The advertising industry is in the middle of a “crisis period” where creatively-awarded campaigns have little or no effectiveness advantage over non-awarded campaigns, a new report has revealed.
Launched in Cannes today, The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness report – commissioned by the IPA and authored by effectiveness expert Peter Field – shows that creatively-awarded campaigns are the least effective they have been in over two decades of data analysis – largely a result of short-term thinking.
“Despite our warnings, the misuse of creativity has continued to grow and the effectiveness advantage has continued to decline. This report is a final wake-up call for good sense, before it is too late,” Field said, urging those who value creativity to study and act on the findings.
“We cannot afford to go on being complacent; left unchecked, the catastrophic decline in creative effectiveness will ultimately weaken support for creativity amongst general management. Money spent on creativity will become ‘non-working’ budget and will be cut.”
Meanwhile, efficiency also continues to decline. In an analysis of 600 case studies, creatively-awarded campaigns fell from being approximately 12 times as efficient as non-awarded campaigns between 1996 and 2008, to just four times as efficient between 2006 and 2018.
As that rate continues to fall, the report argues that creativity is “almost certainly” delivering no overall efficiency advantage today.
However, despite the worrying tone, the IPA said that the problem should be “entirely avoidable” if lessons of best practice in creativity are applied by agencies and their clients.
Creatively-awarded campaigns who adhere to these lessons are eight times more effective than those that don’t in terms of the number of business effects, and almost 16 times more likely to bring major profitability growth.
The industry must also “urgently” change the way it identifies and rewards creativity and stop rewarding campaigns that pursue short-term goals, the report added, as short-termism “drives collapse” in creative effectiveness and efficiency.
Commenting on the report, Janet Hull OBE, director of marketing strategy at the IPA, said that Field’s “rallying cry” should not be “overlooked”.
“In essence, as Peter Field demonstrates so convincingly, the correlation between creativity and effectiveness, and between creativity and efficiency is weakening,” she said.
“This is not because the rules of creativity for brand building have changed, but rather that they are not being applied in the right measure, through the right channels, at the right time. Just as in the wider marketing planning process, creativity is becoming a victim of short-termism.”
The report comes following the IPA’s 2016 Selling Creativity Short campaign, which aimed to tackle the danger short-termism poses towards creative effectiveness.
