Creativity pays: defining what makes an ad ‘great’ today
A still from EDEKA Supergeil (feat. Friedrich Liechtenstein)
What does it take for an ad to be truly successful today? Millward Brown‘s head of UK marketing, Amanda Phillips, shares her insights.
The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity celebrates the world’s greatest marketing ideas, rewarding creative effectiveness in terms of idea, targeting, execution and media choice. While ads can certainly be clever, beautiful and inspiring in their own right, the Lions recognise that what really makes a campaign ‘great’ is its ability to sell the brand, and make “a measurable and proven impact on a client’s business”.
As trends in media usage evolve and people consume messages in new ways, creativity must be redefined. Ultimately, to be effective a creative idea should deliver brand-led growth and payback. What this required in the world of just a few years ago, when people consumed media in a linear way and broadcast was king, is very different from what is required today.
To be successful today, an ad campaign needs to be hinged on:
An idea with cross-media effectiveness
People typically spend their days ‘media stacking’ – using and interacting with a number of different screens simultaneously – so a creative idea must be able to travel across all traditional and digital formats.
Marketers and advertisers need to understand in detail how people consume media, in order to be able to use different elements of a campaign most effectively to construct a brand experience in consumers’ minds. Smartphones and laptops dominate daytime screen use, for instance, while TV takes centrestage in the evenings, according to Millward Brown’s AdReaction 2014 Global Report.
As well as being stackable, the idea must work as ‘bite-sized’ content that can transfer easily across screens. Micro-video is now the world’s most familiar and popular marketing format, with consumers noticing and being more receptive to it than any other (Source: AdReaction).
The third piece of the puzzle is an understanding of how ideas are consumed by demographic, and how the execution of an idea can be ‘flexed’ against the media plan depending on where the ad will run and who will see it. While every screen can achieve everything that’s needed for building a brand, different screens imply certain attributes to consumers and can play specific roles.
German supermarket Edeka used two very different creative approaches to promote its own-brand products. The cute and ‘safe’ TV ad features children in a supermarket, and is clearly aimed at a more conservative family-focused demographic. Online, Edeka ran a wacky, riskier ad targeted at a younger more fun-loving audience, which was highly memorable and became a viral hit.
An idea with emotion
Emotional levers play a significant role in helping a brand message to land successfully, even in the digital age. Marketers and advertisers should not abandon their tried-and-tested techniques for delivering ideas that resonate and connect brands emotionally with consumers.
Ads that generate a positive emotional response are much more likely to be noticed and persuasive. Millward Brown’s Link copy-testing research on both traditional and digital media finds that ads which are likeable typically perform better: those ranked in the top 20 in terms of their impact and ability to persuade all scored highly on making people feel ‘attracted’, ‘confident’, ‘contented’ and ‘inspired’ (Source: Link for Digital Norms).
Emotional response is key to the overall success of online ads, as likeability drives impact at all levels of the sales funnel – with the most likeable ads having a major impact on brand favourability and purchase intent, for example (Source: Millward Brown’s Marketnorms survey).
An ad with the potential to go viral – which reflects a high level of engagement between brand, creative and consumer – is particularly likely to improve brand favourability. Creating a digital ad that connects emotionally with consumers increases the chances of it being shared.
Ideas that are co-created with the consumer
Customers are willing to ‘donate’ their creativity freely to brands. They get involved in research and product development, and openly provide positive and negative feedback. If a brand can harness this willingness by encouraging consumers to grab, own and develop an idea beyond the original ad or campaign, the consumer becomes a hugely positive force working on its behalf.
Quality digital content can be used to capture consumers’ imaginations and get them to play an active part in how a creative idea manifests and grows in excitability and favourability. When a blogger, for example, takes an ad, reworks it to create something spontaneous and new – perhaps a ‘spoof’ – and then plays it back on social media, brand messages are amplified and spread further, and deeper connections are made on a societal and cultural level. In other words, the idea takes on a life of its own.
While creative ads in themselves can be a joy to see, when marketers properly utilise them to deliver brand goals they are a powerful tool.
To develop an ad that successfully builds a brand and leads to real business results, marketers need to ‘unpack’ how people consume ideas along today’s non-linear, multi-screen path to purchase.
They should then use emotion to leverage the idea, and engage consumers in co-creating it. It’s well worth the legwork and the thinking involved: those campaigns that travel across media and forge powerful connections will be those that generate salience, and help make the brand experience more meaningfully different.