Communicate

Print

E-mail

RSS Feeds

Add Comment

Results have always been an important part of deeming campaigns successful. But more recently, the focus on a campaign’s “effectiveness” seems to be intensifying. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity introducing the Creative Effectiveness award in 2011 is proof enough.
Chris Thomas, chairman and CEO of BBDO Asia, Middle East & Africa and chairman of Proximity Worldwide, says effectiveness should not be confused with accountability. There is a big difference between the two, he says.
Accountability refers to “the things that we can most easily measure and count: leverage, return, etcetera,” whereas effectiveness is “much more about the output of creativity and the outcome. And it’s a little bit harder to measure,” he tells Communicate.
“In the industry…we tend to focus on the things we can count most easily, and often our discussions are around production, media buying, media planning… Of course there is significant return on investment…but they are much easier and simpler to measure,” he said during a recent presentation in Dubai. “The harder thing to measure is creativity, and creativity is really about effectiveness. In the best case studies…you can get returns on investments of up to 30 or 40 times against that. So for me, the issue of accountability is of course important, but we also need to make sure we get the balance in our conversation around effectiveness and making sure that we are doing our best to measure and deliver that effectiveness.”
But how does one deliver effectiveness? Thomas turns to an analysis done by independent marketing consultant Peter Field, based on effectiveness papers and case studies by the likes of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Effectiveness Awards. He highlights some core drivers of effectiveness in “already effective” and award-winning campaigns.
Loyalty is often a major campaign objective. But according to the effectiveness success rates in the data, campaigns that aim to increase penetration tend to have a higher level of effectiveness than those that seek to increase loyalty, says Thomas.
Another type of campaign that tends to fare well according to the data is fame-based. “The most effective campaigns...are actually those ones that set out to achieve fame or talkability [getting talked about] as a direct objective of their communications programs. They have a higher incidence of effectiveness,” he adds.
For Thomas, a fame-based campaign is work that gets talked about, shared and makes consumers want to engage or participate. “[The data also reveals that] fame-based campaigns have a higher impact on profitability based on the econometric models within the case histories. What’s also interesting is…that fame campaigns tend to be about 2.3 times more efficient than other campaigns.”
As expected in this extremely connected world, the data suggests that multi-channeled campaigns are also more efficient. For example, campaigns where online was being used to enhance television ads had a high level of effectiveness, says Thomas. This couldn’t be truer in the age of social media and at a time when consumers are surrounded by – and often engaged with – multiple screens.
The data also suggests that “the most powerful strategies are work that is emotional or combines emotional and rational,” says Thomas. “The emotional work has the highest indicators in terms of largest profit gains for campaigns, followed closely by combined emotional and rational.” A large effect was reported on sales, market share and price elasticity when it came to emotional campaigns, he adds.
A reason why emotional campaigns work is the way consumers make decisions nowadays, says Thomas. “When I started in the business, we were always very focused on the rational. We were very focused on both the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of our products,” he says. But nowadays, the why has become an important part of the equation. “What we now know is actually the way our brains operate…we make decisions in a much more deep-seated way. It is much more about purpose and meaning of brands which are the drivers of the decision-making.”
As ways of driving effectiveness become clearer, being able to measure effectiveness becomes a pressing matter. “The opportunity to work out and get a good measure on effectiveness is becoming better and easier,” says Thomas. “The reason for that is obviously the rise in data and the ability for us to use, capture and model that data, which is becoming much more sophisticated. Secondly, it’s because we are getting a much better understanding on how people make decisions and how people buy.”

Print

E-mail

RSS Feeds

Add Comment