New research out this week from the IPA and System1 – to coincide with the 2018 Effectiveness Awards and Eff Week – has proved the “tangible value” of creativity in advertising to achieve long-term growth.
According to the report, ads that use creativity in the form of brand characters or motifs are better at eliciting an emotional response and boosting brand recognition.
Yet despite this, only 10% of all TV advertising spend is currently invested on characters within ads, despite the fact they outperform ads without them.
Indeed, looking over the long-term campaigns submitted to the IPA’s advertising databank, their use has decreased from 41% (in 1992) to 12% (in 2016).
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Furthermore, even when brands do use a character, they are not using them widely and consistently, either on TV or across other platforms. For instance, on average, only 63% of a brand’s TV ads feature their character, while only a quarter of their Facebook ads do, thus limiting their impact.
System1 conducted a tagging exercise on more than 3,250 ads airing on UK TV last year to identify ads using characters and establish the opportunities their use holds for advertisers. The authors said that creative campaigns work better because they generate greater emotional response and establish memory structures that enable “fast and reliable” brand recognition.
“Not only does this comprehensive study manage to put a value on creativity – no mean feat – but it also exposes some real opportunities that more advertisers can capitalise on to truly engage on an emotional level with their audiences,” said Janet Hull, the IPA’s director of marketing, who was awarded an OBE in 2014 for her services to the creative industries.
“We now have tangible evidence of the commercial advantage of using recognisable and repeated characters and motifs, consistently within our communications.”
The research reveals that, in the UK, 43% of all TV advertising spend is on work of an emotional quality “unlikely to contribute to long-term share growth”, with similar results in the US market.
System1’s chief innovation officer, Orlando Wood, said the lack of investment in emotional advertising today will have “damaging consequences” for long-term brand growth.
