With the Cannes Festival of Creativity behind us for another year, the ad industry is awash with opinion pieces, analysis and debate on the value of creativity in an increasingly digital world. The focus of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix winners was upon creating purpose-driven, more authentic human messages for brands to wrap their marketing comms around – all commendable of course, yet what really matters in shifting the dial in brand metrics is getting your ad to stand out from the crowd.
An analysis of twenty campaigns from our Digital Effectiveness Databank has revealed that campaign performance varies greatly depending on whether or not respondents feel that they are looking at “just another ad.” Agreement with this statement implies that consumers feel they are viewing a run-of-the-mill piece of ad creative that is little different to the rest of the crowd. By segmenting out the worst performing and top-performing campaigns according to this metric, we can see that those ads which are thought to be “just another” ad significantly underperform those that are not.
The ten campaigns with the lowest “just another ad” scores (i.e. those which were perceived to stand out more) achieved average brand metric shifts ranging from +6% in unpromoted brand awareness to +6% in Purchase Intent. Those with the highest scores were actually found to record negative brand impact on average, with far lower awareness metric shifts and a -3% point shift in Purchase Intent.
The creativity debate is not confined to just the digital space, with the radio industry also proving its value in driving consumer impact in the run-up to Cannes. Indeed, NCS reminds us that nearly half of all campaign impact is attributable to creative quality and message, with reach and targeting of only secondary importance.
As David Ogilvy once said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative,” and with our research proving that the link between creativity and purchase intent is a very real one, it’s a dynamic that cannot be ignored in the highly automated digital world.
To find out more about how you can test the brand effectiveness of your digital and cross-platform campaigns, visit On Device Research today at www.ondeviceresearch.com or call +44 203 405 9760.
