The return of imaginative repetition

Over the last year, the IPA and its Databank has helped to inspire, underpin and promote both Adam Morgan’s Cost of Dull initiative and System 1’s Compound Creativity white paper, exploring the returns on creative consistency across everything from relationships to idea and execution.

“Aha!” the doubters cry.  “How can both things be true?  How can dull communication be so costly, if consistency is so valuable?”

It’s an objection that is, of course, squared by the magic of a great campaign, as evidenced by the big winners at our Effectiveness Awards in October.  McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Specsavers and (perhaps less obviously) Guinness all demonstrate the outsize commercial rewards from showing up consistently but creatively over time: refreshing their campaigns as, when and where necessary. Their brand ideas become familiar yet remain fresh. And so the brands manage to be both timeless and timely. 

Consistent and creative are not opposites, it turns out, but actually happy bedfellows: the secret sauce of the effective advertiser. Indeed, consistency not only demands but enables freshness. Creative folk often crave the constraint of a tight brief, inviting them to go deep rather than wide.

So while the dictionary definition of a campaign is ‘an organized course of action to achieve a goal’, the essence of its application in commercial communications can actually be reduced to something more specific: imaginative repetition. 

Imaginative repetition demands that our commercial communication is both original and appropriate; that we find our way to the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable formulation for our audience.  It’s the turn of the combination padlock that frees the wheel.  And while it’s most often credited to John Bartle, I’m reliably informed that he first heard the phrase during his apprenticeship as a client at Cadbury’s: from Chris Powell at what was then BMP (now Adam&Eve). 

It’s a sentiment that might also be derived from or even applied to the great musicians, artists and storytellers of our times, notwithstanding their occasional lurch towards reinvention: from Claude Monet and The Beatles (hence the Mersey sound) to Bridget Riley, Oasis, Sally Rooney and Taylor Swift. The iconic and enduring fashion designer Paul Smith’s version was ‘the power of the repeated image’.*

Humans, it seems, like patterns.

For all our industry’s excitability around the new - and as our everyday practice plays ‘catch up’ after an era of epic fragmentation - the UK’s no. 1 beer brand and no. 1 tea brand seem to be telling us something. Something that bears repeating.   

The SuperBowl ads might light the occasional firework, but the wellspring of long-term effectiveness is imaginative repetition.

*With thanks to Jim Carroll.

Laurence Green, Director of Effectiveness, IPA

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