The greater the creative, the greater the effect

TheIPA has released the most rigorous and detailed correlation yet ofcreativity and effectiveness showing that creatively awarded campaignsare on average eleven times more efficient at creating growth thantheir non-creatively awarded counterparts. James Hurman, planningdirector at Colenso BBDO, New Zealand’s Effectiveness Agency of Yearand top performer at this year’s Cannes Lions, discusses the linkbetween creativity and effectiveness.

The only shitthing about having a cracking year at Cannes is those conversations youinevitably have to have with creative cynics. “It’s folly,” they’lltell you as they chalk up each award as further evidence of your lackof interest in the business of actually selling stuff. It drives mebananas. As a planner, my whole gig is making sure Colenso’s work iseffective. And I know without a shadow of a doubt that award levelcreativity is one sure-fire guaranteed way of doing that.

“Tottingup award shows for a living might seem like a somewhat frivolousendeavour,” admitted Donald Gunn, founder of the Gunn Report, at a recent UK conference.

“But it has a serious underpinning. ForI devoutly believe in the power of creativity to produce sales for theimmediate present at the same time as it builds reputation for the longhaul.”

It’s a belief many of us share. Yet the evidence hasalways been sparse, leaving us with the somewhat touch-and-go tools ofpassion and logic when others need convincing. This past year, however,there seems to have been something of a blossoming of correlation. Fromthe most varied of corners, proof of the connection between creativityand effectiveness has revealed itself. So much so that I believe thisnext decade will progress our industry from an era of faith increativity to a new era of categorical certainty of its value.

CannesLions CEO Terry Savage announced last week that there’ll be anEffectiveness Lion in 2011, created to celebrate the link between greatcreativity and marketing results. That might have been bemusing fiveyears ago, but today it’s a perfectly natural progression from a 2010festival whose biggest stars were all extraordinary effectivenesssuccess stories.

Consider the major winners from our corner of the globe. Special’s ‘Together Incredible’ campaign for Orcon,winner of the Direct Grand Prix, attracted 20,000 new customers to theburgeoning telco, all at a much lower than usual cost per acquisition.Leo Burnett’s ‘Photochains’, winner of the Media Grand Prix, took Canon to record market share.

Clemenger BBDO’s ‘Support Scent’ made 85% of their target audience ‘more likely to support Guide Dogs Australia’. Saatchi’s ‘Nothing Soft Gets In’ drove the best Toyota 4WD sales month in history.

And with greater efficiency than the Yellow Treehouse, our Yellow Chocolatecampaign created a substantial improvement in brand health, helpingYellow grow in a heavily declining advertising media market.

What’sinteresting about those Cannes results is that they mirror recenteffectiveness awards. The best in show winners of the world’s majoreffectiveness festivals: Burger King’s Whopper Freakout in the USA, Johnnie Walker Keep

Walking in the UK, Yellow Treehouse in Asia Pacific – have all been recognised at creative award shows. But of course, those are only isolated examples.

Sothe really great news of late is that the UK’s IPA – that most holiestof effectiveness case study repositories – has produced a new studycomparing the creativity of over two hundred major campaigns with thebusiness results they generated. Orchestrated by UK marketingconsultant Peter Field, ‘The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness’merges the IPA’s effectiveness data with the creative awards data ofthe equally painstaking Gunn Report.

“Creative awards have thecapacity to be a huge motivator,” says Field, “clearly for creativepeople but also for their agencies. We know they work very powerfullyon that level. But then on the sceptical side we know that a lot ofclients out there regard creativity as a distraction from selling, andwe have to nail this because we can’t allow (creativity) to become ahuge driver and motivator of the way agencies work unless we can provethat it isn’t a distraction from selling, and quite the reverse, ishopefully a great assistance to selling.”

“Ifthe result is positive,” concurs Donald Gunn (pictured left), “then ourwork, and our report, and our league tables are all worthwhile.”

Thestudy compares 175 IPA effectiveness winners without a Gunn Reportscore (“non-creatively awarded”) with 38 winners that did have GunnReport points (“creatively awarded”). The samples are evenly matched interms of market share, category lifestage and use of communicationschannels.

The first finding is that the creatively awardedcampaigns are on average eleven times more efficient at creating growththan their non-creatively awarded counterparts. Remembering that allthe campaigns in the sample are effective enough to win a coveted IPAEffectiveness award, this degree of difference in performance isstaggering. On average, if you spend 10% more than your competition ona non-creative campaign, you’ll get a 0.5% market share gain. Spend thesame amount on a campaign of creative award standard and you’ll get a5.7% gain.

This study isn’t the first to compare creativecampaigns with non-creative ones. Donald Gunn himself twice created his’Do Award Winning Commercials Sell?’ research study in the 90’s andearly 2000’s, echoing the IPA’s finding that creative campaigns doindeed outperform campaigns in general.

But the IPA study digs alittle deeper. What their depth of data enables them to
show is that ascampaigns get more creative, they also get more effective.Topperforming campaigns manage to create impressive results on a smallerspend. They’re very effective, while at the same time being moreefficient. Good performers still produce results, but need a highamount of media whack behind them to do so.

WhatField (pictured left) and his study manage to demonstrate is that bigspenders with moderate results tend to have low Gunn Report points. Thebig spenders with big results have slightly higher creative awardsuccess. The moderate spenders with moderate results have higher GunnReport points again. And way out in the lead are the moderate spenderswith big results, who have on average six times as many creative awardpoints as the rest. The numbers show conclusively that as campaigns getmore creative, they get more effective.

Fields’ thirdquestion is why? How does creativity make campaigns more effective? Hisanswer is a beguiling one. The analysis shows that the creativecampaigns tend to rank lower in terms of tracked advertising awareness,but higher in terms of what he terms ‘fame’. The actual instances ofseeing the advertising is lower, but the buzz around the idea and theconversation that’s created around the brand is much higher. In aconversation economy, which of course we’re in, more creative campaignsthrive while less creative ones rely on the brute force of media spend.

Ifyou’re as nerdy about this sort of thing as I am, you’ll be delightedto learn that you can watch Peter give the full presentation, completewith maths and acronyms, here (http://www.thinkboxlive.tv/2010/16june/#).

If not, the Cliffs Notes are easy:

1.    Creatively awarded campaigns are 11 times more efficient than non-awarded ones.

2.    The more creatively awarded the campaign, the more effective it becomes.

3.    ‘Fame’ is an important strength of creatively awarded campaigns and contributes to their greater effectiveness.

Go tell everybody.