers and how they work together? Of course. Of course. So one of my main jobs of the past four years has been obviously working at System One with huge, huge creative agencies and their clients and advising our clients who are brand-news app masters normally in B2C, but some B2B as well, on making campaigns, choosing the right insights and creative ideas, and refining execution to make growth more likely and make every media dollar work harder.

15:59what I really found was that no one knows what creativity is we've seen a lot of chatter over the past 20 years about you know creativity you can 12x your profit from Paul Dyson or you know oh don't be dull okay well how do we not do these things and then I see um in these internal frameworks very large businesses where it's like oh the creativity sphere or the creativity keyhole or, you know, all these mad frameworks or, OK, how am I going to the creativity rhombus? How am I going to possibly use that to make any better work? I have no idea. So the this first really big piece of work that I've worked on with the FE and System 1 data is just let's get to a very simple, not all-encompassing, but very simple stack of four things that marketers can actively just think about when they're going through the entire creative process.

17:02So that's when you're briefing, when someone's presenting a campaign or an idea or a platform or a character or an execution to you, or you're in that studio, you're editing, you're refining. These four things need to stay in the back of your mind. Because if you're doing these four things, you can pretty much almost 10x the chance that you're going to be getting more incremental profit from your advertising campaigns. So it's distinctiveness, emotion, showmanship and consistency. These really, you know, you can frame them in two ways. You've framed it as de-risking. I would say that these are, you know, what we can do to actually grow our brands.

17:49So distinctiveness is what I would call the table stakes of creativity. Yeah, I reckon a good chunk of our industry at the moment thinks that creativity is distinctiveness. You know, we've all been in those reviews where the only creative feedback is, you know, make the logo bigger, where's the logo, or something about the damn TNCs. You know, the very bottom denominator of creativity is distinctiveness. Is it recognizable? Is it familiar? Is it similar to the stuff we've done before? And it's important, distinctiveness. We showed in the EFI data that if you're not distinctive, your media spend does not reliably scale into revenue.

18:34Super important. Like, you have to be branded your brand for your dollars to work. but it's creative efficiency, turning that media spend into revenue. It doesn't say whether it's going to change your future behavior or build more memories or even disrupt behavior. You often hear people talking about, you know, how am I going to grow as a brand? It's not with distinctiveness. No one's ever launched a challenger brand and become more distinctive than the category leader, causing people to choose them more. That's not how brands grow. Obviously. So we've really got ourselves into a muddle, I think.

19:14It's important, but I think what's more important is the other stuff in the stack because they lead to actual profitable growth. And that's also crucial as well. A lot of these heuristics in the industry and frameworks focus on share and revenue. I don't really care about revenue. The best way I can get more revenue is by doing a 50 % discount. I know that will lead to revenue. Yeah, you know, it might put me out of business, but that's how I'll lead to revenue. The best way to increase a revenue ROI is to not spend anything. And your revenue ROI climbs to a million, infinite. What's important is profit.

19:58And profit, what we should be getting out of bed for, comes from those long-term behavior changes. So when you climb up from your bedrock, your table stakes of creativity, which is distinctiveness into emotion. As we've talked about, emotion orientates attention. Emotion builds more memories. Emotion leaves a lasting impression. This is what System 1 has been researching for 25 years. And, you know, it's not just us. It's the lots of people in the initiative have looked at this. The more you feel, the more you buy. And then how do you go about creating that emotion and capturing more broad attention and also creating a unique brand personality and creating fame and trust, then you climb that stack again into showmanship.

20:43I am a big believer after working with Orlando Wood, who's wrote Lemon and Lookout on this, two books on this topic, but also reading all of Paul Feldwick's work, which really sets us out in Why Does the Ped Last Sing, a book I read every January because it's fundamental understanding of how advertising works. Advertising needs to have showmanship. I get pushback on this from brands about, oh, B2B, luxury, I'm a very serious brand. What do you mean showmanship? I don't mean slap your brand in the hands of a clown to put on a show or a jester. I mean genuine showmanship. The idea that advertising is always not wanted.

21:29You've been invited into someone's room, someone's house, someone's living room, into their car with them. So you respect the audience and you give them something worth attending to. So that's often, you know, the most obvious outcome of showmanship is stuff like character, story, flow, melody, dialogue, betweenness between characters. This kind of stuff that Orlando's research. but really just asking yourself, if I wasn't interested in buying this brand, this category, this product now, would I be interested in this work? If not, it's not got showmanship. So I think it's really important and we've seen in all the FI data, the more showmanship you use, the more emotion follows, the more attention follows.

22:17But equally, the more important is that it creates these brand effects. Trust and fame, people talking about your brand, giving them something to talk about, worth talking about, word of mouth. And it creates a lasting impact. But I think showmanship is also becoming more important because in all my research with TikTok, you know, these platforms, these short-form platforms, afford us a new opportunity for affordable broad reach. It can really reach a lot of people with high frequency now for not much cash for these platforms. if, it's a big if, you get them to stop scrolling past your work. And the way to do that is showmanship.

23:02You know, we've shown it actually on TikTok. If you use more kind of character, story, humor, you get 50 % more attention, more emotion, and more brand lift, more awareness, more intent, more brand associations lift on these platforms. So in a world where we're moving towards skippable formats and low attention formats, showmanship is becoming more important as well. So these are the fundamentals of creativity. They're not like, you know, people give very specific advice about, oh, you need to do a hook on this platform. No, these are the fundamental bedrocks of creativity that do stretch across your platforms and your channels.

23:43And finally, you've got consistency. I've been researching and banging on about this consistently for like four years now. but I've done this research called Compound Creativity, which is exploring how creativity compounds over time if you're consistent to grow brands. And we've developed this framework, which is basically looking at three ways you can be consistent with your foundations, with your team and culture, and your execution. So your foundations are what planners often call brand cohesion, so sticking to the same idea and positioning over time, and then your team and culture is more about the way you behave as a business, using your ads for longer, putting them consistently across channels, which is great research in the multiplier playbook showing that actually if you use five channels, I think you get a 50 % lift to ROI, but if you use seven channels, you get 70 % lift to ROI, I think it is.

24:41So yeah, there's great data confirming that again in this research. And then finally, consistent with your execution, so your brand book and feel. what the industry won't shut up about, you know, using the same logo consistently, do you see? It's just one small part of how we behave as marketers, and people think it's the whole damn pie. So yeah, this kind of the creativity stack can be framed as de-risking your marketing spend. I actually think it's the marketer's job, and it's important as well. People push back and go, advertising is a weak force gravity is a weak force but it means that we're all sat on our damn chairs lucky enough to do this podcast right now and people say you know oh advertising and creativity is only two percent of the job what about strategy what about uh what about positioning yeah you've done that and then for the 300 days of a year all you can do really apart from keeping and those cogs turning is work out how to be more creative and make better media choices.

25:44Really, that is largely what marketers can really make an impact during their weekly jobs, like funding, scaling, fostering, protecting this stuff. And as you can see in this research, you can 7.5x a chance you're going to make profit if you get this stuff right. So, yeah, I think the creativity stack, although it's simple, it's a good way to scale creativity within teams.

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27:00One of the things we advocate for in the multiplier effect and the playbook is to use is a broad creative platform that uses multiple types of ads, but has a core brand idea. And you've broken this down into the idea of build messaging or nudge messaging or connect messaging. Can you talk about what the build, nudge, connect messaging does and how they work together? Of course. I wouldn't say that me or system I've kind of come up with this. This is that classic marketing training. This is actually from the world of P &G marketers, really, the build, nudge, connect, or I think P &G would call it build, nudge, refresh.

27:47And also, there's people who have talked about this is the more modern, more practical version of the sales funnel that we plan around, but really no one's in the awareness stage. No one's in the consideration stage. That doesn't happen. but no one's sat there right now considering your brand. So the build nudge connects about building memories, nudging behavior, and then connecting with people to purchase. And then this impacts your creative choices and your media choices. So to build those broad long-term memories and to build that 95 % of people are future demand. You want to be using broad media.

28:31you want to be very distinctive work you want to be emotional you want to really lean into showmanship to refresh memories top them up and to reach new people whereas the nudging is more about then finding those sharper reasons to buy and people who are closer to the point of purchase so this would be using a little bit more salesmanship in more digital targeted media channels where people are more likely to buy. And then connecting, I would say isn't even really the job of advertising. I think connecting is what a lot of marketers call physical availability, making your brand and products easier to think of, easier to reach, find and buy.

29:14So I kind of class that as like proper physical availability or shopper activation. people might call that you know stands in this in the gross in grocery and and you know on bottle promotion so yeah um i think build nudge connected so is a more modern version of the funnel and it informs what kind of creativity and media channel choices and activations you should be doing so i think um one of the things that you brought up earlier was about like the focus on like where's the logo make the logo bigger but there is a real role for distinctive brand assets right so the idea of if you have this broad creative platform no matter what message you're using build connect or nudge consumers should know that it's your brand that's talking to them right let's talk a little bit about distinctive brand assets and what are they why do they matter how do they link together all your different ad messages Of course.

30:20So I think people are really interested in this because there's an issue where a lot of our money is now moving towards creators and social platforms, yet insisting ones research with creators. and we're launching the new creative effectiveness playbook at Cannes this year with TikTok and WPP. We find that about after the average amount of attention on social with creative assets, only 45 % of actual consumers can recall what brand that ad is for. So really, if you're not getting brand recognition, it's going back to what I said earlier, where distinctiveness is table stakes, because it's creative efficiency.

31:04You can't do anything. So you should really think about advertising, media, and attention as a volume. And the first filter for that is distinctiveness. Then once you've converted that volume, that attention, that media buy through distinctiveness, then you've got your actual advertising volume that you can actually do anything with. Then it's about how emotional and brand and well-positioned those memories are. so distinctive brand assets are the way to increase that distinctiveness and take more of that volume into useful and advertising volume um we've found that again in this effort work but the different types of distinctive brand assets do generally impact how um how distinct ads are So we see logos being kind of just common, whereas we see celebrities also being quite common.

32:03Like they don't attract attention. When they do, sorry, it's not branded attention. Whereas things that are better, product shapes are great. And brand characters are great. brand characters are unique because they attract attention for your brand it forces you to be consistent and um they can't be used elsewhere so you're not getting misattribution and also audio audio and um i'm releasing some more research i can with mark ritson and um uh cra really looking at um this year that audio is so damn powerful there's something really rooted um close to you know the human experience audio and radio and stuff like this but audio brand assets specifically in an increasingly visually distracted world where you're sat on your sofa you're watching tv you're on tiktok i've also got my laptop out as well and maybe the dog's there and you're having a conversation with your partner you know you can be visually distracted but Audio is, you know, you can't be audio distracted as much.

33:16And, you know, you can't close your ears, but you can close your eyes. Crazy insight, I know. So we actually see that sonic assets and jingles are incredibly powerful ways to increase that distinctiveness. And it's super important to increase your distinctiveness because, as I said, it is the first step of creativity. And if you're not branded, it's not an ad. it's just a piece of art or a school project yeah so let's talk about another finding that bringing creative quality and media support together explains 60 percent of campaign-driven business results compared to just as you said the weak pull of creativity of only being 25 responsible if it's creativity alone for business results so let's talk about why is it so important to bring creative and media planning back together and why have they been siloed for so long of course so i'll give you some caveats first so that 60 figure where did that come from this is when at the end of this this massive research project we did where we took 1 ,265 campaigns, advertising campaigns submitted to the FE Awards across US and Europe.

34:39And we looked at their brand size, what marketing category we were in, what media channels they chose, as in what the key touch points, and how much they were spending on media, and how much their competitors were spending on media, and then looked at the creative input, the emotional response to those campaigns, and the the distinctiveness response and the showmanship features used in those campaigns, you can predict the number or you can explain 60 % of the amount of business results reported by those campaigns. Now, some caveats there. That is 60 % of the business results reported by advertising campaigns, It's not, you know, your creative choices determine 60 % of a business's success.

35:31That's insane. You might not have a good product. You might have messed up your pricing. Your positioning might be wrong. ETC. The other caveat is this 60 % number wobbles for your category. So advertising has a differing impact. I think this is possibly the most killer insight I have ever come across in my research. Advertising has a different impact based on what category you're in because of various things. A few of them being the reliance on physical availability within your category. So advertising actually explains the large majority of, nearly I think is above 95 % of creativity, creativity and media explain about the large majority, above 95 % of business outcomes for pharmaceutical and healthcare campaigns.

36:36Why? It's because there's no differentiation in that category. I believe this medicine is going to work largely. And there's a serious lack of importance on physical availability. I'm not impulsively picking up medicine. It's too important to me. So when you remove that reliance on differentiation as a category, and physical variability, what does matter? That's the effectiveness of your communications. Really powerful. Whereas actually what I found, where this number shrinks the most, I think it's to like 40%, it explains 40 % of the outcomes, is actually FMCG food, like snacking, where actually there is a lot of money that goes into differentiation innovation.

37:33You know, there is. I think a great example of that is nerds and nerds gummy clusters. I think it's a great example of that is innovation that, well, I've never, you know, is a gummy things covered in nerds. I've never seen that. No one else has given me that. And I think that actually grew their revenue from something silly like 30 million to 300 million in a few years. And, you know, that's one example of, yeah, in that category is a lot of differentiating driving innovation. and physical availability. A lot of FMCG relies on shelf space, impulse ETCs. So then the effectiveness of your media buy and creativity explains less of those advertising outcomes.

38:17But then what is important about that 60 % figure is it's looking at when you take into account creativity and media together, what does that explain in terms of those ad outcomes? But when you ignore media and just look at creativity, it explains about 24%, a quarter of those outcomes. That's because you cannot think about media and creativity separately. So it's not media even adding that extra 35 % on a loan. It's about the interaction between media and creativity. When you actually look at what I call excess share of creativity, which is the volume of effective advertising in market, which is how much more creative you are based on the creativity stack versus your category.

39:04Ties by how much media weight you have, how much media you spend, i.e. creative effectiveness, the volume of it in the market. Do you see that as that grows, you get an exponential relationship with the ability for campaigns to report incremental profit? That's because if you've got a good ad, a good ad does even more with every pound of media spend. so that you're planning these things together. All the good managing directors of markets for businesses look at their brand portfolio, and this is a key job of theirs every one to five years. Which brands deserve my marketing investment this year?

39:56You know, oh, Bailey's has an incredible creative campaign, whereas that brand does not. Bailey's campaign has shown that when I put a pound into TV, it turns into five. That brand turns into two. So the marketing director there, the managing director of that market, should be connecting creative media and putting more media spend behind Bailey's because that's what's going to increase the chance of growth. Or, you know, CMOs do this at a market level. yeah they look at growth in market but what they should really be doing as well because growth is a lagging metric whereas brand health and creativity is a leading metric is looking at um okay that is creative excellence in that market they've got a killer local marketing director if i take my money out of poland and put it into here that's going to clearly pay back more over the next five years.

40:54So just to think, or you can do it as a brand manager at the channel level. Okay, I haven't cracked social yet. This work is crap. It's not even branded. I really do own TV. That is a great 10-year running campaign. I'm going to put more of my media dollars into TV this year until the agency delivers me something that I believe in in social. Like, this is what we intuitively do as markets anyway. These numbers, admittedly just looking at Effie campaigns, so it's, you know, the world's best campaigns, the Premier League of football, the RuPaul's Drag Race of drag, the top of the top, you know, but these numbers, the 60 % will change for your brand and your category and your market.

41:44I mean, as we've talked about, doesn't it wiggle? But the principle remains, you should be able to explain the majority of your advertising campaigns. if you focus on creative quality and then you plan it with your medium. That's great. Thank you. I also wanted to talk a bit about the idea of, you know, I think marketing teams get bored with their own ads more quickly than research shows that consumers do. So there's this idea that ads wear out, but actually what we found is that you need time for ads to wear in. So can you talk a little bit about the idea of the fewer, bigger, longer approach?

42:27Of course. I mean, this really comes from my research on compound creativity looking at not just add wear out, but, you know, the concept of consistency in general. But I think there's some more great data in this from analytic partners, which shows that once you factor in the cost, I mean, that's quite impressive analysis. Once you factor in the cost of replacing an ad, 90 % of ads don't wear out. Like, they're still going. let's not get confused with ad wear out and creative fatigue creative fatigue is a real thing that is what your media team needs to be worrying about capping frequency and i am sick of watching bvod and ctv and getting served the same eight ads in the same 45 minute episode please people sorted out.

43:32But wear out is a different thing. That's looking at memory structures over years. And yeah, marketers get far more bored with their ads before consumers even do. And we saw that the most consistent brands, and again, this EFI set is dated that I'm very accustomed to, following the compound creativity consistency framework, those brands that were best at that saw four times higher ROI and we're three times more likely to report incremental profit growth. So consistency and leaning into wearing is a marketer's best friend. And it's important as well because it's good advice. It's good career advice.

44:15You need to be lazy as a marketer. Why? Why always run? Why do we run? Just slow down. That email doesn't need replying to right now. just chill out it's all right the ads are up you know nothing's gonna happen yeah exactly let them cook for god's sake um so yeah it's a key principle so i think we're uh nearly at time so just one last thing if a marketer marketing leaders listening right now if they want to think about overhauling their creative strategy or reworking their creative strategy to get the most out of it. What should they be doing with their agencies and internal teams? What could they do tomorrow morning to get started?

45:10God, I think this is one of the key jobs of CMOs. They should be constantly thinking about how to do this. It's a difficult one to give you a short little closing tip. But I'll just focus on one specific thing. Actually, two. I'll focus on two specific things. I the industry is in froze about this idea about lots of littles versus go big or go home the idea that this is two opposing planning strategies where go big or go home is about one big idea that you show to as many people across as many chances as possible whereas lots of littles is the idea of choosing essentially a brand vibe that's a bad framing for it but essentially is what we're being told what's your vibe and then create a system of ideas you show to many people across many impressions across all the channels and they'll eventually trust us they'll stack up to brand growth i think this is a false dichotomy i think marketing strategy has to be about the big idea and guess what your big idea is your damn brand that you know you have to understand And let's go through the fundamentals of marketing, understanding what is our business challenge?

46:34What are our growth ambitions? What is the consumer behavior change or the customer behavior change, whether you're B2B or B2C? What is the behavior change we need to see to achieve that? What is our brand positioning need to be the associations we need to build to achieve that behaviour change? And then what is the idea, the comms idea, the comms strategy that is going to deliver those associations and messages in a way that's going to be interesting and work, broadly interesting, emotional, distinctive and work across all the comms channels that we've got available to us today. And then once you're in those channels, then you should start thinking about lots of littles.

47:24Okay, within these smaller, skippable media channels, okay, let's follow the principles of lots of littles. You know, brand cohesion whilst creative proliferation to use creativity as a targeting mechanism. And the belief that, yes, you can grow brand through those impressions if you're consistent enough, if you're entertaining, if you get enough attention. And start planning through communicative attention, not just impressions anymore. So I think that's, get your head around that. And then I actually genuinely think if you've done that process, what is just what if you go to business school or you work in a big, proper blue chip business, that's just like the marketing textbook stuff.

48:07But honestly, I work with so many teams now and I have done it over the past few years. I promise you if you've done that process you're in the top five ten percent of marketers globally and plan teams and like the rest are just chasing the tails and trying to you know out execute the lack of strategy so if you've done that process great you're cracking then I will get your your agencies all in the same room it's just classic advice you know can we all align on that plan and the smaller the plan the tighter it is I won't say it needs to be on a page because That's ridiculous. But if it's tight, it's like good creativity.

48:47If it works out of home, it's very good. So it's the same strategy. Tight, tight, tight. You know, good things. Yeah, good things will happen. And then I'd also, as well, these days, people have family teams and far too many teams and agencies. And once you're in that room, people go, who the hell are they? What do they do? They do our radio campaigns. okay get out you guys are now also doing the radio just consolidate a little bit and go biggo and you know tighter team yeah so that was that's three salient thoughts of how to over explain how to do the same hour job yeah excellent thank you i know it's uh it's just uh being the head of a marketing team these days it can't get more complex i think so i think the Oh my God, doesn't it make you want to quit?

49:42It's like, you know, 10 years ago when I first started up, where did I start? Innocent Smoothie was my... Do you have Innocent Smoothie in the US? You know Innocent Smoothie? No? Really? Wow, okay. I'm not a big smoothie girl, though. It could just be me. Okay. You know, the job was... I think it was 15 years ago. The job then, you know, it was make a TV ad. And then you call your shopper team and you bring it below the line. We all make profit because challenger brands can't afford a TV ad. There might be a few big ones that P &G have launched a challenger brand. Oh, God, they've bought a two million pound TV campaign.

50:28Aren't we all worried? Now we're in the like megaverse multiverse. and you know ai can change everything can even make challenge a brand ads should i be in reddit who knows reddit has more penetration than tiktok these days oh but they only spend two minutes attention there versus two hours oh god what does that mean for my strategy and can i just do a cut down of my tv into digital display is digital display real anymore uh you know i 10 10 of all impressions on digital display are actually human and over 90 % of robots these are just things that a marketer that worked 10 15 20 years ago wouldn't have no idea about or it's a completely different skill set if I was starting out in marketing now you know leaving university and I saw this this stuff I don't I don't think I'd come and do the job so yeah yeah so now we're all just kind of stuck in this industry and you know are bowing to tech platforms because we have no idea what's going on but i promise okay you promise if i give you ad and i don't even target anymore ai found people to buy ad and the roi figure it's real that you've told me oh great i'll just do that instead have all my budget you know i think it's dark dark times in marketing so i think research like the multiplayer playbook where it simplifies and gives us frameworks.

51:56And I think that's a very powerful thing. Yeah. And I think it's the thinking about like what actually is going to, like you said, lead to profit, not all of the other ways we can get distracted. Right. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. If you haven't yet, be sure to download the multiplier playbook at work.com to get all the data frameworks in play as we've discussed. I'm Anne-Marie Kerwin. Thank you for listening and be sure to subscribe to the Wark Podcast so you don't miss any episodes.