Back to the future?

It may only be September but Christmas has come early for fans of distinctive brand assets and the principle of compound creativity more generally.

Back in 2018, in its successful submission to that year’s IPA Effectiveness Awards, BBH described the sales effect of reintroducing Weetabix’s ‘Have You Had Yours?’ campaign as akin to finding ‘A Rembrandt in the Attic’. 

As this article is published – and our 2026 competition is about to open for entries – it would appear others have been rummaging around in the advertising attic also. 

Brands are recommitting to ideas already known to the audience

Irn Bru is once again proudly ‘Made in Scotland from Girders’.  ‘It Could Be You’ has returned for the National Lottery.  Even Direct Line’s red phone has been sprung from retirement. 

It’s advertising’s equivalent of the Oasis reunion.

That red phone was something of a personal nemesis back in the day.  Its starring role in the insurgent insurer’s TV campaign was not just the wrong side of advertising fashion but seemed to me the antithesis of Jeremy Bullmore’s advice that “the advertiser can only succeed if he seeks and earns the willing complicity of his audience”.

But as Kantar’s genial effectiveness guru (and erstwhile red phone apologist) Dom Boyd pointed out at the time: “The thing is…it works”.

Of that, there was no doubt and now it’s back in a more creatively palatable guise after a long sabbatical: with TV that earns Bullmore’s “willing complicity” and outdoor that brooks no argument.  That distinctive brand asset, illogical as an analogue landline on wheels may appear to Gen Z, is the servant of what looks like a new organising idea for the business: ‘That’s How It’s Done’. 

It may be a less colourful line than ‘Made in Scotland from Girders’ (a brand attitude premised initially on the soft drink’s rusty hue) and less willfully magical than ‘It Could Be You’, but these are advertisers that all stand to profit from recommitting to ideas that are already in the audience’s head and/or heart.

In a world of fragmented media – and, more debilitatingly, fragmented brand messaging – these are not romantic exercises in creative nostalgia but hardheaded marketing investment decisions.  And it’s perhaps no coincidence that each reaches back to a time of ‘monoculture’, before the odd notion of ‘mass personalisation’ took root.  (Odd in that at least one theory of brands is that they rely on shared meaning and thus collective consumption of their communication.)

The best thing to do is to show up consistently and interestingly

Given the distribution of today’s advertising dollars, our 2026 Awards Convenor, Charlie Ebdy, has quite rightly laid down the gauntlet for more evidence that the new advertising playbook of search and social pays back just as reliably as the more orthodox path that others still take, noting in his call for entries that:

“With audiences glued to their phones, marketers started spending more on online media than offline, and increasingly focused on social media for brand building and Google search for sales-driving; by 2025, 65% of mature brands' UK spend was on these two media, up from 25% a decade earlier... Yet evidence that this industry-wide shift has been effective for brands remains unclear.”

While Charlie leads the charge towards proofs from right across today’s advertising practice, it’s just possible of course that what used to be called ‘The Big Idea’ is more useful to advertisers than ever before. That whether an advertiser chooses brute force or invests in ‘lots of little’, the best thing they can do is to show up consistently, as well as interestingly.

In a world where generative AI will aggravate our tendency to produce an excess of outputs, outcomes will surely be helped by the centre of gravity that a single-minded advertising idea, device or even endline provides. (The disciplined pursuit of doing less will also help AI ‘get it right’ more often.)

Brands don’t have to go back to the future to find these, of course. But whether they’re raiding the attic or not – and we can’t say it often enough - advertising performance is improved by the imaginative repetition of campaign idea. In turn, a stronger brand will de-risk its parent business, as extolled brilliantly in a new white paper from EY-Parthenon.

Hear more about this debate at IPA Effectiveness Conference

Themes like these are amongst the many strands we’ll be debating at this year’s IPA Effectiveness Conference on October 8, where we plan to present the fruits of our own R&D on everything from influencer outcomes to the nuances of SME success. 

With contributions from Les Binet, Grace Kite and Tom Roach, Kraft Heinz, and sessions on music in advertising, how to run experiments and effectiveness in the boardroom, it promises to be a rich mix of ‘That’s How It’s Done’ and ‘It Could Be You…’ See you there!

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.