Key points:
Tesla, Virgin, Ben & Jerry’s, airbnb, Levi’s, Cadbury, Nintendo, Netflix and Nike. What do all these brands have in common? Big kahunas. At one time in their brand life cycles, they have been challengers and disrupters, boldly and bravely challenging the norm and rejecting the status quo. And it’s not just ego, it’s smart business sense and has allowed them to become leading brands.
A creativity crisis?
We know what you’re thinking, easy for an agency to say, ‘be brave!’, it’s not our marketing budget on the line. But fear not, we’ve got the stats to help you build your business case for being a courageous brand. Bear with us while we geek out with some stats that prove being vanilla can be the biggest risk to your bottom line.
According to AdNews, Australia may be in a creativity crisis. The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity agrees, in 2024 Australia ranked 11th globally at Cannes, down four places since last year.
What the experts say…
Have we Aussies lost our way? Kantar’s database of 11,400 ads says maybe. Over the last four years they have seen an increase in the ‘noise’ in the Australian advertising landscape. “The use of humour has increased (46% vs. global 33%) but everybody seems to be trying to out-shout each other reflected in the average levels of involvement with content down by 50% from 2021-24,” says Irene Joshy, Regional Creative Head, Kantar Insights APAC.
Why should brand managers care? DDB Melbourne’s group ECD Psembi Kinstan makes us alert and alarmed by telling us “less than one-third of ads garner any level of attention, and a fraction of these achieve effective thresholds… the ultimate challenge of getting noticed is harder than ever. You have to cut-through in more interesting ways, integrating into the culture of the consumers, otherwise it doesn’t matter what you say about your brand because nobody will even notice it.”
But how? Field & Binet proved in their seminal study of creativity ‘The Long and the Short of It’ that ‘fame’ is the most effective strategy in driving large profit effects. The data in their 2013 study showed that getting a brand and its marketing talked about, with an idea that creates word of mouth and turns consumers into brand advocates, will deliver long-term success, build brand fame, drive price elasticity, and therefore profit. Emotion is key. According to Binet, “in the long run, emotion is where the really big profits lie… consumers will pay more for a brand they feel good about”.
And Field (known as the Godfather of effectiveness) has followed up with a new study with Adam Morgan released in July 2024 ‘The Cost of Dull project’ proving there’s a global trend towards boring advertising. They explain that brands have become widely homogenised with their categories; they look, feel and behave similarly. Dull ads are easy and cheap but we now have the data to prove it’s expensive and ineffective.
Their research based on more than 80,000 ads tested has proven the strong link between business success and the strength of emotional responses to brand advertising. The stats show advertising has lost its way with the most common response to US and UK B2C TV advertising being a neutral, emotionless one. Feeling nothing is now the main response to TV advertising, and this is even worse for B2B advertising.
Beige ads waste your budget and kill your effectiveness.
They posit that the growth of performance marketing could be to blame which has undermined the importance of brands in business leaders’ minds. Their data shows relying on serving promotional messages to customers at the moment of purchase (much of which is done via digital), is dangerously misguided. Without doing the foundational work to build a compelling brand, performance marketing becomes inefficient and expensive.
How expensive? The UK IPA effectiveness database reveals that an average dull campaign in the UK would need a budget of £10m ($19.32m) more per annum just to match the business effects of the most emotive popular campaigns. In the U.S. the cost of dull advertising for a mass-market brand might be as much as $US100m ($148.23m) per annum. And that’s only television ads. Think about the cost of dull branding across every touchpoint.
And the medium matters. Don’t put all your spend in digital platforms as they capture much lower levels of attention. A 30-second TV ad gets, on average, more than 13 seconds of full attention to engage and inspire consumers, whereas on some social media it will earn little more than one second of attention. The research shows that brands can’t be built in less than 2.5 seconds. So the challenge remains, to capture the interest and attention of your consumers outside of digital for long term brand building. No easy task.
So, who’s doing it well?
In their database Field and Morgan have tested numerous ads for long term market share growth, brand fluency and emotional response using face tracking. They found Specsavers is winning the fight against dull. Their powerful, emotionally driven, brand-building campaigns always using humour have helped them lead a previously dull and functional category. The familiarity of the format makes a neutral response less likely, and their long-term brand building has brought “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” into vernacular and made them the largest privately-owned optical group in the world.
Mint mobile also gets a gold star, what can’t Ryan Reynolds do? This is a purposefully disruptive ad which attacks the category leaders and uses random humour to position Mint as the loveable underdog with a highly emotive response as shown in the face tracking below.
Closer to home Telstra head of creative excellence Anna Jackson agrees “better creative has a better chance of occupying mental real estate – the most valuable kind there is. Our brains are supremely energy efficient, forever filtering away content deemed dull or useless.”
In terms of campaign measurement, Telstra sees more distinct and compelling work outperforming across a variety of metrics, delivering more effective outcomes for the business. “Producing ‘safe’ work seems far riskier an investment to me if it means creating wallpaper.” But she warns, remember it must be underpinned by great strategy and solve a problem for your customer.
One of our faves? The best way for your bold brand to drive business results is to double down and make it more than a campaign, as usual MONA shows us the way. As soon as you get your ticket with a suggested dog skivvy from the gift shop you know you’re in for a treat. From their camo covered ferry to their quirky restaurants, to the people they hire and their synchronized court appearances, like any good brand MONA can’t help but live their completely unique brand position: subversive, irreverent and completely disruptive.
And their impact goes beyond their gallery. Mona contributed $134.5 mil to the Tassie economy in 2017-18 and Qantas had grown its capacity into Hobart by 63% since Mona opened. They’ve also encouraged Tourism Tasmania to be bolder in their marketing, we love the bravery of a black and white tourism campaign.
Lastly, it should go without saying but just for you Elon, ask ‘am I disrupting the category for the greater good?’. Causing a stir without an overall positive impact will not float with the next gen and come off as a pure ego trip.
So next time you receive feedback from your board or focus group to pair back your killer idea, remember the two weaknesses of bland brands: firstly, people don’t notice or pay much attention to them (driving weak business impacts); and people do not remember them across purchase cycles, so it doesn’t bring long term impacts.
For marketing results that drive up your bottom line, the data doesn’t lie. To lead your category, go hard or go home.
Ad News. (2024, August 9). Is Australia in a creativity crisis? https://www.adnews.com.au/news/is-australia-in-a-creativity-crisis
Campaign Brief. (2024, July 25). Australia ranks 11th country in the world at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. https://campaignbrief.com/australia-ranks-11th-country-in-the-world-at-the-2024-cannes-lions-festival-of-creativity/
The Australian. (2024, July 22). Dull advertising costs more and is less effective. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/growth-agenda/dull-advertising-costs-more-and-is-less-effective/news-story/fce7b42cbfa347e333fcade43cd396a4
The Australian. (2024, July 29). New research to reveal the horrific cos of dull media.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/growth-agenda/new-research-to-reveal-the-horrific-cost-of-dull-media/news-story/53b1cfb873996e843906dfa16af16ded
WARC. (2013, June 12). The long and short of it: Measuring campaign effectiveness over time.https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/the-long-and-short-of-it-measuring-campaign-effectiveness-over-time/en-gb/1727
Uncensored CEO, Eat Big Fish, System 1 & Peter Field. Another dull whitepaper: The extraordinary cost of dull.https://2235762.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/2235762/The%20Extraordinary%20Cost%20Of%20Dull-1.pdf?__hstc=106808796.2d988c8b421e01aea925e40b9303f60c.1725240162665.1725240162665.1725240162665.1&__hssc=106808796.1.1725240162666&__hsfp=2169098829
BMF. Tourism Tasmania: The Off Season. https://bmf.com.au/work/tourism-tasmania-off-season-4/
