September 2024:

The statistics around the state of creativity and effectiveness in Australia makes marketers think: ‘this is not about me or my content’. Nothing could be further from the truth because each one of us has paved the way to a creative effectiveness crisis.

”We know that creative and effective content drives salience. It is the most important ingredient in delivering campaign ROI. In collaboration with WARC’s ROMI Database, Kantar proved beyond doubt that creative and effective campaigns generate 4.7 times the profit.” 

Despite this, we still tend to operate with a myopic lens hiding behind time and budget constraints. Why is this myopic? It is because we seem to be loosening our purse strings for the new and shiny in the media landscape without a consideration for the money that we are investing betting on a wrong horse – here, the creative. This has brought us here.

The Kantar LINK database is the largest treasure trove of advertising insights and after an analysis of 11,400 ads across TV
and Digital (2021-H1 2024) we discovered that content in Australia does not seem to be serving the needs of the people or the brands. It has been observed that involvement levels have dropped significantly over this period (55 percentile point dip) indicating that the ads we have been creating are turning people away instead of luring them.

Involvement is the measure of engagement quality that the ad triggers in people.

It ranges from an Active Positive/lean in and watch to an Active Negative/irritating experience. We seem to be increasingly irritating our consumers. It should come as no surprise when we see the impact it has had on Brand Equity or Demand Power (the Kantar measure for equity that combine Meaning, Difference and Salience). Demand Power has seen a 40 percentile point decline. This is largely driven by a lack of brand difference (34 percentile point drop).

Where is this perceived lack of difference being attributed to the brand coming from?

The key lies in the way we tell our stories – less than half of the ads are seen as ‘different’ or ‘distinctive’! So, we are reminding consumers of who we are as brands, what we do but there is nothing new or different about what we are saying or how we are saying – both, at a brand and a category level.

So, in a nutshell, we are creating at the speed of light – becoming prolific and clever with content generation to the level of industrialising content development. But at the cost of the idea and at the cost of losing consumer engagement.

The Kantar Australia ‘Destination: Marketing Effectiveness’ survey conducted in collaboration with WARC among Australian marketers indicates that 75 per cent of the leading businesses invest in optimising the idea at an early stage of content development to achieve emotive clarity and best-in-class synergies between their campaign assets (only 25 per cent of the lagging businesses invested in idea development).

Once they get the idea right, then the focus is on optimising for the platforms because content does not travel across TV to Digital and other media (only 50 per cent transference between channels). So, they ensure that they have enough footage to be able to edit and customise to platform given their different behavioral economics (64 per cent of the leading businesses optimise to platform).

Leading businesses that are growing and thriving in Australia do what is right by creativity. Their journey in creative development in nothing short of the journey of the Hero. They are bold and brave at the early stage – testing the fringe and breakthrough ideas that scare them alongside the safe. They then, consult and go into their shoot well-planned. All the time, being aware that they have the responsibility to create and reflect culture, entertain and land their ideas to win in the short and long-term. They hit middle earth and want to ensure that they have canned enough (a long-forgotten term to mean shoot enough stock) to allow them to customise their content to platform. They are not traditionalists and hence, unafraid to use AI technology to test and learn till creativity and effectiveness converge in their content across all assets of the campaign.

These are the heroes that we celebrate as leaders in the market, and we thank them for their trust and partnership with us over the years. They live by the principle of ‘shamelessly’ optimise and ‘arrogantly strive’ till you get it all right. The next bend in the road for them would be getting media right.

Irene Joshy
Head of Creative,
Australia, Kantar