Ritson on Advertising Effectiveness with special guest Guilherme Ferreira VP Global Marketing Cadbury

0:28Welcome back everybody, it's the Uncensored CMO. good? What are the principles of advertising effectiveness? And what can we learn? And I didn't want you to miss out. So what I've done is I've taken all the content from that great webinar and condensed it into this podcast. It may sound a little bit different to what you're used to, but I promise you it's worth it. Here it is. Just to introduce my fellow guests. So we'll start with Mark. Mark, do you want to introduce yourself? Oh, hello, everyone. My name is Mark Ritson. I am a former marketing professor and now founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing, and I come to you live from Tasmania, Australia, where it's 2am.

1:03There we go. You win the award for commitment. And we'll be talking about your favorite ad, of course, when we get into the session. So we'll keep them waiting for what that is. And then Guy Ferreira as well, a recent recruit to Team Cadbury. Do you want to give us a quick introduction to yourself? Yes, I'm Guy Ferreira. I'm originally from Brazil, but I have been leaving abroad for quite a while already. I have just joined Mondelez. I have been on the job now with Picadbury for the last two months. So quite new. So I'll try to do my best to represent the work that the team is doing over here.

1:32And prior to Monday, I have worked in Deliver and Danone. Fantastic. Now, no small task because you already have, I think, the best scoring ads on our database in the category. So there we go. We'll get on to find out what you're going to do about that. How are you going to beat it? So what we're going to cover today, we're going to touch on five different topics. Firstly, budget setting and allocating the right amount of money to creativity. How to brief, because something that won't surprise you, not everyone does that well, and we'll talk about why. The importance of distinctive assets and how critical they are to effective advertising.

2:04The creative itself, of course, and how we make great creative. And also how you measure and assess the impact. I thought I would start with a bit of breaking news, actually. So over the last year or so, we've been working with the team over at Walk, and they've got a database of about 160 case studies of successful campaigns that measure the ROI. And they came to us at System 1 and said, what would happen if we took our database of pretest ad results and overlaid it on their database? What's the connection between the star rating that we use at System 1 and ROI from these brands? And this was the outcome, which I thought was quite fascinating.

2:38So we measure long and short, long being star, short being spike. And what you see here is that when we divide it into one and two star, that's the chart on the bars on the left, they are the ones that we predict have limited to no market potential. Three star in the middle is kind of medium. So about kind of potential for a share point gain. On the right hand side, the exceptional work like Cadbury, which we're going to talk about, four and five star. What ROI do they see? Now, I love it when data points line up like this because it shows we're not smoking our own weed. But in this case, what you can see is four and five star campaigns delivering three or four times the ROI compared to the others.

3:16So, again, it shows that great creative work gives you enormous competitive advantage. Anyway, I thought I'd put that up front. But Mark, maybe if I go to you, mate, there's a lot of evidence, isn't there, for why creativity matters. And we don't really talk about it enough, do we? Look, I think we're getting there. I think it's probably this year or last year, and much of it down to System 1 maybe as well, that we've kind of begun to redress the imbalance. I certainly think we had a period of about 10 years where we certainly didn't talk about it enough. And I think that we're now in a place, thankfully, where I think creativity is linked to effectiveness very nicely.

3:58And I'd probably go even further. I really think we're living in a golden age of advertising effectiveness, where we not only do we know shit, but most marketers know that shit and are using it in their work, which you have to trust an old fucker like me wasn't the case even 10 years ago. so i think that fact that creativity emotion etc are important i think yeah i think you're right it's been neglected but i i feel better about it than i've ever felt about it do you know what i yeah no totally makes sense interesting statistic we found the other day actually looking at the difference between confidence levels so if we ask marketers how important is creativity i think we get something like 67 saying it's extremely important right and then we asked a different question, which is how confident are you to make the case to the CFO?

4:53And that drops to 12%. There's quite a big gap between how much we believe it and how confident we are convincing others, which I think is interesting. Yeah. And it's a tricky one, right? I mean, we struggle to talk to CFOs or finance people about anything, right? But talking to the power of creativity and emotion, it's very difficult not to sound like a wanker when you're making that case right it comes across as it is inherently soft so i do kind of feel marketers pain on that one you know what i mean like it's yeah where else in the boardroom or do you really have to push the idea of creativity being valuable and so on like it's a it's true but that doesn't make it a very difficult conversation to have yeah now you've had senior marketing positions at unleaver danon and you recently joined the team at monday's you must have some experience of making the case for investment in creativity.

5:48What are your tips on how to do it? I relate to what Mark is saying. I think what is really common across my experience in these different jobs is basically that, you know, this confidence gap that you are talking about comes from the vision gap. I think money follows the vision. And when we don't have vision, we are basically treating marketing as a core center. Yeah, so I think in the case, Especially in the case of Mondelez and Cadbury, I think we managed to prove that the model works and works year on year. And then once you create that confidence behind the idea and the creativity that we bring into the business, then money, money follows.

6:28And just to give you a few facts, in the past five years with this new idea, we generated over a billion dollars in additional revenue. we are basically driving penetration driving share bringing another 40 million consumers to the brand so when you basically have a vision you have an idea that is compelling you track you get the results then you have an exponential effect from that it's a virtual circle there's nothing like actually having the results is there and this is what drives me crazy about people changing their creative all the time it's like when you've got the evidence like that why would you change you know exactly exactly yeah so and i think mark spoke about that at length you know i think the idea is the same execution is that is what is different yeah so you know how do you keep that idea fresh time and time again yeah so it is basically a concept that i have learned from my my friends at vccp as i'm now getting into the business and they call it compound creativity basically playing with compound interest you know you have a multiplier effect when you are consistent with the same thing time and time again, instead of growing linearly, it grows exponentially because you are building on memory structures that you have established before, and you are consistent with them.

7:43It goes with the philosophy that those things take time. I think the first idea on generosity, yes, it resonated. But then as you come with the second and the third, that's when you start actually building up those memory structures with consumers. So it has proven to us very successful. Now, one of the questions I've got for you both is I did a little survey of CMOs and I asked them what's the biggest thing they are struggling with right here, right now. And most of them came back with exactly the same thing, which is making the case for long-term investment and not being forced into short-term tactics, right?

8:16Mark, what's your response to that? Is that a surprise? The opposite of a surprise, John. So I wrote a column about this years ago because that question that you just got from all of your marketers is what I call the question. And I get whenever I've given a talk ever anywhere for the last, I don't know, seven or eight years, it literally always comes up. And for the first five or six years, I used to bullshit all these pretty bad answers about how to make the case, you know. and in the end I thought I'm going to sit down I'm going to write to the far I think it was six CMOs who've all all worked for big you know gi style companies and I know that they've all brought in proper long-term investment and I'm going to ask them how they did it and then I'm going to create an article about it and whenever the question comes up I'll just circulate this column from now on and and that's exactly what I did it's one of my best columns because I didn't write it It's been written by very big CMOs who answered the question.

9:16So I'm not surprised it came up because it comes up from everyone. And I guess that's the one disappointment of this golden age we're in. I think marketers are getting it, but I think the idea that we can communicate it to the rest of the organization is still a tricky one, right? And at the end of the day, let's not forget that when we don't invest our dollars in long term brand building and we overinvest in short term, we are losing enormous amounts of money as a result. And it's not even, that's not a discussion, right? We know this to be true. There's a need to do performance and there's a need to do brand building and there's a balance between them.

9:59And when companies don't have the right balance and they go short, they lose enormous amounts of money because they're so stupid. You know what I mean? You can say, do we blame the marketer here because they didn't convince or do you blame the organization but whatever it is it remains the big challenge i think is is showing how roi is a relatively dumb variable you know it sends you in the wrong direction most of the time brand building is you know is incremental as gi says and you need to keep doing it and doing it but i don't think the organizations that manage some of the big brands i don't think they'll ever get the message you It seems like we're always going to have a struggle with the question, and it will always be there.

10:46Yeah, it will, won't it? Maybe I'll move us on to briefing. And I've got a stat for you, which will probably neither shock nor surprise you, but there's a report last year, Better Briefs launched it, I think, November time. And apparently 78 % of marketers believe their brief provides clear strategic direction. and the percentage of agencies that agree with that? What do you think? I know. I know this. Guy, what do you have to get to this one? I know the status as well. I haven't worked with this guy before. Oh, there you go. There you go. 5%. 5%. Now, it doesn't surprise me, I have to say. I used to do kind of pitch training for agencies, and my very first point was always, whenever you get the brief, like literally phone the customer up and ask who's making the decision, what's the business problem, what's the real brief, you've got to do that.

11:35do not take what's written down as gospel. Anyway, that's just from my experience. But Guy, what advice would you give in terms of clients to get a good brief? I think briefing is the most underrated skill there is, I think, in the marketing profession. And I think I spend most of the time on being very clear about what the problem is. And normally the problem is at the intersection of what the business job to be done is, the consumer job to be done, and the brand job to be done. It's in the section of those three, as simple as that. And then I try to spend as much time as possible with all the partners inside the organization and outside as well.

12:11So for me, there is no moment where I hand over the brief to the agency. There shouldn't be a handover of the brief. I think we should be co-creating that brief from the very beginning. Because otherwise it happens. I have seen that many times that the agency takes the brief and says, you know what? I'm going to repurpose that. I'm going to need to reinvent and repurpose this because this is not useful. but I think if you do the other way around if you procreate that from the very beginning also allowing for provocations and allowing for challenges then I think you can get to the best position I think the second point is that the brands we have here, Monoliths, for instance Cadbury or Oreo they are super single-minded Cadbury stands for generosity and Oreo for playfulness so how can we use these values at the service of sorting out a problem and there is nothing else like, oh, what is the functional benefit?

13:03What is the emotional benefit? What is the tone of voice? And whatever. Because we are super single-minded about what we stand for. Yeah. And finally, time. Allow time. You know, I was positively surprised when I joined Mondelez two months ago that we are already working on the campaign for 2025 to 2026. That's a luxury. I'd never seen that in my life. So no wonder I think the work is beautifully crafted and super effective because we are allowing time to be cooked and to you know to go with the to consumer go back and work with the different partners around the table yeah yeah mark you train a lot of people what do you think is going on with briefs oh look i agree i love the better briefs guys that did the research i think they're making a huge difference but i differ with them on i agree with them totally that the briefs are shithouse you know 19 times out of 20 but i think also we have to factor in that most, not most, but a lot of the time, the clients don't have a strategy to brief.

14:05So if you talk to the Better Briefs guys, they're going to train you to deliver an amazing brief. But my point to them is you can be the best briefer in the world. If the strategy hasn't been developed or it isn't ready, it doesn't really matter. So for me, it's usually a more fundamental problem. We don't have clarity on targeting. We don't have clarity on positioning. and we don't have clarity on objectives. And that comes across in the Better Briefs research, but the inflection is they haven't communicated it. I openly doubt that many brands really have that clarity at all. Most brands don't know who they're targeting.

14:45Yeah, totally agree. Now let's move on to distinctive assets, which are incredibly important to success of any brand. Now, actually, let me ask you both a quick question. So at the Super Bowl, the average score of all Super Bowl ads on the system on system is 2.7. What do you guys think the average score of an ad with a celebrity in was? It's got to be higher, right? Because I just think for me, celebrities have always been a lazy but effective trick most of the time. So I'm going to go significantly higher. I think it's going to sit on average. So the average is 2.7. The average with a celebrity in is also 2.7.

15:24Ah, Guy was right. 61 % of Super Bowl ads have a celebrity in. Now, this is the interesting thing. So when we cut the data by those with a fluent device, so anything that is unique to the brand, M &M's characters, scenario, average of 3.7. So an entire star difference based on those that had owned devices versus those that had hired celebrities. And the other benefit, of course, is you didn't have to pay millions of dollars to use them as well, which is the other thing. So Mark, you talk a lot about codification, don't you? You know, how important is that? And are marketers really getting their heads around it?

15:58No, no, they're not. I mean, you know, a shout out to Jenny Romagnuk, the queen of distinctive assets. I think it's been one of the great evolutions over the last 10 years, again, has been the discipline now that's been applied to working out what your distinctive assets, assets, codes are, you know, the palettes. And then the second trick, which is, as you say, podification of everything. And the twist for me with clients has always been they get bored. And so, you know, no matter how good the marketer is and how well studied they are and how great the codes are, at some point they start getting bored of the four or five things that they have to use.

16:42And, of course, the consumer isn't getting bored. The consumer is hardly noticing them. And we have to do it even more. So for me, even when you have a good set of distinctive assets and the palette's been correctly developed and it's been applied for the first year or two, the test is year 12. Because in my experience, agencies aren't very good at this. Agencies get bored even quicker than clients and they're saying, oh, we're overdoing the purple and let's find a new character and all that shit. And so I think it's a rare, rare marketer that's able to just keep banging the same hammer against the same drum for that incremental effect.

17:23And we all know what happens, right? You get that distinctive asset out in your comms and it just creates a memory structure tunnel in which, boom, all the shit that we've been building up for the last 40 years is brought right into the consciousness of the consumer. And that's a magic trick you shouldn't live without. you know yeah yeah and gui can you tell us anything about oreo and how they use their distinctive assets what i love about that is that you know i think mark was talking about the fact that we have this very lazy binaries is either product credentials or you know building brand credentials or functional versus emotional you know above the line versus below the line i think these are all lazy uh dichotomies i think we we need to find ways of doing both always.

18:12And in the case of, would you argue that this ad is a functional ad? I think it is. It is an emotional ad? Yes, it is. It is a positive-centric ad? Yes. It is about the purpose of the brand? Yes. And that's the beautiful thing about Oreo. It's not only the cookie, because you could say, you know what, I'm going to spread this cookie all over the ad, and that's how I'm going to get fluency. That's not the case. It is a DBA with an E, with a ritual that has been established time man time again actually that didn't come from the brand it's a ritual that consumers have themselves of twist lick and dunk yeah and and then we we picked up on that and we always still more and more meaning behind it so i think the other danger as well is that also we overestimate some bbas and saying you know what again what is what is the purple or what is the cookie or what is the tagline or what is the branding oh let's put you know the brand on the corner here because we know we don't have enough branding.

19:09No, it's not about that. I think we need to also ensure that we're stealing meaning behind those DBAs as well. That's a tricky one, John. It's the arbitrariness of a lot of these assets. Some of them are logical reasons for existence, but a lot of them are just luck and bizarre moments of history, right? And I think it's, again, the ability just to go with that and realizing that they fall into the lap of a brand. And then, you know, where these colors and shapes come from if you follow the stories they're bizarre you know but being able to trust that and go with it i think is one of the hardest things marketers have to do you know and not want to fix it or change it yeah and gee i loved your point about starting with consumer insight because that's how people use the oreo isn't it and then turning that into an idea that it can build creative around i thought was absolutely genius yeah very very good example let's go to another ad now mark we're going to get to your favorite ads we talked about this last year when we met up this is garage ad from last january now i have to say mark this is one of my favorite ads of last year it just like it just gets you doesn't it that moment where you realize it's the dad the rug pull is a wonderful example isn't it it is and it's probably my favorite now of all time i think it's also when you watch it a couple more times over it's the subtleties of of the casting is great they don't overplay the brand in the early moments which is often dangerous you know you don't see close-up shots or anything to begin with you've got a little bit of menace which i think is a lot to do with the success of the ad if you look at your your emotional response chart there's that kind of to begin with this kind of like what's going on here right there's a there's there's an uncertainty is he a predator is he is she okay all of that's part of it right so it's it's brilliantly done and i think yeah i mean we have an australian version of it which has just got an australian audio version on the same ad and it works equally well so i think it's one of those universal ads but again it's on the brand man it's you know if you understand what gi and the team are up to yes it's generosity he buys her a chocolate bar but it's not some big you know charitable actor it's a little human micro piece of generosity and and and it's so perfectly on brand you know so no i think it's it's one of the greats of all time yeah interesting observation on negative emotion as well because sometimes people say to us it's all about positive emotion and some but actually what we find with story arcs is you sometimes need that little bit of jeopardy or a little bit of negative emotion to then make the positive emotion feel even better at the end and actually increases the high that you feel and as we know from behavioral science how you feel at the end is how you feel overall usually because you remember the moment of greatest happiness i thought it'd be rude of me not to quickly quote the grand fromage himself orlando Wood.

22:07I've got one of his famous charts in here, which I'm sure I'll do a terrible job of explaining. What I love about this is it kind of explains, it looks under the hood of how you generate an emotional response and what features do it. Basically, what he did is he took all the features in advertising over many years and then he measured their ability to capture attention and generate an emotion. He described them in right and left hemisphere theory. Apart from animals, of course, Guy, by the way, quick tip here. If you want to improve on your 5.9, then you might want to chuck an animal in next year.

22:40Anyway, apart from that, the things that actually capture our attention. So characters with agency, implicit communication, dialogue, facial expressions, even accents. I mean, Mark, you're saying about redoing it in Australian with the right accent. But all those things that Orlando identifies as being able to create an emotion are absolutely present in this ad. And what it's not doing, of course, which is overdoing the product. The product is part of the story. We're not too close up. It's one scene that unfolds rather than lots of fast-cut scenes. Anyway, I thought I'd drop that in because I think the Cabra example here really illustrates some of the science that Orlando's done to explain it.

23:20But maybe, Guy, I'd love to learn a bit more about generosity. Can you tell us where it came from as an idea and the origin behind it? I do have a personal belief that often many, many friends I have say, you know, it's just super naive with that. But great values build great value for business, you know. So, and I think most of iconic brands, they hold that as true. And they hold those values over their history, whatever, you know, the trends and the hypes and, you know, what is going in the world. And I think that's the case of Cadbury because I think it comes, you know, the Cadbury's. They have a Quaker background and they did their best to instill those Quaker values into everything they did from the ground up.

24:07From a category, you know, chocolate was super expensive and they made it accessible by the breakthroughs they had on making chocolate. You know, by building the benefits of drinking chocolate when there was a lot of depravity and people drinking alcohol, for instance, and they built a category around that. with the experiments they had with employees. There was a moment where they were spending over 30 % of their revenue with a wealth sort of investment behind the employees on education, on training and giving back to the community by putting another half a glass of milk into the product whilst everyone was putting the same quantity and how obsessed they were about quality as well.

24:55Even in times of recession where they didn't, you know, refrain from actually keeping with the prices and, you know, ensuring that the product was affordable. So generosity throughout, yeah. But there was a moment that we lost the connection with generosity. And we know that moment, you know, with the gorilla, it was very successful when it was done. But as Mark said, you know, the gorilla didn't have legs and, you know, that's the idea of joy. And the business started to decline because we just connected with that value from the very beginning. And I think what, you know, I need to mention him.

25:33You know, there's an Australian guy. His name is Ben Wicks. He was the VP of the brand back seven years ago. He very humbly went to the archives, went to Bourneville, wherever the brand was founded. And basically, he reconnected himself with that history and said, you know what? We need to bring back that value to the world of today. And that's when this new idea was repurposed. So it's not a new idea. It was there 200 years ago. It's basically refreshed from new lenses into the world of today. And that's basically why we have been successful for the last 200 years and even more so on the last seven.

26:12It is, by the way, one of the most important traits of a good brand manager, as Guy says, is one of the first things you do even before primary research is you go and sit in the archives and you go, you know, I think there's this view that, you know, if you've got a brand like Cadbury, that's so many decades old, that maybe the, your predecessors were somehow more stupid than you. And of course they weren't right. They were just as smart as you doing similar things to you. So often the answers for the today's challenges are in ads from the old days, you know, or in, in other things. And I've found extraordinary things in archives that answer the questions of the future.

26:53So I think all great brand managers, we say research and everyone thinks about surveys and focus groups. The best research is, yeah, go to the home of the brand, sit down in whatever archive you've got left and just go back through time. It's always time well spent, right? It's a brilliant, Ben doing it is a brilliant example of that, you know? And going back to our previous point as well, so many distinctive assets can be uncovered as well can't they about the brand that might have gone gone by the wayside as well that's a really good example and then gee in terms of like creative development i mean obviously you got this precious idea in in generosity how do you approach the creative development of the next idea i mean i mean mark something i picked up in your article is like going from the one-off gorilla to the one of many and the idea that you have a common idea that sits across even though the execution might change but gee what's your approach to kind of creative development and how to get that bit right so you kind of don't lose the good things and keep the you know don't lose you know keep the good things first of all is staying always consistent but then always always fresh and therefore our understanding about generosity in the world what are the different cultural expressions the manifestations in the zeitgeist and all of that i think is super super important and if you look at all the different ads they are touching upon one part of the tension you know which is in the end of the day you know the the world going through isolation you know people are drifting apart and then the role of the brand is bringing them together and chocolate is a is a token for for that so i i think that's our task as marketeers is basically understanding you know how that tension is manifesting in culture and being sensible to that trying to express that in the work we do.

28:38So I think that's the key work we do. And as I said before, when we were talking about Brief, we spent quite a lot of time on Brief. And I was even more surprised when I joined Mondelez. We spent nearly three months back and forth discussing the Brief. There was another nine months of creative development, close to four months in pre-production. So all those choices that Mark was highlighting, for instance, on the casting for the garage ad. That was just cursed at length, you know? And I have recently participated on a PPM last week, pretty much the same, you know? There is a lot of passion and a lot of time allotted for having those conversations.

29:19And I think that's extremely important as well. Yeah. And it's very clear, actually, looking at the ad, how you really focus on the craft. I mean, the acting, the storytelling, everything is brilliantly scripted and timed and the reveal and everything. It's very, very, very well done. How do you get the balance between, because obviously, you know, a lot of people that work with System 1 is trying to get the balance between data, you know, data and testing versus kind of creative judgment. How do you kind of approach, you know, that kind of decision? I had a boss, you know, when I had my first brand manager position that he said, you know what, young Ben, be careful with your research.

29:54It is always a snapshot of the past. Yeah. So if you want to create something new, don't let research replace your judgment. Research should be informing your judgment. So for instance, on the garage ad, there was, when we tested using another methodology, there is a problem with branding. Okay, we could have splattered the brand around, but how can we do it? So we dressed a bit of the store with some of the color, but it was very, very subtle. But I think the key change was the integration of the product. and there's something really beautiful because in most ads that's sort of a how can i say without being not you know so so i'm a bit polite but we have very poor ways of showing up the product in a way that just drops the the whole the whole story and if you look at that particular scene she grabs the bar of of of cabaret she doesn't show off or do anything with it but there's a little caress and saying you know what i just received that for my father and it really means something to me that scene was carefully crafted so it felt really really natural in the way we we showed off the product but that's not often the case i come from a category that i worked before hair care that is very famous for for interruption and what we used to call hair porn on hair switching and moving CGI and then product in your face.

31:23And I think that's super, super, super lazy. And I think the Cadbury guys here managed to find a way of integrating the product in a beautiful way and addressing that issue that we received from research in a beautiful and strategic way. All the marketeers would have done something different with it, would have started with the logo in the beginning or doing whatever with the product. And we still need to fix it. If you look at some of the executions we have, we still have a long way in that sense. But I think this piece that is working right now is sort of setting the way for us. Yeah. It's really interesting.

31:59What we find actually in all the work we've done is that the more powerful your distinctive assets, the more you can play with them and hint at them because they work so much harder. So you're right with the block of chocolate and the purple. because they're so distinctive and so well-known, you can actually play with them a lot more. Whereas if you're a new brand, you have to be probably a bit more route one about it. I put a time restriction on my mini MBAs of 40 years. So if you've got purple for 40 years, you can start to play with it. But it's a dangerous game because you do, I mean, it's sort of flippant, right?

32:33But it's true. If you look at which codes can be successfully inverted and played with and the consumer gets it, it's at least three decades of enforcement before you can mess around with them. You know what I mean? Just to build them up, first of all. And I think, again, we sometimes underestimate how long that takes. Yeah, 100%. So talking about assessment then, Mark, you often say that, you know, marketers don't understand metrics and this kind of thing. So what kind of measures should we be looking at judging creative by? I was interested in Guy's answer. I very much thought the same thing.