A short presentation on Creativity and Effectiveness

Last week I joined twenty-five digital marketing leaders at an event designed to explore creativity and effectiveness, hosted by the Wharton School's Future of Advertising Project. Each of us gave a five-minute talk explaining our point of view on how these two essential elements intersect.

I wanted to share some of the takeaways I found most fascinating, as well as my presentation.
The foundation of the day's conversations was Peter Field's wonderful presentation on the link between Creativity and Effectiveness, based on two key studies that looked at data from 435 campaigns from 1994 to 2010. The clear learning was that the data backs up the power of creativity applied to emotional motivators (and the shaky ground that more rational communications stand on).

The most powerful communication strategy is to engage people in an emotional way, which we always strive for in our work. As he puts it, the “data show us that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure falling somewhere between the two.”

The other interesting nugget from Peter - “Award-winning campaigns are becoming more effective over time, while non-winning campaigns are actually becoming less effective. This is because of the lift that winning campaigns get from being shared on social networks”. In other words we can now verify the link between the effectiveness of a campaign and the amount of industry recognition it receives.

This has everything to do with the rise of social media, as the increase has been detected over the last 5 years. Brands that make good creative get talked about.

As Denise Larson, founder of NewMediaMetrics said at the end when we all summarized our takeaways: “it seems like significance is the new success”. Making meaningful stuff pays off!

Thanks again to Hailey, Jerry and the Wharton team for having me, and to Mindshare for hosting.