The Power of Compound Creativity with Dom Dwight (Yorkshire Tea), Vickie Ridley (Lucky Generals) & Andrew Tindall (System1)

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Yorkshire Tea and their partner agency, Lucky Generals, who have been putting these principles to practice over many years and have been hugely successful as a result. So not only are we talking about the data, we're also talking about the practice. So go grab a tea, ideally Yorkshire Tea, sit back, relax and enjoy. Here it is. Andrew, welcome to the show. Hi, long time listener, first time caller, John. It's not as if we've met each other. No, no, no. You should have mentioned you have a podcast. Yeah, I know, exactly. But you've been working busily over the last few months on this new report that's just recently launched called Compound Creativity.

1:04What was the idea behind that? The idea is that marketers know that consistency is the right thing to do to grow a brand, but we don't really see much consistency, do we? Like all the awards essentially reward new. The first thing that marketers do when they get in a role is essentially look for what to change. but in our hearts we know that consistency is the right thing to do so IPA and system one really want to put some evidence together to champion consistency and do and keep on doing the right thing for longer now if I was to look back at our whatsapp chats the number one chat I think you and I had these years what the hell do we call it so how do you how do you end up with compound creativity as a title yeah um two months two of those months were the title I think I'm obsessed with the right name and position of something is is it something will live or die by that so i was putting we were obsessing over the title so we started off with um wanting to kind of leverage what you did with the cost of door right uh loss aversion we're dancing around like the cost of change and then we started going on i mean the findings in the research really point to the idea of um the magic of a campaign so then we kind of was leaning into this idea of campaign power um which um is just just lands the wrong kind of semiotics and connotations i think so then we finally got to the idea of compound creativity which is actually technically a long screen from the ipa suggested it which is a killer idea and because in the research we found that consistency compounds creativity it gets bigger and bigger and bigger more effective every year and it also points to the fact that you've got to have something special to start with you know if you start strong and then you compound it, you get stronger.

2:48It's not just about consistency over anything. You need to have that amazing idea to start with. And talking about consistency, you can define consistency in different ways. And you came up with like the building blocks of consistency, didn't you? What are the things that make a campaign consistent? So we got to three kind of building blocks. The first one you could call brand coherence, but I would call it solid creative foundations. So we're looking for brands that find an insight-driven positioning, a creative idea with legs, and an amazing creative team, and stick to that for multiple years.

3:24So getting those building blocks, those foundations right, and that being present across time, across assets, across platforms. So that's kind of our first one, those foundations. Our second is a unique one that You don't really hear people talk about much, but it's getting the culture of consistency right. You hear so many brands now that have like 20, literally 20 agencies, an agency for each different platform and different markets and all this. But we need to put these ideas across platforms and across campaigns. So we were looking for the idea of teams working together to put these ideas into digital, into out-of-home and stuff like this.

4:03We also looked for the idea of ad life. So what is the average age of a campaign and assets? So how long do brands commit to putting those on air for? We look for evidence of what Orlando would name this one. So commitment to showmanship. Some brands dip their toes in entertaining advertising. And then that's it. For a few more years, we'll go back to kind of shouting at people down the phone to give us some cash. but some brands manage to be consistently right-brained and entertaining over a long period. And then a boring one, we looked at what I would call kind of creative efficiency, which is multiple versions of assets and also reusing assets across campaigns, sweating your campaigns harder.

4:51So that's kind of the second bucket we looked at. Does your marketing team have a culture of consistency? And the third bucket is what you would assume I'm talking about when I say consistency, it's execution. characters, assets, tone of voice, celebrities, and soundtrack. How consistent is the execution across assets? Now, how do you work out the business impact of all this? Because as I understand it, you took the IPA data, you took the system one data, and you're able to work out what the value of being consistent would be. So how did you work that out, and what did it tell you? Yeah, good question.

5:25So it's all the powerful research that you see, and the most convincing research is when you combine multiple data sets. So first of all, we had to use System 1, and it's kind of where the idea came from in the very first place, is that to do this, you'd have to get every ad launched by these brands over a five-year period. Luckily, I think it was you and John Keery decided to start testing every UK and US TV ad. I think it was five years ago. Yeah, yeah, about five years ago. We took around 5 ,000 ads, which have been tested on like 600 ,000 consumers consumers with our test you add stuff and then we match those brands to you go of brand tracking data to get the brand strength and then we matched those brands to the latest campaigns in the ipa data bank to understand what effects in market these brands kind of drive so we've got the creative quality we've got the brand strength and we've got the actual brand and business effects and then matching all that up i think the best summary is that we got to this finding that we predict inconsistency will cost just the brands in our research three and a half billion pounds over the next five years so we worked out that because consistency lowers creative quality these brands and just in a sudden just the 56 brands would have to spend an extra three and a half billion pounds to all grow at the same rate which really kind of should be sounding alarm bells really for brands that's incredible isn't it yeah so what was the difference let's say in star rating between those that were consistent and those that weren't consistent?

6:54So we saw advertising from the most consistent brands get an average star rating of 3.3. We saw advertising from the least consistent brands get an average star rating of around two and a half. So it's effectively, on average, a whole star jump. So you expect to be growing an extra percentage point in market share annually, assuming that same kind of media spend with that jump. But what's magic about it is that this gap gets bigger every year. So we saw the star rating for the least consistent brands. It remained incredibly stable because these brands were changing agency every year, changing idea, redoing their brand look and feel.

7:34And they were effectively starting again every year and were just staying around two and a half year and year. Whereas advertising from the most consistent brands, it was growing by a quarter star rating annually. So then when you, I mean, that's why we call it compound creativity. The gap between the most consistent and the least consistent brands gets bigger year and year. Then after a five-year period, you literally see advertising work twice as hard from the most consistent brands than the least consistent brands, because this gap just keeps getting bigger and bigger. That's amazing, isn't it?

8:05And I think you also managed to revalidate something we had discovered a couple of years ago, where in versus where out. So even with the same, I mean, you're talking about consistency in a broader sense, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. But even on the same assets over time, I think you were, was it 0.7 or 0.8 star? You know, if you look at it over time as well. So, yeah. So I think you led that great research looking at wear out. We're looking at the same ads and how actually good advertising wears in, not wears out. We looked at a slightly different angle where we looked at how long a brand uses an ad for on average.

8:37And we saw that if brands use their ads longer on average, they create higher creative quality. So we saw the brand that uses ads the longest is actually a Yorkshire tea. They keep their ads on air around two years at a time. Whereas some brands in the study use their ads for 15 days at a time on average. So they start to look at it and it becomes very obvious, right? If you're going to put an ad on air for two years at a time on average, you're going to try a little bit harder than if you're only going to have it up for two weeks. That's true. So it's kind of a different way of looking at wear out.

9:13So wear out doesn't exist, but then brands that manage to create great advertising and use it for longer, they have more time to focus on creative quality and strategy and actually focus on effectiveness. And one of my, going back to our friend Orlando, one of my favourite inventions of his is the idea of the fluent device, isn't it? Something that's ownable to your brands that appears everywhere you appear. And I think also your research showed that those that use fluent devices also saw a better result than those that didn't as well. So that's another, I think, tactic that brands can lean into.

9:44A fluent device, a repeatable brand character that brings drama to advertising, it's not an easy win. So we actually saw that brands that use fluent devices in their first two years, the advertising on average performs worse than ads that don't use fluent devices. But then after that three, four, five-year period, you start to see these exponential gains as people fall in love with characters and ideas. The best example, I mean, we're filming this near Christmas. Well, advertising Christmas. Christmas is too much of a way. Advertising Christmas. Advertising Christmas. Jesus, this is tiring. Kevin the Carrot, right?

10:25In his first two years with Aldi, their average score was in the threes. It was. And then we saw four, five, 5.9. And it's just got better and stronger and stronger as people fall in love with this character. And it starts to point to why we see consistency driving effectiveness. And it's three main things we saw in that research. So, you know, there's this phrase that I think has been said on this podcast before, familiarity breeds contentment so using the same ideas platforms characters even ads consumers start to like your advertising more and they want you to show up more the second would be processing fluency if you're repeating the same messages and ideas again you lower cognitive ease and people can understand your message more and in a world where now marketers are kind of hooked on more lower attention media channels where some very high-reach media channels, you need to land a message in a few seconds, really.

11:26By lowering cognitive ease, and so people understand your creative idea, you can access these other media channels. And that's why, you know, best practices often launch your 60-second, hammer it, and then actually what's the 20-second that you can extend your reach and frequency with because you've lowered that cognitive ease. And then the other kind of idea that we saw working here is from Ehrenberg Bass, you know, the world of memory encoding. It's a lot easier to refresh memory structures, the same ones, than build new ones. So when we see brands hammering the same assets, ideas, ads, characters, they're refreshing the same memory structures and they're building all the things you expect, awareness, salience, this kind of stuff, and growing distinctiveness.

12:14Now, the other benefit, of course, working with the IPA is their database gives us access to actual business effects as well, which is really fascinating. What did the business effect data show you about the brands that were being consistent? Well, it's greens across the board, really, John. We saw value share. Well, first of all, we saw business effects, brand effects grow. So we saw huge jumps in awareness, distinctiveness, salience, changing attitudes, brand images kind of stuff. And we saw then this beautifully ladder into the business effects. We saw value share grow, market share grow. We saw consistent brands report double the very large profit gain in the IPA debt bank.

12:56That's absolutely huge. And what I particularly love about that is we see all our data kind of lining up together. So at the top, what we talked about was the system one creative scores predict ads working twice as hard. Then at the bottom, we see double the profit gain. It's really nicely lining up. And then as I was presenting this, and then the first time at the IPA event, Les Burnett came over and he pointed out that one business effect that we didn't see shift was actually volume change. But if we're seeing value change and profit change and market share change, but not volume change, that points very heavily to price sensitivity.

13:36So consistent brands can charge more. and it's a great example that just won the Grand Prix for the IPA effectiveness of what's this year, was McCain's. This is a great chart. I don't know if you're ever really stuck on a Sunday evening and you need to read something. Go and read the Grand Prix McCain's IPA award and find this chart. It's got this annual year-on-year what they could charge for a bag of chips and it's going down and down and down and down because McCain's an incredibly consistent brand. So there's something going on with price sensitivity. And then what we didn't see consistency lead to, the IPA tracked two very interesting effects, which is arresting market share decline and breathing life into a stagnant market.

14:21So, you know, you're losing rapid market share or your market's completely stagnant. Consistency is not your friend. I mean, it's the Einstein quote. What was that Einstein quote? It was... The whole definition of madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome. Yeah, there you go. Now, if you've got a one-star ad, if you haven't found that creative idea, if you've not got that amazing positioning, holding the wheel is not going to help you. Being consistently rubbish is not going to help you. Exactly. My favourite example from the kind of stagnant market is really toilet roll, right?

14:51Like who gives a crap is a good example of they came and shook up the entire market and then they've consistently done that and look what they've done. They've eaten up market share. They've done brilliantly. And lastly, some good news for our agency friends about don't fire your agency as well, isn't there? Some good supporting evidence for sticking with the right partners. Yeah, no, completely. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like I've been paid off by the big the big agency holdings because we found this really interesting finding that not only that brands that change agency most of that five year period, we saw them produce lower average creative quality star ratings.

15:34But you could argue, well, actually, you know, a brand side person might say, well, if an agency creates me better work, I'm not going to change. And that's what you're finding. But actually, we also looked at what I would call annual ad distinctiveness change. So the percentage of consumers that recall your brand correctly after seeing your advertising. And we looked at how it changed over the five-year period. Brands that change agencies most saw their ad distinctiveness decrease by around a percent every year. So after the five-year period, I'd argue that if 5 % less of your consumers aren't linking your advertising to your brand, you're wasting 5 % of your media.

16:12And that really points to the power of building strong relationships with your creative teams so they can build knowledge and skills and execute long-term plans. Because if we look at the brands that didn't change agencies over that five-year period, we saw their ad distinctiveness increase by 3 % annually. So more and more of the advertising was simply working harder. So you could argue the gap gets bigger then between those situations. Exactly. Everything points to... Now, we're going to be talking about them in a second because Yorkshire Teague will be joining us in the second half of this episode.

16:43But just run down the top most consistent advertisers and brands that you saw in the study. The most consistent brand that we found was Great Western Railway, which I love talking about because, you know, in our world or sat on LinkedIn all day, you see a lot of people talk about the same brands. And when System 1 tests every TV ad, we find the boringly effectiveness gold in the haystack, right? Like no one's talking about GWR, the train brand, but they're literally maxed out across all the metrics we looked at. The second most consistent brand that we saw, and the amount I go on about them, people assume I've been paid to talk about them.

17:24And it's nothing to do with the fact that I'm actually from Yorkshire, but it is Yorkshire Tea. The idea that, a few things that Yorkshire Tea is incredibly good at is that this idea of where everything's done proper is the epitome of finding that insight-driven positioning and bringing it to life with a creative idea of Lex. And they've stuck to that, and it's gold that just keeps on paying back. And we also see Diageo brands do quite well. Guinness is a very consistent brand across multiple metrics, and so is Gordens. Gordon's, their look and feel has not changed for a very long time. And then we also see Aldi do very well.

18:04Of course, yeah. Of course. Kevin the Carrot is the epitome of some of the things we've talked about. We also see, again, another kind of borrowing brand, Andrex. Andrex has been consistent for how many years now? Yeah, very impressive kind of FMCG brands. Yeah, brilliant. But if anyone wants to get a hold of it, there are lots of very nickable charts in the presentation. So presumably go to System 1 Group website and it's available for free. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to part two of this extra special episode of the Uncensored CMO where we're talking about creative consistency. And we have in the building, ladies and gentlemen, two people that know a lot about creative consistency.

18:42So Dom Dwight and Vicky Ridley from Lucky Generals and Yorkshire Tea. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Lovely to be here. Thanks for having us. So it's great just chatting to Andrew there about all the research on creative consistency and the impact it has on business. And what I love about having you two on is because you've been delivering this, you've been actually doing it. And congratulations, by the way, on coming second in the creative consistency table. Nearly there. So well done on that one. Thank you. We'll get there. Indeed. Give us another 10 minutes. Well, something to go for, right?

19:10Exactly. I know this is probably the only price where you have to wait quite a long time to get it, as opposed to changing it every year for a can entry. but apart from this of course you also won the ipa gold didn't you recently so well done it's been a good few months it has isn't it so fantastic well take us back to the start i mean maybe dom i'll start with you to introduce yourself and you've been working on the brand for quite some time so you've had some consistency yourself on the brand as well where did it start for you and how did you end up being in charge of the marketing well one of the things i'm conscious like i've been on your show before john so there's also like this aspect of uh the consistency of um what did i say when i was last on your show so I joined the business Betty's and Taylor's is the name of the group it's a family-owned business based in Yorkshire so it's kind of essentially still an independent business I joined them in 2008 as a copywriter and I'm not going to tell the whole story because it took up an hour of your podcast last time but um copywriter through social media into digital into creative and then eventually a marketing director in 2016.

20:082016 was when we did a pitch which led to us working with Lucky Generals, who we've been working with ever since. And then most recently, I moved out of the role of marketing director at the end of last year and I've moved into a new role, strategy and innovation director, which is throughout all of the sort of wonderful success and the celebration of Yorkshire Tea, I guess as a business, we've started to reflect on the fact that we are very, very dependent on Yorkshire Tea. We need other irons in the fire for the next 10 years. So that's where I've started to focus. But I haven't left the building.

20:37I haven't left the business because I guess the consistency is born out of it being a nice business that I don't want to leave. And I remember you saying as well when we talked last time that it's not just your role, but the management team itself has also been pretty much unchanged over the last 10 years as well. Yes. So I think the consistency benefit is not just from a marketing perspective, but business as well. Absolutely. So Vicky, can I ask you, were you on the pitch team? I was, yeah. I was an account director back then in 2016. So I wasn't in the pitch room, but very much on the pitch team.

21:08And yeah, I've stayed on the business ever since. So Dom and I have been working together for eight years now and kind of grown up together a little bit, haven't we? We've changed roles together and sort of worked together throughout that. So, yeah, it's been great. Now, I think I've just learned that I think you must have set a record for most number of ideas presented in a pitch. Yes. I don't actually think we played that one brilliantly. I mean, it paid off, but it probably wasn't our best pitch ever. I think we got so excited by the brand and by the idea that we came up with that we actually presented 17 scripts in one meeting, which was potentially a bit overwhelming.

21:40for the guys there, but I guess showed the strength of the idea. But it was a bit of a wild meeting, wasn't it? I don't think it was our best appearance, but it did the job. Yeah, you won. Now, I do know something about Dom. He tends to only change his creator every couple of years. Credit to you, actually, because it came up in our research as being one of the reasons why you've succeeded. Presumably you're still working through the 17 scripts. We are, yeah. Is this why you're still here? Yeah, yeah, to some extent. I mean, there are some where it was like, that was a great idea eight years ago.

22:08It's still a great idea. Now, I mean, there is something I think about those scripts, although they are sort of bespoke to Yorkshire Tea and the creative platform, each one of them is essentially just like a classic sitcom type joke. So they will, I think they will stand the test of time for a long time. So some of them can kind of stay in the fridge until we're ready to use them. Like it, like it. Now, listen to the show, listen from all over the world. So if anyone that doesn't know about Yorkshire Tea and where it's from and the idea behind it. So you can just explain a bit about Yorkshire Tea, and I'd love to know a bit about how you landed on the idea of doing things properly.

22:41Because I think for a British person, that would be like, oh, yeah, that's so obvious and clever. But maybe for someone who doesn't, not so familiar with Yorkshire, how did the idea come about? Well, we can't take full credit for sort of proper Yorkshire Tea, or Lucky Generals even. But we kind of got to the idea actually from going up to Yorkshire Tea HQ during the pitch process. So we all got sort of shepherded it up there to get an immersion into the brand. And we've just, it came across so strongly when we were talking to absolutely everyone there, sort of this way of doing things at Yorkshire Tea.

23:11So shipping in hard water to test the tea against the absolute hardest conditions to make sure it's great. Really making sure that you have fantastic relationships with the farmers, you know, who are growing the tea and all these kind of amazing, amazing proof points doing things proper. And we saw it sort of emblazoned on the wall. It was actually written on a wall in reception, we do things proper. And it just came through so strongly from absolutely everyone. we talked to that we were like there's something absolutely magic in this so although it was something that was already existing and such a truth of the brand we thought there's something magic you know there's still magic to be built into that and to make it sort of famous and culturally relevant and I think that was going to be sort of the opportunity is how do you take something that is so ownable so Yorkshire you know it's doing things proper not doing things properly and attitude feels so Yorkshire and you know of the place but making sure that you aren't just going to wang on about these sort of rational proof points and how they make tea and how they treat people because it's kind of dull so how do you take that attitude and then make it famous which was which was the really exciting bit and then something we hopefully have done pretty well seem to have done I mean the other thing I'd add so one of the things that I really respected about Lucky Generals in the pitch was that um that notion of properness was part of our previous creative work um and while it was a different creative platform I think one of the things that you guys did was spot that there was the kernel of truth there were elements of the ad that were like another agency might have thought we need to start from a fresh canvas because we want to have complete territorial control here and all those things whereas actually they didn't throw away the things that had actually already been building and gaining meaning and power over time um which i really liked because i think it's probably one of the other reasons for the um the longevity of this relationship is kind of just very low ego on all well hopefully on all sides can't speak for myself but yeah yeah there was definitely something in it and some magic to be to be taken i think where we added value is sort of this idea of yorkshire tea being where everything's done proper so not only putting sort of a place around it but where everything's done proper suddenly gives you so much fun to have there and sort of exaggerate it and really go to to other other places with it so i think that was the slight unlock but yeah we definitely weren't chucking out everything you'd done so far because the brand was doing well it just we knew it could be sort of so you know rocket that success so much more so that was the fun bit so you started with 17 ideas yes you've got a lovely platform where everything's done properly i mean everything take can take you anywhere does it how do you then narrow down was your was the kaiser chiefs creator was that the first one you came up what was the sequence in terms of we started with three so the first the launch was three ads in one which was kaiser chiefs and then parky r.i.p parky but parky doing the interviews and the brownie brothers the triathletes doing sort of careering around the H2.

25:59The Brownleys had just had their real moment in the sun where a big, I think it might have been in South America, Johnny Brownlee had pushed himself too hard, was nearly collapsing by the finish line, and Alistair gave up his chance in the top spot to run back and help his brother over the line. So they were famous in Yorkshire, but at that moment they suddenly became really famous globally. So it was kind of like a lovely moment to work with them. You casually drop in, you know, Parkey, the Kaiser Chiefs and the Brownlee brothers. I'm guessing they don't come for free even though they might be Yorkshire and big fans already so how do you kind of convince the business to get behind a bold new idea but also coupled with not exactly a cheap production to put on either I mean usage rights and all the rest of it how do you kind of convince the business to get behind it uh yeah and well I know it's a cliche but the kind of Yorkshire thriftiness thing it doesn't come from nowhere so there is uh you know we like to get value out of our money and I when I reflect on this I kind of sometimes think god how did this work because um I I was a month into having become marketing uh marketing director just started to work with uh lucky generals and then my boss and some other pretty senior figures I kind of needed to convince them that this new creative direction was the right way to go and they were kind of up for the creative direction but it was this whole use of celebrities and there were two things that made people nervous one was not the money actually it was about the use of celebrity itself because any examples out there of celebrities being used tended to be quite gimmicky like the the celebrity just like badged on top as a kind of layer to get attention yeah but i think the key thing about the use of celebrity in um our work is just it's so integral to the idea like it doesn't work without there being a famous person because the joke is we're kind of almost treating them like they're not famous they're just part of our team yeah and then the second thing the money i guess um that was the leap of faith part and maybe because it was an unproven idea that we we found that we were able to get them in for slightly less money than later when it was a big established idea and everyone knows how big it is I think perhaps because it was three it was okay like it was less dramatic later when we started to work with like really big a-list celebs and it was just that one celeb and all that money was going on that one celeb I think some people would be a bit like Really?

28:14Is that how much you, you know, I've got some bosses who are a bit like, is that really what they get paid for a day's work? It's not a day's work. It's the value of their image and their brand and all those things. It's going to quantify, wouldn't it? Like the cost of celebrity versus the impact it has on the campaign itself. Yeah. But I think it's not just, as Dom says, sort of using a celeb and paying for them to be sort of this ambassador that holds up the mug of tea, drinks it and says, mmm, delicious. And then you plaster their face absolutely everywhere. It's we're using the celebrity to say something about the brand, you know, that properness attitude.

28:46So I think that's where they've paid back. Not only is it obviously giving us cut through and fame and people love those celebrities, but it's so helpful in learning what this brand is all about. And I think that's where we've seen so much sort of value in using him. Definitely. And I think I mean, it's interesting, though, when you said that it would be interesting to find out. and part of me thinks we should do that because there's something around the amount that you invest in the celebrity is partly a form of media because it's kind of maximising the media because of the fame of that person.

29:17But it is also maximising the creative because the joke works so much better if you've got somebody who's just the perfect choice for making that point. And then I guess the other weird part is I think we found with some celebrities, they wouldn't do it for free, but they would say yes when to other brands they might say no and that's to do with the way that the brand had behaved in the decades before that point so i mean honestly like one of the weirdest moments in my life was seeing a message that um sir patrick stewart had put out uh that just talked about it being the honor of his life to be the audience he had and i was kind of thinking you've done some pretty big things that feels crazy that he thinks that but we'll take but That's the genius of like making it about Yorkshire and Yorkshire celebrities.

30:02I mean, I think my favourite one is Sean Bean. Just describe that for anyone that's listening that maybe hasn't seen it, because it's beautifully acted as well. And the power is even in the accent and the actions he takes. Yes, we've got a whole host of sort of new starters about to start their new role at Yorkshire THQ. And, you know, it's sort of shown that there's going to be an induction speech, a induction training day. and in walks Sean Bean to the surprise of everyone in that room and then he goes on to give a rousing induction speech about what the business is all about at Yorkshire Tea and how they make a proper brew and go out there and do it for Yorkshire is the famous line.

30:40But he gets quite carried away in the Sean Bean standard way and it's a pretty funny little piece. Brothers, sisters, today a great legacy rests upon your shoulders because here we make more than just tea. We make proper brews. Brews that bring a tear to your eye and warmth to your soul. So go out there and do it for each other. Do it for yourselves, but most of all, do it for Yorkshire! And then he reminds everyone what time the fire alarm is at the end, which brings it back down to Earth. Oh, and the fire drills Thursday at three. I mean, that's beautifully done that bit because he drops from his acting accent, his sort of big stage accent, into his local Yorkshire.