PROOF: Bold Creative Creates Big Returns
Here's why and, also, how you can get those 'out there' ideas approved!
If over three quarters of marketers and 91% of agencies ALL agree that creative ideas are essential to an organisation’s marketing efforts then why are they so hard to get approved?
A recent survey of over 1,000 marketers and agency folk from across the world sought to identify why creativity, the life blood of great advertising, is such a struggle to pitch and approve when we know it can drive up to 70% of a campaign's ROI.
How do we know? Well, we've been studying its effects since the turn of the century and have consolidated insights from over 750 brands across 45 countries representing hundreds of billions of dollars of ad spend into a single database called ROI Genome and this was the conclusion we came to, as our APAC MD Paul Sinkinson explained in a recent case study video, below. He starts off listing all the variables that can impact sales but finishes on the most powerful of all - creative!
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Why is it so hard?
So, if creativity is so powerful why does there seem to be so much resistance to it? According to the survey only 30% of agencies and 27% of marketers agree they are well-trained in evaluating ideas, which includes giving objective, as opposed to subjective, feedback. In fact a hefty 89% of agencies and 84% of marketers agree that personal opinion has a big impact on decision making, (don't I know it 🙄 - Staff Writer).
The approval process is another area of contention with respondents describing it as inconsistent, slow, subjective and even painful although there is a marked split between the 56% of marketers that agree the current approval process works well vs. the 77% of agencies who don't.
But what about the briefs that are supposed to inspire creativity? Well, one wonders if they are even worth writing when less than a third of agencies (29%) believe that marketers inspire them to do their best work and only 10% of all respondents agree that ideas are always evaluated against clearly defined criteria in their organisations.
What's the answer?
So far, so depressing, but what can we do about it? Handily, the report also suggests some solutions to these pervasive issues:
Provide training on how to evaluate ideas and deliver better feedback.
Streamline the approval process, including ensuring that only the necessary people are included in the decision-making.
Ensure the creative idea is evaluated against the brief and key criteria.
If we don't at least attempt to do this the rate of amends, which has increased from three rounds in 2007 to five rounds now, will only continue to grow and, along with it, the time and money it takes to produce merely average work that doesn't reach the extraordinary ROI potential of truly creative campaigns.
To read the survey for yourself, head here: https://www.betterbriefs.com/asssesing-creative-ideas-global-report
And to find out how we could double ROI for your retail brand, head here: https://analyticpartners.com/solutions/retail/
(And for fun, here's one my favourite bold Asian creatives from 2023 by Singaporean electronics brand PRISM+ 😂 - Staff Writer)
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