Being an effectiveness researcher is much less complicated than creating effective work.

Last week I did a post on LinkedIn which stimulated some conversation. 

In the post, I said that a remark I often hear from marketers who are skeptical about creativity is 'it doesn't matter how creative a campaign is if people don't remember what brand it was for'.

And that one outcome of this mindset is that, in the attempt to make clearly branded advertising, we often end up producing bland ads that people largely ignore.

I made the point that an averagely branded campaign that uses creativity to attract the attention of everyone can produce better overall effectiveness than a campaign that's ignored by most, but correctly branded by the few that notice it.

And I showed a (hypothetical) comparison of campaigns to visualise this:

The post got a little pushback, and the most ‘liked’ of that pushback was Jenni Romaniuk’s thread that began with the question ‘why should someone have to choose?’ and went on to suggest I was creating a false dichotomy by making it seem as we had to choose one or the other – rather than aspiring to the height of creative effectiveness which is to do both.

I 100% agree with Jenni’s point that we should always aspire to do both. I'm also a huge admirer of the great work that she and others at Ehrenberg Bass have done studying areas like mental availability and how distinctive assets help to ensure consumers remember the brand that the advertising is for. 

When I teach effectiveness, my message is that producing the most effective work is about getting everything right at once. Starting with enough budget to underpin growth. And understanding how advertising works in the short and long-term and adhering to those principles. And using distinctive assets to support mental availability. And choosing and executing work with creative award-winning qualities. And getting the media targeting strategy right. And managing the media spread and duration of the campaign to create the biggest effectiveness advantage.

And that we should be aiming to do all of that when we set out on a new campaign journey.

As Jenni noted, there are many examples of campaigns that achieve all of that, and which as a result produce the kind of commercial results that we should all be aiming for, all of the time.

Therefore, it’s possible. Therefore, why don’t we simply expect it of all of the advertising that we create? The principles aren’t difficult to understand. And we have plenty of case studies to look at and learn from.

But I think I have a perspective that’s a little different from my peers around the world who study advertising effectiveness. 

As far as I know, I’m the only one of that group who has:

-      Been a creative in advertising, conceiving, making and creative directing campaigns (at Lowe New Zealand and occasionally at ColensoBBDO), many of which won major creative and/or effectiveness awards, and naturally many that didn’t.

-      And been a planner and a head of planning in advertising (at PublicisMojo, DDB, ColensoBBDO and Ogilvy Shanghai), where I planned work and wrote effectiveness papers that went on to win more than 50 local and international effectiveness awards.

-      And run an agency (Y&R New Zealand) and managed the P&L, client/agency relationships and global network politics that influence the work an agency produces.

-      And researched and published major advertising effectiveness studies, papers and books (The Case for Creativity, The Effectiveness Code, Rethinking Brand for the Rise of Digital Commerce and The B2B Effectiveness Code)

I’m not listing all that to show off – my point is that having a relatively diverse career has given me a deep understanding of effectiveness, but also a deep understanding of how things really go down in the process of conceiving, developing, selling and producing effective advertising.

Being a creative was the most instructive. If you haven’t ever been a creative, let me assure you that it’s really, really hard. Coming up with ideas that deliver on the campaign strategy + have creative award-winning qualities + are on brand + utilise distinctive assets or have strong brand or product linkage is extremely challenging. Couple that with tight deadlines and cost realities that mean we can’t simply search forever for the perfect idea and it’s harder again.

Contrary to some opinion, it’s not that creative people are lazy or incompetent or just trying to do work that wins creative awards while ignoring the strategy and effectiveness principles.

To those who believe that, I would appeal to you to spend time in an agency as a creative. You’ll find out that it’s vastly more difficult than it seems to you.

The other thing my experience has given me is the knowledge that that coming up with brilliant, highly effective campaign ideas is much, much harder than studying effectiveness data, deriving effectiveness principles, and publishing and popularising them.

The ‘effectiveness researcher’ part of my career has been by far the easiest. 

I’m not saying it’s any less important, or that effectiveness researchers and marketing scientists aren’t brilliant or don’t work incredibly hard.

But having done both, I can honestly say that coming up with ideas that conform to the principles we’ve established as an effectiveness community is much more challenging than coming up with those principles in the first place. 

It reminds me of how the wealthy misunderstand those in poverty. The principles of lifting yourself out of poverty are really simple and straight-forward. You get a job. You work hard. You budget sensibly and save and invest wisely. That’s it. It’s not difficult to understand or do. Many people have gotten themselves out of poverty and generated wealth by actioning those simple principles - so we have plenty of instructive examples. Therefore, those who haven’t must be stupid, lazy, impulsive, or all three.

It's not until we go in with an open mind and an empathetic mindset, and we really study and understand people in poverty, that the cycle of poverty reveals itself. How much is stacked against those in poverty. How there are myriad unfair realities that make those simple principles extremely difficult to actually execute. Realities that we don’t see and don’t understand from the perspective of the lucky and already wealthy. How it’s not that simple at all.

My appeal to those who don’t have to do the work of coming up with creative campaigns is to bear this reality in mind. Whether you’re an effectiveness researcher, marketing scientist, client-side marketer, market researcher, agency planner or suit – I challenge you to appreciate how difficult it is for creative people to come up with great ideas. How difficult it is to get it all right, all of the time.

(By the way, I also challenge creative people to understand that, when you’re a client, buying great work is way more difficult and complicated than simply saying yes in a creative presentation.)

Jenni’s suggestion was that I was introducing a false dichotomy. That it shouldn’t be a choice between highly creative work and well-branded work. That even suggesting it is a choice is unambitious.

I philosophically agree with this.

But my job is not to be a philosopher. It’s to help brands create the most effective work that they can, within the constraints that inevitably surround them.

In any creative presentation, creatives present a range of ideas that they’ve worked hard on (often at night or during the weekend, and under considerable pressure) and those ideas always have different strengths and weaknesses. Some will allow for really intrinsic branding. Some will be really creative. And together, our job as a team is to select the idea that we think will be most effective. I really don't think the dichotomy is false - it's a dichotomy that agencies and their clients face every day.

At our very best, we achieve perfection.

But, as Primo Levi, the brilliant Italian chemist and writer said, “Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.”

I’m conscious that when we create effectiveness principles, they’re narrated events. They’re things to aspire to, revealed by studying the best businesses, brands and campaigns, and narrating their nature.

The reality on the ground is one of multitudinal factors, pressures and difficulties. When we expect that the industry executes perfectly on our narrative, or accuse them of being unambitious or incompetent when they don’t, we’re like the rich sneering at the poor.

As we grow as an effectiveness and marketing science community, I think it’s important that we bear this in mind.

#advertising #effectiveness #creativity #marketing #marketingscience