Here's some research that every CMO should be aware of. An analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards shows a substantial return on marketing investment is based on creativity. The study shows that the most creatively-awarded advertising campaigns are 11 times more efficient at delivering business success.

The study - which builds on findings from an earlier study by the IPA, Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007) - involved analysis of a wide range of award-winning and non-winning campaigns,

The Thinkbox/IPA analysis examined both the effectiveness (in terms of a campaign’s ability to drive business effects such as share, sales, profit and loyalty) and the efficiency (in terms of share growth per point of Excess Share of Voice) of creatively-awarded and non-awarded campaigns.

Key findings include:

• Pound for pound, creativity makes ad campaigns more efficient; on average, creatively-awarded campaigns (i.e. in major awards competitions recognised by The Gunn Report) are at least 11 times more efficient.
• 

The vast majority of Gunn Report creative award scores (74%) are for TV commercials, showing that TV creativity is at the heart of the success of these campaigns. The remaining scores cover press and online.


• The more creatively-awarded a campaign, the more effective it becomes.
• 

Creatively awarded campaigns are much more likely to be ‘emotional’ than ‘rational’ (44% vs. 19%). This partly explains the prevalence of TV in creatively-awarded campaigns as TV creates emotion better than other media (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, IPA).
• 

Investing in creativity is a powerful way to achieve fame (i.e. buzz). The study shows that brands can buy awareness but not fame; fame is proven to be at the heart of the most effective advertising (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, IPA).


• Creatively-awarded campaigns that invest strongly in Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) perform particularly well, suggesting that many creative campaigns could further improve ROMI by investing more in Share of Voice (SOV).


• Despite generally being disadvantaged by lower levels of ESOV, creatively-awarded campaigns still generate more and greater business effects than non-awarded ones.
• 

With the same level of ESOV, creatively-awarded campaigns would have driven twice as much market share growth as non-awarded ones.


• Creative awards strongly reflect consumer liking of ad campaigns. On average, 35% of consumers ranked Gunn awarded campaigns as ‘highly liked’ versus just 20% for non-Gunn awarded campaigns. Liking an ad is the best predictor of business success (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ IPA).

The often overlooked, hidden value of creativity is that it can also drive down the cost of production execution. People want to attach themselves to better ideas and will cut prices and over deliver just for the opportunity. "A great idea has many fathers. A bad idea is an orphan" is as true today as ever.

The problem that remains, though, is the fact that not every agency, or everybody can come up with truly great ideas. Fallacies like, "A great idea can come from anyone" are just that, fallacies, typically spoken by those who don't have a clue. To make matters worse, given an ever increasing aversion to risk, not every CMO will approve great creative over the mediocre. Or, as often as the case may be, even recognize it in the first place.

And what should be understood is great creative is only half the effort. Great creative ideas that actually see the light of marketing dollars will always require great salesmen to sell through and around, shepherding the fragile thoughts past the various kill zones, such as focus groups, politics, committees. And yes, the bosses wife.

After the last few years of social media propaganda being touted by an army of people with little to no marketing experience, the actual reality is now becoming clear and it’s massively different than what they’d have you believe.

Neilsen’s Three Screen Report for the first quarter of 2010 shows that 99% of video is viewed on television. Mobile viewing accounts for two-tenths of 1% of all video viewing.

In a Forbes article, titled, “It takes money to make money": How the new “social” media is like the old “media” media,” the writer cites some research conducted by Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard.

The findings?

The correlation between online trailers that were popular and the movies or games with the biggest budgets was very strong, Elberse found. In effect, the videos that got watched the most on the Internet are those that bought their popularity through traditional offline advertising, especially on TV.

Elberse says:

Most of the time, you have to spend money to make money online…This is not to say that viral hits can’t happen (out) of the blue. They do, but they are the exception.

The Old Spice campaign is another example that pundits like to show as evidence of the success and dominance of social media. But there wouldn’t have been any social media as part of the campaign, without a massive TV buy, especially during the Olympics. In fact, without TV, it’s doubtful anybody would have known about “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” at all.

The article concludes:

There is another school of analysts, of which Elberse is a prominent member…The Web, they say, is amplifying the winner-take-all dynamic that was already present in our mass media economy. Rather than making everyone a “winner,” the new world of social media is doing the opposite, reducing the number of winners and increasing the yawning gap between them and everyone else.

Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper into socmed propaganda to see what’s really going on. Adweek recently ran an article that states, “More than one third of folks that like Facebook brand pages say they would buy the products more often.”

Within the article we find out why:

When ranking the most important reasons why they follow brands on Facebook, respondents cited promotional benefits first…

Of course they’ll buy the products more often when they’re on deal. This is far from new, or news worthy.

And just who are these brands on Facebook?

They are all brands with gigantic traditional advertising budgets. That’s why they’re the top brands on Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter.

Obviously, I’m not against social media, or what I'd rather call, online marketing. We’re doing quite well with it for our clients and ourselves. However, it’s an arrow in the quiver, not the whole quiver.

Let alone the bazooka.

Given the emphasis on social media, corporate social responsibility, transparency and so on, it’s surprising that so much advertising still depends on fabrication, if not outright lies.

Recently there was a municipal election in Toronto. On the day of the election I came home to a pamphlet stuck in my door. It included pictures of the two contenders. One was a badly cropped picture, demonizing the front-runner. The second showed a perfectly photoshopped picture of the angelic competitor.

Is the electorate that stupid? Does it not cross the minds of this particular politician’s handlers that a depiction like that might just hurt their client’s credibility, more so than the front runner?

Not sure if the flyer mattered that much, but the front-runner won by a landslide.

Perhaps the worst abusers of truth are the fast food companies. Why do they continue to lie about their product in pictures? Why do they continue to lie about health and nutritional benefits?

Regardless of the fact that people know they aren’t getting the product shown in the TV commercials, they continue to buy anyhow. Maybe that’s why they don’t bother with the truth.

But this might be changing.

In an Ad Age article, titled “The Competitive Advantage of Truth”, the writer contends that:

People are having conversations these days, only not "with" brands but "about" them. I'd like to suggest that we're at the start of something big -- something bigger than simple engagement or entertainment, and something that goes far beyond the merits of friends and followers on social technology platforms: The ultimate purpose of conversation is to produce a shared understanding of truth.

Doing so will emerge as the only real competitive advantage left to brands otherwise able to copy one another into commodification. Failing to deliver and sustain truth will be indicators of broader operational weaknesses.

He goes on to frame this new reality, or proposed metric as “the truth gap.”

Some brands and companies may have a larger truth gap, while others are smaller.

Large truth gap? Reminds me of a Canadian telephone company that spent millions on a new logo and campaign informing the audience that they were ‘better.'

During the course of the campaign, I needed some service. My call was routed to India where I was forced to endure thoroughly hacked English by the rep on the other end. After two weeks, a box of parts arrived at my home. A week later a technician showed up and said they were the wrong parts. All in all, it took a month of this 'Who's on first' business to get my internet problem resolved.

Perhaps they should have spent those millions on, you know, actually becoming a better company.

Anyhow, we should all hope that truth becomes the new thing in marketing. Brand credibility would certainly benefit. Not to mention consumer confidence.

Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School created this video introducing her new book, DIFFERENT. She describes the book as "an intimately drawn meditation on the meaning of business differentiation."

If the book is half as good as the video promises, it should be a great read.

After all the research, focus groups and C-level selling is done, what's left of the marketing budget is spent on a campaign message. At this point, the message is often so homogenized and watered-down, that it’s madness to think that it would work at all.

Yet, this process is still typical in even the most sophisticated marketing organizations.

Failure is met with shock and surprise. “How could this not work?”  “We tested everything and reflected our consumer’s needs and wants in every picture and copy point.”

Budweiser is a prime example of this myopia. An article in Advertising Age, titled, “Budweiser’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand” had this to say:

Shortly after August Busch IV was named CEO of Anheuser-Busch, he accepted a company director's recommendation for a consulting firm that would assist with managing the brewer's burgeoning brand portfolio. The firm, Cambridge Group, ended up going far beyond portfolio management. In fact, its exhaustive research resulted in the "Drinkability" campaign that -- four years and millions in fees later -- is considered a major factor in Bud Light posting the first full-year sales decline in its history.

Do you know your audience? Really know them? I wager that despite collecting, collating and deciphering all the research they can about their target, most companies don’t know squat. Just like Cambridge and Anheuser-Busch.

The reason is that most marketing organizations are consumed by their own rigid and collectively agreed upon definitions of their target group, as if it’s a completely unique sub-genre of the human race.

Mark Earls sums up marketing's obsessive dependence on target research nicely in his article, “The New Audience”:

Since its earliest days, marketing has prided itself on putting the people who buy the products being marketed (or the 'consumers', as we've got used to calling them) at the heart of its thinking and processes. You could argue that the fundamental point of marketing (as well as its primary contribution to contemporary culture) is the idea of organizing business around the needs, wants and desires of the people who buy its goods and services.

Along the way, we've come to rely on certain ideas about these people – how they do what they do, how they make the decisions we seek to influence, the nature of the relationship between us and them, and the importance of the role we play in their lives.

He goes on to suggest that this is changing. That perhaps the assumption that thought proceeds action, is in fact wrong:

In recent years, science has encouraged us to rethink much of what we took for granted about the people who make up our audiences. We have learned that thinking is much less important than we imagine in shaping our behaviour. Much of our decision-making is essentially automatic and based on shorthand and heuristics; we often do stuff and make sense of it later. Cognitive behavioural scientists, such as Kahnemann and tversky, and Nudge authors thaler and Sunstein, have catalogued the cognitive biases that have come from our “lazy brain's” use of shorthand and heuristics for decision-making.

Thought can be a barrier to action. Too much of it can get in the way and in fact become paralyzing. Think about it. We learn by doing the things we do, not by being told, or informed. Especially not by an inanimate brand fronting an organization with a vested interest.

So, if you’re trying to change perceptions, it’s important to keep in mind that perception change is a result of changed behaviour, not the other way around. That is, if we are trying to change perceptions then we should probably be thinking about the behaviour change required to do so. And if we are simply trying to change behaviour we shouldn’t put the need to change perceptions in the way as a barrier.

Mark Earls also suggests that the key to behaviour change is in influencing and learning from each other:

Equally, we've come to understand that we are a fundamentally social species. Our minds are supremely adapted for a world of others, rather than for independent thought. Our ability to learn from each other (via 'social learning' and the disembodied accumulation of others' knowledge and skills we call 'culture') is now widely seen to be the key mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of phenomena, from the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and whether we vote or not, to the names we give our children. Many now believe this must therefore also be the key to changing such behaviour.

The best companies seem to innately know this. Companies like Apple and Nike place less importance on dissecting their audience and more importance on offering products that people want and want to talk about. In Apples case, products that people will line up for when launched, as if they’re attending a rock concert.

I’m going to say something radical. Challenge the target research, if not chuck it altogether.

Dare to be different and meaningful.

Rather than chasing your target, have the courage to attract and lead.

People will buy your brand based on an alignment of values, ideals and attitude - sometimes even more so than if the product actually fulfills a need.

Once again, take Apple for example. It’s not like as if anybody needs an iPad. Yet the internet has been buzzing about it since it was announced. And on April 2, you can bet to see lineups.

Mark Earls concluded his excellent article with this:

Next time you find yourself thinking about your audience, please remember this: they're very different from what we've been told – less considered and deliberative and certainly much more influenced by each other than even they'd like to admit. More importantly, they're not really an audience in the way that received wisdom suggests – passive and dependent on what you offer. They're not 'listening' and, to be honest, they're not yours. If they're an audience at all, it's first and foremost for themselves. And therein lies the opportunity for marketers.

How do you feel about your own marketing efforts? Is it the way you’d like to be marketed to? Is it something you’d be proud to tell your friends about? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

An excellent article on the history of advertising written by Randall Rothenberg for Ad Age. Certainly an article that new people in the business should read and study.

He finishes the article with this:

But as we near the end of the broadcasting era, at the twilight of the advertising century, this much is now clear: In the spark of creativity lies the future of business.

This is a fundamental truth, regardless of changing technology and the advance of metrics. Though, Bill Bernbach in the 1960's said it best when challenged with the silly idea that advertising is science:

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

He also said:

However much we would like advertising to be a science-because life would be simpler that way-the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formulaization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A blog started by a Brit who claims that he is the CMO "of a big company. I can't say who. But if I say we're number 2 in the European consumer durables market relating to, or directly involving, cleaning clothes and or soft furnishings and or other fabrics, with a commitment to excellence, quality and placing superior cleaning at the core of our customers' product experience, I think you'll suss. Yes - that's us!"

The blog is mostly written to and about ad agencies, letting them know the realities of how he, as a senior marketing guy thinks. The language he uses would've made Sam Kinison blush, which after some debate, I've decided to let stand.

Here are a few of his insights into the workings of the ad biz:

The presentations

I've admitted several times that planners and their powerpoint slides turn my mind into bum-gravy, but they're by no means alone. Over the years, agencies have made many and varied attempts to present me into my fucking grave.

On one occasion, an agency MD gave me 30 slides on the agency's long and celebrated history, the account director gave me 40 slides on their 'brand eruption methodology', a planner gave me the usual 50 slides on whatever the fuck it is they do and the media buyer gave me 60 slides on audience segmentation, reach, 'the media day' and his manifesto on 'owning the media worldscape'.

Then the creative director showed me a half-page ad, a flyer and an insert for the Northampton cunting Trumpet. 

The agency barista

I am a prolific consumer of coffee (especially in the morning, when I like to make a smoothie with coffee, bacon, fried bread, black pudding, eggs, ham, lamb tikka bhuna and sausages) but even I can't fathom why agencies need a fully-fledged coffee emporium inside their building. Some of you agency hamshanks even have some desperate intern as a barista, making little ferns in the milk of your skinny latte while he dreams of being allowed to blow the creative director's assistant's dog-walker's fucking builder.

Do you know how many coffee shops there are in Soho? Exactly 7,434. There are branches of Starbucks in supermarkets, petrol stations, funeral parlours, strip joints, municipal dumps, drains, the trousers of people who stand still too long - you fucking name it. I came down to my car one morning and there was one in the fucking boot! There's more coffee than rain in Britain! Just go out and get some!

The names

It used to be Surname & Surname. Then Surname would get a call from this other Surname - and his very good friend, Surname. They'd do some lunching and, a bit later, merge into Surname, Surname, Surname & Surname. Then Surname would leave, but Acronym & Surname would come along - creating Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname. By this time, agencies had rebelled against that old-fashioned naming protocol and were going for Dark & Esoteric or Edgy & Cool. So when Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname acquired an up-and-coming agency to compensate for fact that they'd grown too rich to be bothered, they became Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname / Edgy & Cool.

Now, agencies are called things like UnCulture or MeLikeYouLikeHappyTime, and I honestly can't decide which is fucking worse.

The industry-wide self-delusion that they aren't salespeople.

Come on, folks. Let's the two of us have a heart-to-heart here. Nobody else - just us. Let me be honest, because I like you / you buy me beerz.

The only difference between you and a car salesman is an ironic T-shirt.

The constant fucking 'offerings'.

What is it with you fucking people? Why does everything you do have to have a name? Why do you have to call two account executives trawling the internet for second hand research 'The Truth Laboratories'? Why is your planning department 'The Disrupterference Unit'?

And why must you have a fucking 'system'? Because whether you call it '360 Insightification', 'Mirage-Busting' or 'Gorgeouslogicmakesideasgrow', I know that your 'offering' involves an account man giving a brief to some one-time film-makers/novelists who will do everything they can to produce work that turns them back into film-makers/novelists. And you know it too, you fucking con artists.

The flaunting.

I walk into my agency. The sofas are beautiful. The reception desk is like something from a spaceship. The flooring has the reassuring feel of real wood. The sculpted fittings and furniture are sleek and beautiful. There are grand plasma screens, a stunning sculpture and, for real impact, one of the Minis from The Italian Job.

THAT'S MY FUCKING FEE, YOU CUNT-FORKS!

Jesus wept. It's like a mugger popping round the next day to show you what he spent your cash on. 'Look, I got this nice watch - and I sold your phone for this jacket. Fucking nice, eh? Same time tomorrow, you fucking twonk?'

A brand has a sustained, meaningful difference

Or a difference that’s forgotten and allowed to erode

A brand is a fulfilled promise

Or a broken one

A brand is utility and innovation

Or the boring and safe, same old

A brand is the one time it failed

Not the many times it succeeded

A brand is its current advertising

Not the great advertising that may have gone before

A brand is the values of company executives

Not the values engraved on a plaque at reception

A brand is service calls handled promptly and courteously

Or service calls routed to India

A brand is made profitable through customer stakeholders

Not stockholders

A brand is why employees are proud of their job

Or hate it

        A brand is the act of offering non-customers deals to switch

        While offering current customers nothing

        A brand is policies to make the company more efficient

        While making customer’s lives less convenient

A  brand can be built or broken

Not by advertising

By the people managing it