November 6th, 2009
Creativity is dead. Long live creativity!
In a recent article on Forbes.com, Mike Linton ask the question: “Is Creativity In Advertising Dead?”. He asks this question somewhat rhetorically, ultimately stating his belief that you need both the story and the numbers. But he’s clearly a guy who loves good creative (and don’t we all) and is frustrated by the appearance that the pendulum of prevailing thought in marketing has swung towards an obsessive focus on numbers to spite the story.
Yes, the pendulum has potentially swung towards everyone doing “brilliant” creative to everyone being focused on metrics. While an obsession with short-term gains is probably counterproductive (assuming that you’re looking at the right metrics in the first place), imagine how great things will be when the pendulum swings back to creative, only this time heavily informed by a thorough understanding of the business impact of that work (something that a great many agencies still refuse to pay attention to).
No more “big ideas” that are un-researched to begin with and un-validated after the fact.
If it were the case that the entire industry was suddenly focused on metrics instead of creative (a hyperbole at best), I can’t say I’d be sad for that. In fact it’s about time.
Of course, you SHOULDN’T be ignoring creative thinking and innovation, but you need to make sure that your creative and innovative solution actually meets the needs of both the company and the target audience AND is a promise that the company can deliver on. When these factors are all in alignment, that’s where we see the best performance.
Linton asks: “Do you think there’s a short-term ROI model to measure the culture, service and marketing creativity that delivers fun?”
The answer is “yes, of course there is”. Likely a campaign that tells a great story around a consumer need that a company can uniquely deliver on will generate short term sales. I’ve always wanted to run test ads that included nothing but a company’s logo, just to see what ROI there is there. Based on the tests that I HAVE run, it looks likely that such ads would be ROI positive.
What’s more important, however, is the long term ROI (as Linton suggests), and even there, you can get good indicators of that in the short term if you are looking at brand metrics. A short term lift in some brand measures (you are measuring brand metrics as well as direct response metrics, right?) should point to a subsequent lift in future sales (you are correlating the two, right?) assuming that the campaign has real legs.
Linton suggests that you have to take creative leaps and risks to move the ball, and this is exactly right. If you don’t make leaps from time to time, you’ll end up optimizing up a nearby hill while missing the mountain across the valley. But if you’re not measuring the impact on your business, then you can take a beautiful leap into the Grand Canyon and call it success while you kill your chance for future success. You should definitely take leaps, but you should evaluate where you land so that you can tell if you should abandon an approach, or build on it.
Yes, there may be a shorting of the creative side of the equation, but the business value side was sorted for so long, that I believe it’s ok that we spend a little time on the other side. We’ll be back to creative soon enough, and, with our new understanding of business impact, it will be better than ever.