A Forrester report in Campaign from late 2021 claims shockingly that only a third of USA ceos think their marketing chiefs grow business. This just doesn’t ring true to me. Every CMO I’ve met is driven by growing business, effectiveness and creativity. Is there an issue with the language of branding in those board rooms?
The increase in ad bombardment has consequences for trust and interest in advertising. 60% of adults say that they see too many ads and as media consultant Nick Manning has written: “The user experience is suffering and the traditional compact between the public and the ad industry that held the acceptance of advertising in balance has eroded as some of the old controls fell away.”
Forbes writer Emilia Kirk explains: “Attention is a finite resource. On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day. The average human brain is simply incapable of processing such a bombardment of content, which means the vast majority of ads seen are only ignored or forgotten about within seconds. As the number of advertisements encountered increases, so has the hostility towards them.”
There has been evidence of a worrying drop in effectiveness in the UK according to WARC’s ranking. Some of this may be mitigated by the biannual cycle of IPA Effectiveness awards (last year was an off year), but we need to pay attention to these findings. Campaign reporter Daniel Farey-Jones states: “Between 2014, when the WARC Effectiveness report debuted, and 2019, the UK consistently occupied the second spot in the country ranking for the most awarded campaigns around the world. However, it placed third in 2020, fourth in 2021 and now seventh in the 2022 ranking.” As I wrote in the last IPA Advertising Works 25 book introduction: “It’s our collective responsibility to champion effectiveness and its measurement for the ultimate health of our sector. Any business that doesn’t do this, that doesn’t put effectiveness at the heart and centre, and through every muscle and sinew of activity is short-changing its own future.”
A downward spiral must be avoided where declining proved effectiveness, diminished public trust in advertising and the noted board brand rift in major organisations all contribute to diminished outcomes for our sector.
We can turn this around.
We can improve the relevancy of advertising by aligning media and creative and this will drive trust and enjoyment of advertising. Do you remember when you were a kid how every ad break in kids commercial TV was like a brilliant catalogue of toys that you loved? What if every ad you saw was relevant to you? And frequency was capped to ensure no wastage. This would break that cycle of bombardment and mistrust. W hen data, media and creative are optimised in concert, effectiveness increases significantly. This is the start of the fifth age of advertising.
We must all take responsibility for effectiveness measurement. There was a strong showing in 2020 in the IPA Effectiveness awards, when I was convenor, producing a truly inspirational body of work, and I expect to see the same this year under the Convenor Harjot Singh, Global CSO, McCann and his team of judges. However, every leader in our sector must make sure that effectiveness is built into their, and their teams’ objectives and key results.
In addition, it may be that we should consider adapting the language of branding to fit the board room. My long term esteemed colleague and performance legend David Kyffin used to tease me by referring to me and my team as the “brand bunnies” as if this was a less serious part of the advertising mix. He believed however that great brands drive great performance and that brilliant performance and of course customer experience do support great brands. Yet the lack of knowledge revealed by The IPA and FT research “ The board brand rift”, which tells us that over half of business leaders rated their knowledge of brand-building as average to very poor, indicates that understanding brand building is not a priority for those leaders. Is language part of the problem? Let’s talk instead about building value and generating demand.
Branding just might need a rebrand.
There are 48 ways to transform creativity; here’s #6
May 23rd, 2022There are 48 techniques that can transform the creativity of the work that you do. Here’s the sixth technique: What if we exaggerate?
Take an idea, take a problem, take a question and exaggerate it to help you find a creative outcome.
One of the most iconic pieces of advertising did this beautifully. The Sony Bravia ad featuring huge dollops of colour cascading through the landscape took the literal idea of enhanced colour and exaggerated it into something that would not just transform your TV experience, but which would transform your whole physical and emotional experience. The art director Juan Cabral reportedly wanted to exaggerate even more than the final shoot allowed, he wanted to throw a million balls through the streets. In fact they couldn’t find a million balls in time for the shoot, and so a mere 250,000 were used.
Apple’s 1984 commercial. Conformity exaggerated into a dystopian nightmare relieved only by Apple’s revolutionary new computer. Old Spice’s The man your man could smell like. Not really, of course, but yes in your wildest dreams.
Beyond the realm of advertising exaggeration can drive creativity. Peaky Blinder’s writer Stephen Knight took the real lives of a Birmingham street gang and exaggerated the characteristics of one gangster: Sam Sheldon and by making him smarter, prettier and more heroic created the show’s magnetic protagonist Tommy Shelby.
Exaggeration of threats can lead to creativity in business problem solving. This might seem unnecessary in these times of change and disruption but change is less difficult if you can get ahead of it. Re-imagine customer service by auditing best in class service, not in your competitive set only but beyond the sector that you operate in. What would happen if your closest competitor delivered at that level? What actions do you need to take now in order to ensure competitive advantage?
Risk management requires not only imagining the worst that could happen, but also working through the business’ appetite for risk, should the worst occur.
New product development and increased satisfaction can be accelerated when you pre-empt a potential client or customer re-pitch by offering a solution to a problem that the client isn’t even aware they have yet. How about imagining the client in question as the most unreasonable client you’ve ever met. Consider them to have the standards of the princess in the story of the princess and the pea and the patience of a toddler.
When we were answering the brief for the Cannes Lions Creativity for Good competition we applied exaggerated thinking to one of the insights. To quote Francesca Ranieri, one of my Team Wriot team mates, “if women received as much business funding as men, and if they combined their business worth, they would become the most powerful economy in the world”. From this exaggeration of the economic facts we created the award winning campaign – you can find out more here.
If you are having a tough time, creative exaggeration can be surprisingly helpful. Dreading something? A difficult meeting? A speaking engagement? A networking event? What is the worst thing that could happen, and if it did, how bad would it actually be? Was inspired by this years ago by asking my brilliant daughters how they were so good at networking (my particular bete noire). They replied: “we just think, if it goes badly, we don’t ever need to speak to that person again”. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy includes this technique too as a way to stop worrying – exaggerate to the worst case scenario and then go further and work out what your reaction might be to that: “If the worst-case were to happen, what would you do to cope with it? ..If you do have a bad meeting, you might be disappointed for the rest of the day, curl up on the couch with a pint of ice cream and watch T.V. Get back on that horse the next day.”
Looking for a creative solution: Exaggerate
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