Emotion and accountancy – the happy coalition
Lindsey Clay, marketing director, Thinkbox, on the relationship between advertising creativity and business success.
Emotion and accountants are not two things you would necessarily put together on an ordinary day – rather like Liberal Democrats and Tories, or Richard Littlejohn and Gay Pride. But, together with the IPA, we have recently brought emotion and accountancy together in happy coalition. We are yet to begin work on Littlejohn, but the Lib Dems and Tories seem to have found each other without our help.
We have done it by bringing together two advertising goldmines: we examined the correlation between the most creatively awarded ad campaigns, as ranked by the world-renowned Gunn Report, and those campaigns that have achieved the most business success, as awarded by the IPA Effectiveness Awards. The goal was to discover whether advertising creativity (the soul of which is emotion – more on that in a moment) has any relationship with business success (which dominates the souls of accountants). We thought it might, but there was no really robust evidence, just gut feeling or anecdotes – and gut feeling and anecdotes don’t really cut it in the finance department.
The analysis of these two goldmines by Peter Field – a more cerebral and excellent man you could not wish to meet – revealed that the answer is a resounding yes, creativity exerts a remarkably strong influence on an ad campaign’s ultimate business effect. Among other things, he found that creatively awarded campaigns are at least 11 times more efficient in hard business terms than non-creatively awarded campaigns and that the more creatively awarded a campaign, the more effective it was. This isn’t to say that the non-awarded campaigns were inefficient or unsuccessful – they did still win IPA Effectiveness Awards. Effective campaigns must also have the right strategy – but better creativity turbo-charges their success.
We also discovered a bit about the role of emotion in advertising success. Creatively awarded campaigns are much more likely to be ’emotional’ than ‘rational’ in their approach (44% vs. 19%). So, put simply, they appeal more to the heart than the head (although of course we know that the ‘heart’ is actually just a different part of the head which is responsible for emotion). Emotional adverts are generally not explicitly, blatantly selling you something; rational ones are.
The importance of emotion in advertising – and life – cannot be underestimated. Rory Sutherland, the current IPA President, recently spoke on the absurdity of how, even though we now know that the vast majority of the decisions people make are made using the emotional part of the brain, organisations still insist on rationalising everything. Of course there is room for being rational, but to give it precedence and exclude the emotional mind is a very strange, irrational approach. You can watch him talking about it here http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1303
Anyway, back to our study.
Alongside the centrality of emotion to success we also found that the vast majority of Gunn Report creative award scores are for TV commercials – some 74% – suggesting that TV creativity is at the heart of the success of the most creative ad campaigns.
The strong trend for emotional advertising in the most effective ad campaigns partly explains the prevalence of TV in creatively awarded campaigns – and vice versa. This backs up the findings from a previous study of the IPA Effectiveness Awards databank (‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’), in which Peter Field (together with Les Binet) revealed that TV creates emotion better than other media.
So what this study effectively shows is that TV is the best driver of emotion in advertising; emotion is the bedrock of creativity in advertising; and creativity is at the heart of the advertising campaigns that have the most business success. So accountants should love emotion (and TV). Job done, now for Littlejohn.
The Cannes effect of non-UK awards is worrying therefore. Risk aversion is a national sport in UK marketing and yet this report encourages risk and lateral thinking. The power of TV is in growth not decline, and yet the UK has a paucity of “great, memorable” ads. I think we were all guilty of going digitally daft whilst ignoring TV as the most digitally alluring consumer medium out there.
Rather than a golden generation we have created a lost generation, while emerging markets have actively championed the big elephant whilst ensuring they integrated the mouse at the same time. The issue is that clients who delivered the edge in creativity are now broke or under corporate masters whose value equation is at odds with creativity. Glossy = expensive, simple = value, a triumph of function over form. Binet and Field only stated the obvious but very few who hold the purse strings believe them.
Social Experience Economy people out there want to place creativity in the hands of the public rather than agencies, the ultimate path to eating our own lunch! It is time to face facts, TV + Web is the future and clients who play in endangered species media will lose. Employ an agency and challenge them with a pithy one line brief that is audio visual.