Where Today’s Creative Campaigns Are Failing
Pure creativity isn’t cutting it anymore. Key reasons why your creative campaign could be falling short.
Simply put: creative campaigns are failing to make their target audience look twice.
In modern marketing, brands expect their teams to generate unique, well-thought-out ideas that deliver impressive results in revenue fast. However, today’s advertisements are no Apple Macintosh Commercial. A lot more effort is required to survive what is described to be a crisis in creative effectiveness.
As the new Crisis of Creative Effectiveness report presented by strategist and marketing consultant Peter Field revealed, even award-winning campaigns are faring no better than their non-awarded counterparts these days. That’s based on 24 years of data analysis.
Specifically, Field’s findings show that 121 creative campaigns that picked by major global creative, marketing, and advertising awards are now underperforming. It confirms a worrisome and continuous decline in campaign remembrance, efficiency, and effectiveness long-term, no matter how creative.
There are various key avoidable reasons why a creative campaign could be failing.
1. Memorability
British market research company Millward Brown identified that engagement is one of the primary reasons why any ad is shared and not so easily forgotten. With the help of a clever tagline, of course.
There are campaigns that are memorable for all the wrong reasons, Pepsi’s Commercial for their “Live for Now” campaign featuring American media personality Kendall Jenner, for example. But, in 2020, the goal is to be more daring and inventive in crafting something as noteworthy and long-standing as Snickers’ “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” a 10-year global effective campaign for the records, and still counting.
Due to a shift to “short-termism”, which refers to an “excessive focus on short-term results at the expense of long-term interests,” a 10-year mark falls a bit far off the grid, even for top leading brands. Focusing on delivering fast results works against any company’s purpose of being remembered by its target audience.
Mars Chocolate became aware of this by 2009. The American Company made a decision to stop lagging behind top-selling chocolate brands and position Snickers as today’s world-leading chocolate bar by understanding how fragile memories can be. They created a bigger more compelling platform that imparted positive feelings about the brand and continues to pay off.
It is imperative for any marketing and advertising team to go over their best practice guidelines to not just grab the audience’s attention, but to reassure their campaigns stay in the market long enough. More compelling stories can definitely get any brand back into the tracks.
Here is something to inspire you:
“Coca-Cola’s first polar bear print ad appeared in France in 1922, and the cuddly creatures were used sporadically over the next 70 years.”
Talk about longevity!
2. Efficiency
Field also concluded that:
“briefs should stress the importance of how ideas will strengthen the brand over time.”
With patience and belief, the best way to take advantage of our creativity is to generate and execute ideas that perform in the long-term.
Brands should work on deploying creativity while carefully balancing long-term impact and sales-generating activity. That’s how Amazon outsmarted their competition back in 2018 with their Alexa voice product Super Bowl Commercial.
It was their mission, with clever use of creativity, to leave a lasting impact on the market with a much more memorable ad. In a large field of expensive forgettable commercials, the full 3-minute ad where Alexa “loses” her voice and celebrities fill in for her is still said to be one of the most recalled and recognized advertisements in recent modern history.
Just like Amazon, ensuring that the audience connects with your work will always be relevant. That is if you want to be successful.
3. Effectiveness
Results are important, but so are the months and years a campaign lasts. There’s so much more to go after than sales. In a world where people are continuously being bombarded with hundreds of campaigns, brands get very little chances of leaving a mark on its costumers.
The goal is never the final goal. Top contenders and their respective marketing and creative teams cannot afford to go on being complacent with the results of just a few months.
The ultimate goal is brand love.
If marketing specialists and creative teams can make the audience perceive a brand as high quality and worth their attention for years to come through a constant collaborative and creative process, effectiveness has been met.
Takeaways
- Refresh your creative ability by exploring different sentiments and emotions you can use to create more compelling stories that perform well in the long-run.
- Communicate with your team. Even if you are not part of an integrated team, seek feedback from other professionals in the workplace. The best work is born out of joined forces.
- Don’t work around the short-term mindset, even if that’s what’s being expected from you. Push yourself out of that poor practice and become a high-performer by balancing short and long-term objectives.
