The greater the creative, the greater the effect

The IPA has released the most rigorous and detailed correlation yet of creativity and effectiveness showing that creatively awarded campaigns are on average eleven times more efficient at creating growth than their non-creatively awarded counterparts. James Hurman, planning director at Colenso BBDO, New Zealand’s Effectiveness Agency of Year and top performer at this year’s Cannes Lions, discusses the link between creativity and effectiveness.

The only shit thing about having a cracking year at Cannes is those conversations you inevitably have to have with creative cynics. “It’s folly,” they’ll tell you as they chalk up each award as further evidence of your lack of interest in the business of actually selling stuff. It drives me bananas. As a planner, my whole gig is making sure Colenso’s work is effective. And I know without a shadow of a doubt that award level creativity is one sure-fire guaranteed way of doing that.

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

“But it has a serious underpinning. For I devoutly believe in the power of creativity to produce sales for the immediate present at the same time as it builds reputation for the long haul.”

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

Cannes Lions CEO Terry Savage announced last week that there’ll be an Effectiveness Lion in 2011, created to celebrate the link between great creativity and marketing results. That might have been bemusing five years ago, but today it’s a perfectly natural progression from a 2010 festival whose biggest stars were all extraordinary effectiveness success 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 the burgeoning 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 Chocolate campaign created a substantial improvement in brand health, helping Yellow grow in a heavily declining advertising media market.

What’s interesting about those Cannes results is that they mirror recent effectiveness awards. The best in show winners of the world’s major effectiveness 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.

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

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

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

The study compares 175 IPA effectiveness winners without a Gunn Report score (“non-creatively awarded”) with 38 winners that did have Gunn Report points (“creatively awarded”). The samples are evenly matched in terms of market share, category lifestage and use of communications channels.

The first finding is that the creatively awarded campaigns are on average eleven times more efficient at creating growth than their non-creatively awarded counterparts. Remembering that all the campaigns in the sample are effective enough to win a coveted IPA Effectiveness award, this degree of difference in performance is staggering. On average, if you spend 10% more than your competition on a non-creative campaign, you’ll get a 0.5% market share gain. Spend the same amount on a campaign of creative award standard and you’ll get a 5.7% gain.

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

But the IPA study digs a little deeper. What their depth of data enables them to show is that as campaigns get more creative, they also get more effective.Top performing campaigns manage to create impressive results on a smaller spend. They’re very effective, while at the same time being more efficient. Good performers still produce results, but need a high amount of media whack behind them to do so.

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

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

If you’re as nerdy about this sort of thing as I am, you’ll be delighted to learn that you can watch Peter give the full presentation, complete with 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.