NO CREATIVITY, NO TRUE EFFECTIVENESS

Brand communication needs to work harder than ever before to deliver results and justify its financial investment, says Hephzibah Pathak

Effectiveness winners across the world have revealed some interesting trends. Firstly, that brands are moving from ‘propositions’ to ‘purposes’. Purpose inspires consumers to lead higher order lives. Purpose also provides brands with an opportunity to give a fresh look to their communication. It also lends itself to digital engagement and onground activation.

Secondly, brands are seeing the benefit of consistency – sticking to an idea over a period of time rather than flitting from one idea to another. There are more winners among brands that have explored new dimensions of the same idea.

Thirdly, disruptive thinking is becoming part of effective campaigns. It could be in the creative solution or the media usage. Product innovations are also becoming a part of communication campaigns. Disruptive thinking is also socially leading consumers rather than fitting into their lives. Multimedia integrated campaigns are becoming the norm, but more about them later.

As we move into the future, digital content and real-time digital content will become part of strong campaigns. This is going to become more relevant because today’s generation is moving away from appointment viewing, has a short attention span, and greater restlessness with brand messaging.

However, judging effectiveness entries will also become more challenging. It’s important while judging creative effectiveness to unpeel what the actual impact of the communication was in delivering the results. I have seen good results despite the advertising and communication. A new campaign creates its own buoyancy. So, with the support of retail display – in a growing undifferentiated brand and product world – offtake could increase as a single blip. Iconic brands leverage their past equity to drive sales. New entrants, on the other hand, have the benefit of consumer disposition towards experimentation to get initial trial and offtake. Heavy media bombardment could result in pure salience driving sales – neither actually building equity nor actually working towards persuasion through perception change.

Similarly, for some terrific creative ideas, there is often not enough scale to actually correlate results with the brand idea. Judges need to be sensitive to this. While there is some modelling available to unbundle the effect of creativity in messaging from other factors, for most effectiveness cases this is deficient. The only available quantitative metrics are advertising tracks measuring cut through and message recall. This gives some indication of how the creative messaging was received and how it actually worked. Hence, it is important for a judge, after reading the case and absorbing all the information, to pull back and ask themselves, ‘did creativity give the brand an edge? Did the creative work the consumer saw or experienced make a difference to the brand and its task?’ It is qualitative, but important for every jury member to draw on his or her wisdom and experience and take a considered view.

The challenge in measuring effectiveness in emerging digital and integrated categories is even more tricky. In digital, views, likes, shares and comments are indicators of creative cut through. However, some of these can be seen as only ‘reach’ indicators and hence have to be carefully calibrated. It is important to see what behaviour change and impact the digital campaign drove. Ultimately, much of marketing communication is aimed at changing behaviour – driving sales or human behaviour. Unless purely digital, it is hard to isolate what digital did and what the other media added.

In integrated campaigns, the usage of multi-media with market and mind measures as results is not enough to qualify for effectiveness. It is important to understand how each additional media drove results – whether it helped to build scale or drive purchase by adding to the consumer decision funnel or increased engagement with the brand and its communication. Again, the creative edge delivered through each media used is as critical as the usage of multiple media.

Historically, there has been the creativity versus effectiveness debate. In my judgement, they are closely interlinked and need to be more closely linked in the future. Creativity is important to gain consumer attention. It must have scale to make a real difference. Creativity brings efficiency to effectiveness and that is an important measure to judge. One must remember history (brand heritage) and budgets (size of battalion) have roles to play and their effect and impact need to be isolated. And it is the responsibility – and challenge – of an effectiveness judge to determine all this when he or she evaluates the written case. Hephzibah Pathak is global brand director at Ogilvy & Mather India and president of the creative effectiveness jury. She is also discussing ‘Creativity through chaos’ at 17.30 on March 7