The relationship between creativity and effectiveness

Back in 1978, agency Davidson Pearce created a launch campaign for a little-known margarine spread called Krona that pushed the product’s butter-like qualities. The brand quickly built up market share, mainly taking sales from more established butter brands. And while Krona as a brand name may have long since disappeared from British supermarket shelves - ironically replaced by the ‘I can’t believe its not butter’ stable of brands - its legacy remains as the first campaign in the UK to be recognised formally for its effectiveness break-through, winning the Grand Prix award at the inaugural IPA Effectiveness awards in 1980.

Fast forward 30 years and effectiveness is still the ultimate benchmark for any marketing campaign. But over those three decades, two key questions have still not been answered adequately - exactly what contribution the creative portion of the marketing process makes to the overall effectiveness and how it can be measured.

“The problem has been that in my 20 years in the business, we have gone around in circles on this,” says Dave McCaughan, director of strategic planning Asia-Pacific at McCann Worldgroup. “It has always been the case that a lot of creative work was seen as good simply because it was creative. This includes a lot of the work that stood out at Cannes and the award shows. But when you look back over time, you think, what happened to that campaign, what did it achieve?”

The appearance of scam advertising at the global award shows over the years has not helped creative’s case. This ‘creative for creative’s sake’ has been partly responsible for the clumsiest interpretation of the relationship between creativity and effectiveness, which suggests that the two marketing objectives are mutually exclusive - that a campaign can be either creative or effective but rarely both. “Typically the industry divorces creativity from effectiveness,” says Mark Sinnock, regional planning director, Asia-Pacific, at Ogilvy & Mather. “It’s almost as if there are two environments you can operate in.”

But the most recent research suggests something very different. According to a study released last year from the IPA and run in conjunction with The Gunn Report, it was illustrated that campaigns which won both creative and effectiveness awards, as opposed to just effectiveness, were 11 times more efficient at delivering business success. Far from being removed from the business-end of marketing, it found that creative-and-effective campaigns were more likely to both appeal to the emotions and create more brand buzz.

Agencies, unsurprisingly, are quick to point out that effectiveness without creativity would be a hard sell. Andy Wilson, head of planning at BBDO Singapore, argues that effectiveness and creativity are two sides of the same coin. “You can’t have one without the other so long as the creativity is focused on the task in hand, which is what strategy does.

Indisputable research has forged a connection between likeability of advertising and its long-term effectiveness. So creativity as a vehicle to entertain, humour and generate affection is a proven effectiveness-driver.”

From the client perspective as well, creativity is seen as an indispensible part of the effectiveness programme. According to the 2011 Campaign Asia-Pacific/Synovate Marketers Poll, measuring the effectiveness of campaigns was the number-one priority for the region’s marketers in the year ahead. But running a close second - behind effectiveness by just one percentage point - was the need to come up with creative marketing solutions.

“There is no communication effectiveness without creativity at Kraft Foods in Asia-Pacific,” says   Shawn Warren, vice-president of marketing for Asia-Pacific. “To be effective, our integrated marketing programmes first need to tap a consumer insight and use it as a springboard for best-in-class creative work and media across all of our brands.”

The argument that creative marketing approaches can drive business results is one that barely needs making. “Companies who efficiently employ creativity in their businesses are not surprisingly some of the most successful ones today, despite the global recession,” explains Jarek Ziebinski, president, Leo Burnett & Arc Asia-Pacific. “Look at the recent business performance of Canon, Nike or McDonald’s. Creativity in everything they do, including communications, drives their success. Creativity is not a luxury, it’s a must.”

But while creative is an essential element to creating marketing cut-through, this ultimately begs the question of how the creative contribution can be measured and whether agencies are supporting their clients with the right kind of creative.

The key to greater effectiveness would in principle seem tied to better measurement metrics, but this may not necessarily be the case. Measurement comes as both a blessing and a curse. The wide availability of data means that there is much more that can be measured, but at the same time this increase in information can be counter-productive. “False value is placed on much of the data,” says Peter Field, an author, marketing consultant and honorary fellow of the IPA. “Clients often don’t know which numbers really matter.”

The use - and misuse - of data can come dangerously close to undermining the effectiveness project. “Many people have compared evaluating communications effectiveness to evaluating the causes of climate change,” adds Wilson. “Like the weather, there are so many complex and uncontrollable factors at play it is difficult to attribute effects to an isolated cause. Especially when the quality, accuracy and timeliness of data is as poor as it often is - a real problem in Asia. Many of the ‘predictive’ research tools in the marketplace are statistically deceptive, self-serving and operationally mismanaged: snakeoils that are seriously undermining
the industry.”

Gurdeep Puri, a founding partner at The Effectiveness Partnership, argues that the key is for agencies to allow access to all stakeholders - media, creative, digital and PR agencies - to work together to solve the problem, rather than keeping their data to themselves.

“The greater the explosion in data, the higher the chances of the wrong data being considered to create effectiveness,” he says. “Of course, it can be very different if the key data owners work together to solve the client problem and work off one single macro framework for effectiveness instead of lots of mini-dashboards that do not connect at a higher and more relevant level.”

But placing too much emphasis on the measurement of post-campaign results is itself a problem. “In one respect, there are too many tools to measure so it’s easy to do a smoke and mirrors act,” says McCaughan. “There are myriad pieces of research and tools, but we need to really try to assess what was the purpose of marketing in the first place.”

The onus, therefore, is on agencies to insist that their creative contribution goes beyond responding to a client brief and instead start to place themselves more at the front-end of the client’s business. This means moving beyond execution and introducing a creativity that encompasses strategy, engagement and media, along with packaging, distribution and design - in short, a more holistic intepretation of creativity. In this respect, the very definition of creativity itself needs to be addressed.

“Creative was traditionally about art but now it is about interactivity of messaging; the whole system of creativity around the brand,” says Sinnock. “But creativity is a critical business tool. It is not just about the aesthetic, about how things work, not just how they look. The dynamics of the game are changing dramatically, as are the dynamics of how we understand creativity.”

With this in mind, agencies have in recent years been putting much more emphasis on their briefing and planning tools. The objective is to get involved earlier, and as a business partner as much as a creative agency. Sinnock believes that such an approach is breaking paradigms and introducing a new way of thinking around creativity. “It is creative strategy, creative thinking and the application of creativity up front as much as in the form of art that you come up with at the execution. This sort of holistic creative thinking is actually quite liberating.”

Jeffrey Seah, CEO Southeast Asia at Starcom MediaVest Group has witnessed this trend first hand. “Creative agencies have started to focus on their client’s business needs with the mindset of an MBA,” he notes. “Our creative agency partners are beginning to include business goals and take front court in consumer insights on effectiveness, beyond ad and message recall. The benchmarks to effectiveness remain wide open but the thinking and process will set an agency apart from the next.”

But while creative agencies are doing more to address the effectiveness issue, are they doing enough? The fact that, Ogilvy aside, agencies have yet to establish effectiveness positions at the highest level suggests there is plenty more to be done.

“Most agencies feel that effectiveness is the domain of planning and here lies the problem,” suggests Puri. “Within agencies, it is not the planners who have the high-level relationships that are required to push the effectiveness agenda within client organisations but the account people. Until we can get the client services directors on-board to help facilitate effectiveness, it will be the sound of one hand clapping.”

Field says that although econometric modelling is a vital part of taking effectiveness seriously, much more training needs to be done. “Agencies often have one or two specialists in effectiveness — but, in fact, it needs to be much more mainstream than this,” he says. “The problem of course is funding the workload evaluation generates and with the dead hand of client procurement constantly bearing down on agency income it is difficult to see how this can happen.”

And no matter how much agencies push effectiveness, it will all count for nothing if their clients are reading from a different page, which, in Asia at least, often appears to be the case.

“Clients are now doing more to enhance the culture of effectiveness but still not enough is being done,” argues Seah. “There needs to be more openness to data sharing and appreciation, and the parties involved need to be structured collaboratively. Clients need to invest more in this area or pay their agencies more in conducting this type of work, which they are not. In this effectiveness climate, the calculator is no longer just a tool of the media agency practitioner.”
Charles Wigley, chairman, Asia at BBH says that while in his experience clients in Asia are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the region becomes economically critical, there are still problems.

“First, there is a very traditional Asian business culture of ‘knowledge is power’ on the client-side and so very little data is shared with the agency. And second, the marketing function itself is at a distance from the core business data and decision-making process in a company. In this instance, marketing can easily become something that is ‘just done because we always do it’ - without any rigorous target setting or measurement.”

Clearly, the various sides of the effectiveness equation need to come together and agree on set criteria. But for this to happen, there will need to be greater collaboration and sharing of data and objectives - and not just between clients and their creative partners.

“A one, two or three-legged chair doesn’t really work well to support someone’s weight,” says Warren. “And a chair with one leg longer than the others doesn’t really work well either.”
Warren adds that to really drive highly-effective campaigns for the Kraft brands, the company relies on the close collaboration of four parties: in-house marketers, creatives agencies, media planners and consumer insights experts.

This article was originally published in the May issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.