Does Good Creative Really Matter? Yes, "More Than Anything Else" - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBloggers

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I can just see my good friend and mentor Burt Manning gagging as he reads the first five words of the title of this blog post. Not only Burt, one of the world's great Advertising Hall Of Fame members, but everyone at every creative agency would be taken aback by such a question. The entire industry was originally built – before media became so important – on the idea that the only thing that really counts is great creative. So what could lead me to even ask such a question?

It all started back in the '80s with the rise of marketing mix modeling (MMM). By the '90s when Ed Dittus sold MMA to Aegis there had arisen a counterculture of numbers folks who looked at advertising in a new, purely quantitative, way. To them, it appeared that a GRP was a GRP, regardless of the messaging quality. I have seen MMM people put forth the argument that their data do not support the idea that creative makes any difference at all, X GRP means Y sales, and that's that.

ARS Group, the folks who do copy testing for many large advertisers, did their own MMM a few years ago in which they showed that MMM incorporating their copytest scores accounted for much more variance in purchases than the raw GRP data alone.

A well known MMMer who shall remain nameless dismissed their findings as "obviously self serving."

The great thing about MMM is that since each analyst uses slightly different approaches and gets slightly (or substantially) different results from the same raw data, the MMM process remains a black box, and people can argue about it endlessly without closure. This is important given that otherwise we might run out of things to talk about and people could feel awkwardly silent. :-)

Recently Mike Hess sent me a superb paper by Len Lodish, Ye Hu, and Abba Krieger that ran in the ARFJournal of Advertising Research in 2007 and that I had somehow missed. Summarizing hundreds of BehaviorScan and matched market tests done by IRI, the paper finds that the sales effects of increased TV weight have changed dramatically since 1995.

The good news is that since 1995, more TV weight does tend to generate significant uptick in sales for mature brands, whereas prior to 1995 this was a much smaller average uptick.

The authors (Len Lodish is a giant in our field) also point to high variability in the results, which suggests to us that creative does make a difference, and in fact the final conclusion of the paper is a call for better and earlier measurements of the strength of copy in terms of probable sales effects, hence it is obvious where the authors stand on the question with which we began this post.

However, what really nails the question for me is the recent disclosures by Mars, Inc. Being based on real empirical household-level singlesource, and not on aggregate market level MMM inferences/models, I tend to take these results more seriously as a basis for advising clients on how they spend their hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Mars found that it was able to lift its TV ROI from 70 cents to $2 in a three year period in England, France and Germany by using the data from the three small singlesource panels operating in those countries at that time. But the big news is that more than half of this improvement came from the creative side, from seeing which commercials work on sales and which don't. And running the sales producers more, and the others ones less or not at all.

If this doesn't nail the answer to the title question, I don't know what does. Great creative matters, and it matters more than anything else – more than everything else combined.

Mars also reported that media improvements – seeing which media types had the highest ROI for the brand, often related to the density of purchasers of specific types within their audiences, but also related to environmental psychological factors – accounted for a bit less than half of this total improvement – and even that (less than half of the difference between Mars "pre" 70 cents and Mars "post" $2 return on TV adspend) is a huge improvement when projected to a brand spending say $50 million a year in TV.

So it turns out as suspected all along that creative does make a difference – a huge difference – and is the central factor in the sales success of advertising. We really do have to figure out what the purchasers are thinking and how to get them to favor our brand more. We really do have to indulge the colorful creative folks in their preferred oddities or whatever it takes to get the pearls, and we must not swinishly mark up their copy as if sitting on a higher throne of creativity.

Not only that, Len Lodish is right, we need to really early on test the commercials for sales effect. We have great tools for pretesting communications effects, and great tracking studies for tracking communications effects, but sales effects are something slightly different. Yes, persuasion correlates with sales – somewhat – but not so exactly, not all the time. It's time to add real sales measurements to the arsenal of advertising creative research.

TRA does this, of course. Any singlesource does this, and at the moment, TRA is the only singlesource game in U.S. town. TRA clients right now are looking up the sales effects of their various creative executions. One client has found that one execution has nearly 4 times the sales effect of the average of the brand's whole commercial pool. Getting these patterns known early helps, as Mars has shown.

One of my pet dreams is that we see enough results across enough brands to really discover some underlying generalizations about what works and what doesn't in the present era, some gathering of insights that can be meaningful to the creatives, grist for their mill, that can spur the next great leap forward in our business. As John Lennon said, you may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Bill Harvey has spent over 35 years leading the way in the area of media research with special emphasis on the New Media. Bill can be contacted at bill@traglobal.com.

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