Research from Les Binet shows that budget scale is far more critical for market share gain than campaign ROI. While ROI is important, it only explains 11% of the variance in incremental profit. The industry's focus on efficiency and narrow targeting is hindering significant growth potential.
An under-the-radar resource, the History of Advertising Trust, offers a "brand archaeology" service. Remarkably, every agency that has invested in this service to understand a brand's history for a pitch has reportedly won the business, highlighting the competitive advantage of deep historical context.
Testing of Coca-Cola's AI ad revealed an inverse relationship between age and acceptance. While older audiences scored it highly, Gen Z viewers were put off, scoring it poorly. This suggests the generation most fluent in technology may value authenticity and human craft more in advertising.
The CMO behind a controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign treated the public backlash not as a crisis, but an opportunity. Instead of apologizing or changing course, he stopped reading social media, referred back to his core strategy and data, and ultimately chose to double down on the partnership.
Data shows that while combining brand and performance is best, adding brand advertising to a performance-only strategy provides a significantly larger ROI lift than adding performance to a brand strategy. This suggests most marketers are over-invested in performance channels.
A key insight from analysis of Effie and System1 data is that brands get bored of their creative work long before audiences do. As strategist Mark Ritson highlighted, pulling successful campaigns prematurely forfeits the significant long-term value of "compound creativity."
According to analysis by strategist Peter Field, the industry's reliance on cheap, low-attention media forces the creation of dull creative. To improve creative effectiveness, marketers must first address the foundational problem of their media strategy before attempting to fix the creative work itself.
Peter Field's analysis, applying attention data to media costs, reveals TV's high value. With an average 14-second attention span versus 1.7 for in-feed ads, TV's attention-adjusted CPM is extremely low. It also captures over 50% of Gen Z's media consumption, busting the "TV is dead" myth.