“We have arrived in an era where award-winning creativity typically brings little or no effectiveness advantage.” This is the stark revelation from the IPA’s new report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness launched on one of the major stages at the Palais in Cannes today (19 June 2019).
The report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness covers almost 600 case studies from 1996 to 2018 and is a follow-up to the IPA’s 2016 publication Selling Creativity Short that warned of the dangers to creative effectiveness posed by short-termism in marketing and highlighted a misunderstanding of how brands grow.
According to revered effectiveness expert and report author Peter Field*, creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than they have been in 24 years of data analysis and are now no more effective than non-awarded campaigns.
The Report also reveals the continuing decline in the efficiency** of creatively awarded campaigns. Over the pre-crisis period 1996-2008 creatively awarded campaigns were around 12 times as efficient as non-awarded ones, but over the period from 2006-2018, as the crisis developed, this fell to below four times as efficient. It continues to fall and creativity is almost certainly delivering no overall efficiency advantage today.
This situation is something the report argues is entirely avoidable if the lessons of best practice in creativity are learned.
Says Peter Field: “Despite our warnings, the misuse of creativity has continued to grow and the effectiveness advantage has continued to decline. This report is a final wake-up call for good sense, before it is too late. I urge everyone who values creativity as I do, to study this report and act on it, especially those with the power to change how creativity is commissioned, deployed and judged. We cannot afford to go on being complacent; left unchecked, the catastrophic decline in creative effectiveness will ultimately weaken support for creativity amongst general management. Money spent on creativity will become ‘non-working’ budget and will be cut.”
Says Janet Hull OBE, Director of Marketing Strategy, IPA: “It is timely that this latest iteration of our IPA Databank series on the topic of Creativity and Effectiveness is being launched at the Cannes Festival of Creativity, as the messages it delivers have wide relevance not just to advertising strategists and planners but also to brand owners, creative departments, creative award winners, juries and organisers. In essence, as Peter Field demonstrates so convincingly, the correlation between creativity and effectiveness, and between creativity and efficiency is weakening. This is not because the rules of creativity for brand building have changed, but rather that they are not being applied in the right measure, through the right channels, at the right time. Just as in the wider marketing planning process, creativity is becoming a victim of short-termism. Peter’s rallying cry to the industry should not be overlooked.”
Peter spent 15 years as a strategic planner in advertising and has been a marketing consultant for the last 22 years. Effectiveness case study analysis underpins much of his work, which includes a number of important marketing and advertising texts: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, The Long & The Short of it, Media in Focus, Brand Immortality, The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness, Selling Creativity Short, Why aren’t we doing this? and chapters in Eat Your Greens and the Sage Handbook of Advertising. His latest work in partnership with Les Binet – Effectiveness in Context – was published in October 2018. He was also a contributor to the Wharton Future of Advertising Project. Peter writes and speaks regularly around the world about marketing effectiveness. He is an honorary Fellow of the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
The Report is a follow-up to the IPA’s 2016 report Selling Creativity Short which was based on IPA and Gunn report data to 2014, and now includes two new waves of case study data from 2016 and 2018. This provides 24 years of data covering almost 600 case studies, 121 of which picked up major creative awards worldwide at the 46 creative shows monitored by the Gunn Report (now part of WARC Rankings).
**Efficiency is measured as % points of market share gain p.a. for every 10 % points of ESOV invested in the campaign. It is a ‘bang for bucks’ metric.