Why joined-up thinking matters
Creative and media are often siloed endeavours within the advertising process. Making sure creative work has emotional resonance is undoubtedly vital, as is reaching consumers through the right mix of media channels. But thinking about these activities in a connected, coordinated way ultimately leads to the strongest returns.
Media and creative’s combined power
While creative quality and media support are responsible for just over 60% of advertising’s business impact on average, The Creative Dividend found clear variation by category.
- This figure, for example, surpassed 90% for categories like financial services and banking, pharma and healthcare, and restaurants and food service.
- When looking at food and non-alcoholic beverages, by contrast, that total fell to 41.3% - not least because physical availability has an outsized role for these brands.
“Advertising is one of the few commercial investments that compounds when it works,” Andrew Tindall, System1’s svp/global partnerships and author of The Creative Dividend, said. “But compounding requires two disciplines: creative quality that changes memory and media support that gives those memories a chance to form.”
Creative’s impact in isolation
- Creative quality alone, the study revealed, is responsible for an average of 24.2% of the business results generated by advertising.
- Variation in the impact of creative quality was much lower across categories when this factor was considered in isolation than for creative and media in combination.
- The standalone impact of creative quality, for instance, was slightly higher for automotive and food/non-alcoholic beverages, but slightly lower for health products in the consumer packaged goods sector.
From cost centre to growth driver
- Looking at the role of creative and media together, the study argued that advertising should be regarded as commercially meaningful in a measurable, repeatable way.
- Achieving this outcome, however, requires a nuanced blend of craft, judgment, investment, time, focus and strong creative relationships.
- The goal for CMOs is to champion breakthrough creativity and secure enough media support to give compelling work the reach and time in-market that it needs.
- Such a challenge must not be underestimated. But success could help shift C-Suite perceptions of advertising from being a cost centre to being a growth driver.
Overall, the research incorporated 1,265 campaigns from the US, Europe, UK and Ireland. The study covered the period from 2007 to 2023, and the featured campaigns represented $139 billion in market share. Consumer responses to advertising from more than 200,000 people also informed the analysis.
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Source: warc.com