At last, evidence advertisers should be in for the long haul

It’s not difficult to count up the UK’s influence on the global advertising industry: great creativity, a strong intellectual underpinning of advertising theory, and highly strategic and creative use of media.

But of all its bequests, the most significant is account planning; the discipline that bridges consumer insight and creativity. That in turn has led the UK, via the IPA, to build a powerful and enduring culture of advertising effectiveness.

You can define effectiveness in many ways, but perhaps the best is this: using advertising to build long-term and sustainable growth in sales, market share, price inelasticity and hence profits.

Like ad industries the world over, the challenge in the UK is this: how do you get clients to focus on the long-term ad campaigns that truly bring business success?

If anyone can persuade clients, it’s the planning community; and there are few finer sights than leading planners in full flow, moving the thinking on and challenging accepted wisdoms. That was the treat for a packed house at BAFTA last week, where the erudite Les Binet of adam&eveDDB (winner of more effectiveness awards than anyone else) and consultant Peter Field (winner of an effectiveness gold) mixed a heady brew of econometrics, empiricism and a bit of neuroscience.

Digging deep into 1,000 IPA effectiveness case histories from the last 26 years to explode the odd myth and pose ideas many might find uncomfortable, Binet and Field’s findings included the following:

• Brands that advertise for the long-term generate twice the profit.
• Regularly reaching a mass audience is most effective longer-term – and better than chasing customer loyalty or building deeper relationships with existing customers because, frankly, they’re simply not that interested.
• Tight targeting is good for short-term sales uplifts, but not for long-term success.
• 60% of media budgets should go into long-term brand building activity.
• TV advertising is crucial to achieving long-term success and can increase efficiencies by a factor of six.
• All the brands that achieved long-term profit growth used TV; synergies with online increase the effectiveness of TV.
• Creativity is vital and ads that tap into consumers’ emotions are twice as efficient and deliver twice the profit as ads that use a rational message.
• Rational messaging only works in the short-term.

Phew. Some must find this stuff tough to hear: owners of other media (fortunate for all concerned then that the research was sponsored by Thinkbox and not newspapers, radio or digital media); those in the business of trumpeting the mantra of customer loyalty and relationship management; advertisers hooked on pumping out promotional-type advertising and/or rational messaging (the two usually go hand in hand); and those who live by the mantra of tight targeting (and audience segmentation).

Provable ammunition

Of course, agencies have long trumpeted to their clients the virtues of some of this: thinking long-term; focusing on brand-building; using mass-reach media (think of all those lucrative TV and media budgets); and that creativity matters.

But it often sounds like pleading, especially in the current climate when budgets are tight. At least, thanks to Binet and Field, agencies will now have some decent, documented and provable ammunition – in a language that the client’s finance director might even buy into – with which to make their cases.

Of course, as Binet and Field were quick to acknowledge, few brands have the luxury of being able to focus only on the long-term, especially when it can take at least three years to hit goals like higher market share and price inelasticity. The pressure to hit short-term sales targets is constant. The trick then is to find the optimum balance.

But it is this area where agencies are most likely to struggle to make their case. The life span of the average marketing director is generally agreed to be short and brutish – between 18 months and two years, some say – and the chances of building for the long-term are diminished if there is an ever-revolving door.

In comes the newbie and there is a high risk that everything changes, often starting with a need to build short-term sales (that being the reason the previous incumbent was fired).

Indeed, if I could recommend additional investigation to Binet and Field, it would be into the longevity of marketing directors at those advertisers achieving the greatest long-term success. Just as they have correlated the relationship between creativity and effectiveness, so they should correlate the relationship between client stability and long-term effectiveness.

Good TV ads still cost money

Cynics may also point out that it’s all very well to position TV as the cornerstone of any successful long-term campaign, but what about those brands that can’t afford it? Binet and Field will say that TV has never been cheaper – pointing to the fact that its real cost has fallen by half over the last 25 years.

This may be true, but while anyone can make a crap ad for damn-all, making good, creative, emotional TV ads – think John Lewis, Comparethemarket or VW – has not got any cheaper and will still be beyond the reach of many.

There will inevitably be those who take issue with some of Binet and Field’s findings, although not, I suspect, their broad thrust. But that is healthy. The ad business needs to put these issues on the table and debate them, especially with clients. If nothing else, it moves the game on.

By the way, the event also threw up two fascinating nuggets: one, as revealed by Craig Inglis, marketing director of John Lewis, is that the retailer never pre-tests its work; and adam&eveDDB employs a ‘Scientist in Residence’ – one Dr Daniel Mullensiefen, who is esoterically titled a ‘music psychologist’ (no, I never knew they existed either), with a day job at Goldsmiths College.

The full research will be published by the IPA next year. You can watch a video of the event on the Thinkbox website.