Brand & Creativity: 259 findings, with sources

High-consistency brands report very large profit growth six times more often

Campaigns from brands with a high culture of consistency report very large profit growth 38.5% of the time, against 18.2% for medium and 6.7% for low-consistency brands - six times more often. Consistency is a profitability strategy, not a branding preference.

Most social users open the apps to be entertained

80% of TikTok users, 65% of Instagram users and 55% of Facebook users visit the platform seeking entertainment, which makes dull ads on those channels doubly misplaced.

Consistent creative foundations multiply every brand effect, up to seven-fold

Brands scoring in the top third for Creative Foundations - consistent positioning, long-running creative idea, agency tenure - are 5.4x more likely to report very large awareness effects, 7x difference, 4.2x trust, 2.5x brand image and 1.8x salience than the bottom third. Committing to one positioning builds more branded memories.

Influencers deliver one of the highest long-term ROIs of any channel

In IPA research with Andrew Tindall, influencers scored a long-term ROI index of 151 against an all-channel average of 100, on just 6.2% sales contribution, returns that rival linear TV for far less spend.

Playing safe removes the upside of an ad without removing its downside

Because negative response stays flat at every level of dullness, making an ad safer does not reduce the risk of offending anyone. It only removes the positive emotion that would have made it work. You cannot bore your way out of negative emotion.

Closing the effectiveness gap with media money would cost more than all US TV advertising

To make US advertising in the three duller quartiles perform as well as the Non-Dull quartile, brands would need to spend an extra $189bn a year. That is roughly the GDP of Greece, and considerably more than the entire annual US TV advertising spend of $66.1bn.

UK B2B puts more than half its television money behind its dullest advertising

B2B inverts the pattern. Of roughly £103m spent annually on UK B2B TV advertising, only £9m goes to the Non-Dull quartile while £53m, more than half, goes to ads in the Extremely Dull quartile. Matching Non-Dull effectiveness would take an extra £267m.

Matching a fame campaign with a dull one costs millions in extra media every year

Peter Field's IPA analysis of the cost of dull to UK brands: the extra annual media spend a single campaign needs to match the broad business effectiveness of a fame campaign runs from £3.1m in CPG food and drink to £17.8m in retail and £17.2m in durables, averaging £9.6m across all categories.

Marketers believe their briefs give clear strategic direction; agencies almost never see it

78% of marketers say the briefs they write provide clear strategic direction. 5% of creative agencies agree.

Three quarters of briefs are not good enough, according to the people who have to use them

Asked about the last three briefs they wrote or received, marketers said 31% were not good enough, 52% ok and 17% good. Agencies said 75% were not good enough, 22% ok and 3% good. Same briefs, opposite verdicts.

On's extra social content outdrew its hero spot ninefold

On's Dreamers spot with Zendaya got 5m views on YouTube, while its additional social content, including bloopers and jokey Reels with stylist Law Roach, added another 45m+ views.

Rebriefs are recognised as waste by the people who order them

69% of marketers and 73% of creative agencies agree that rebriefs happen too often. Marketers name the cost themselves: time lost or wasted (43%), added cost (18%), confusion (13%), demotivation (10%). Only 9% see a rebrief as positive or no problem.

Samsung and LEGO rose fastest in the index while Houseplant and Duolingo slipped

In the 2026 Entertainment Index, Samsung (+56), LEGO (+54) and Apple (+30) were the biggest risers, while Houseplant (-72) showed the limits of founder-led hype and Duolingo (-19) dipped after social leadership changes and AI-first controversy.

Sonic cues: the most effective asset for branded attention

On Ipsos's branded-attention scale, brand characters score 6.01x, celebrities 2.84x, package shape 2.09x, creative visual style 1.67x, colour 1.44x, font 1.41x and logo 1.17x. Sonic brand cues beat all of them at 8.53x.

The Distinctive Brand Assets Grid plots every brand element by fame and uniqueness, and crossing 50% on either axis is enough to be reliably linked to - or to dominate recall of - the brand.

Jenni Romaniuk's Distinctive Brand Assets Grid plots every brand element on two axes: fame (% of category buyers who link the brand to the element) and uniqueness (% of all links to the element). Above 50% fame, buyers are more likely than not to be reminded of the brand. Above 50% uniqueness, it is the dominant brand recalled.

Where brand equity is actually built

Only 28% of brand equity is built by paid media. The other 71% comes from direct and indirect experiences - owned touchpoints build 30% and earned builds 41%. The remaining 1% is survey 'Other'.

Own product experience and word of mouth score highest on brand impact; print ads, OOH, online ads and sponsorship score lowest

The touchpoints customers score highest on brand impact are the experiential ones: own product or service experience, and word of mouth from friends and family. Print ads, OOH, online ads and sponsorship score lowest on both quality and reach.

Octopus Energy turned its belief into experience so well that nearly 40% of UK consumers had 'heard good things' about it by 2025 - far ahead of other suppliers

Octopus Energy built its position on 'technology can drive a faster, cheaper and greener global energy transition' and turned it into a differentiated everyday experience. By 2025, Kantar BrandZ showed nearly 40% of consumers had 'heard good things' about Octopus, far exceeding other major suppliers.

Campaigns with a brand character are more likely to deliver very large long-term effects

Across all IPA long-term campaigns, the share achieving very large effects was consistently higher for campaigns with a character Fluent Device than without: new customer gain 40.9% vs 32.0%, market share gain 40.9% vs 29.7%, profit gain 34.1% vs 26.2%. Base: 44 character device campaigns against 256 without.

Brand characters do not buy you pricing power

The one IPA measure where character Fluent Devices show almost no advantage is reduction in price sensitivity: 6.8% of device campaigns achieved a very large effect against 5.9% without. Both are small. Devices are a memorability mechanism, not a pricing-power mechanism.

The use of brand characters in award-winning long-term campaigns has collapsed since 1992

Across all 492 IPA long-term campaigns since 1992, the share of submissions using a character or slogan Fluent Device fell from 41% in 1992 to 12% in the most recent year measured. The industry did not test the device and reject it, it drifted away from it.

The UK cost of dull is more than twice the country's entire television ad spend

In the UK the equivalent figure is £13.29bn against a total UK TV ad spend of £5.11bn. For the Extremely Dull quartile alone, matching Non-Dull effectiveness would take £7.94bn, again more than the entire industry's TV spend.

US B2B spreads its money evenly across dull and interesting work alike

In the US the B2B split is flatter but still costly. Of $1.39bn spent on B2B TV ads, $0.37bn (26.6%) goes to the Non-Dull quartile and almost as much, $0.36bn each, to the Very Dull and Extremely Dull quartiles. The extra spend needed to match Non-Dull share growth is $3.1bn.

Adding creative quality to a share of voice model roughly triples its predictive power

In a validation across the entire UK Cereals category, predicting market share gain from TV extra share of voice alone correlated 0.25 with actual growth. Adding creative quality as a multiplier, ESOV times Star Rating, raised the correlation to 0.81.

A £40 ad about paint drying beat nine out of ten ads in the database

Adam Morgan challenged Jon Evans to make an ad about paint drying that would beat the average ad in System1's database. With a budget of £40 and thirty minutes, using one central character, a simple story, a catchy soundtrack and a dog, the result scored better than 90% of ads in the database at 3.7 Stars.

Budget allocation shows no relationship to the emotional quality of the work it buys

Media money is distributed almost independently of creative quality. Plotting dollar spend against star rating across US advertising shows large budgets sitting behind one-star ads at roughly the same rate as behind five-star ads.

Right to participate x reason to watch x ability to execute - miss one and the work fails differently

The Chaos Advantage diagnostic: work needs all three drivers - right to participate, reason to watch, ability to execute. Miss one and you get the near misses: never-shipped (dies in approval), unattributed (visible with no link to the brand), or safely invisible (on-brand, signed-off, ignored). Only one driver gets you missed opportunities, vanity projects or busy fools.

Both sides agree good creative work is hard to produce without a good brief

89% of marketers and 86% of creative agencies agree it is difficult to produce good creative work without a good marketing brief. In the UK that has risen from 79% and 80% in 2003 to 90% and 89% in 2021.

The brief is the most valuable and most neglected tool in marketing, and both sides say so

90% of marketers and 92% of creative agencies agree with the statement that the brief is one of the most valuable and paradoxically most neglected tools marketers have to create good work. Near-unanimity, including from the people writing them.

Nine in ten briefs change after they have been presented to the agency

90% of marketers admit that their briefs change once they have been briefed in. Nine out of ten briefings are the start of a negotiation rather than the end of one.

Clear strategic direction doubles how energised an agency feels about the work

Creative agencies are twice as energised to work on briefs that provide clear strategic direction. Strategic clarity is not just a quality input, it is a motivation input.

Bigger agencies feel worse about the briefs they receive

Positivity toward briefs also falls as agencies get bigger: 54% actively positive in agencies of 1-10 people, 46% at 11-50, 42% at 51-150 and 40% at 150 or more.

Sonic cues: the most effective asset for branded attention

Ads that use sonic brand cues are 8.53x more likely to be high performing for branded attention. Audio-using creative in general is 3.44x more likely. For comparison, a logo scores 1.17x and any visual asset 1.15x.

Showing brand assets beats saying the brand name

High-performing creative shows brand assets, on average, 34% more often than low-performing creative.

Aldi UK grew from 4% to 10% market share by moving from 'just another discount retailer' to Meaningfully Different

Aldi UK grew from 4% to 10% market share between 2006 and 2026 by moving from 'just another discount retailer' to Meaningfully Different - improving perceived quality across its range, expanding its store footprint, and creating a distinctive in-store experience through the 'middle aisle'.

The Fluent Devices findings rest on a census of television advertising, not a sample

System1 Ad Ratings measures every TV ad in the UK and US across six sectors: automotive, financial, FMCG, health and beauty, tech and charity. That was 22,350 ads between July 2017 and June 2018, and close to 35,000 ads by May 2019.

Most of what makes a brand visible inside AI models is the brand equity it already had

63% of a brand's visibility inside LLMs is attributed to long-term brand equity. The slide gives no definition of visibility or of how attribution was modelled, so treat it as directional.

88% of marketing leaders believe bold work is more effective in uncertain times

88% of marketing and communications leaders agree that bold communications work tends to be more effective in periods of uncertainty, and 87% agree uncertain environments create more opportunities for brands to gain share of voice. Belief in bold work is not the bottleneck - the organization is.

85% of leaders agree a delayed decision can be more damaging than an imperfect one

The wait-and-see tax: 61% of marketing leaders say waiting too long is the bigger risk (vs acting too fast), 58% say waiting too long is what actually happens more often, 47% have experienced missed market opportunities from waiting, and 85% agree delayed decisions can be more damaging than imperfect ones.

Meta ad spend has grown to nearly match global linear TV spend

Global Meta ad spend grew from US$7.0bn in 2013 to US$155.6bn in the latest year shown, close to linear TV's US$163.0bn, shifting budgets from a high-attention channel to a low-attention one where ads are mostly sales-driven.

The most consistent brands earn four times the advertising ROI

In the Effie replication of the consistency study, the most consistent quartile of US and UK brands averaged an advertising ROI of 8.8 per dollar against 2.1 for the least consistent - and 17.6% of their campaigns achieved incremental profit against 6.1%.

Brands that keep their agency create measurably better advertising every year

Brands that kept the same creative agency for five years improved ad quality every year (+4.7 fluency, +0.22 star annually) and reported 2.2 very large brand and 2.2 business effects; brands with multiple agency changes barely improved (+0.1, +0.07) and reported 0.8 and 1.6. The compounding lives in the brand-agency relationship.

The most consistent brands are eight times more likely to build differentiation

Brands ranked in the top 20% for consistency beat the bottom 20% on every very large brand effect in the IPA Databank: differentiation 59% vs 7%, brand values 65% vs 7%, salience 65% vs 20%, quality 41% vs 7%, trust 29% vs 0%. Consistency does not trade differentiation away - it is how differentiation gets built.

B2B advertising produces even less emotional response than consumer advertising

In B2B advertising the problem is worse. Neutrality covers 60% of UK B2B response and 54% of US B2B response. Emotion matters just as much in B2B, but most brands play safe and adopt a tone of voice that produces no reaction at all.

Nearly all of the most entertaining brands grew revenue

97% of the world's 30 most entertaining brands in Small W•rld's 2025 Entertainment Index posted revenue growth, and over two-thirds reported double-digit gains.

Almost half of the most entertaining brands achieved double-digit revenue growth

Among the 2026 Entertainment Index Top 30 brands with financial data (83%), only five reported revenue decline and 47% achieved double-digit growth, despite tariffs hitting brands like Porsche and Mattel.

Marketers already put the most money behind their most interesting consumer advertising

The good news is that marketers can tell when they have made something interesting and back it accordingly. In both markets the Non-Dull quartile attracts the highest media spend: $21.2bn of $66.1bn in the US (32%) and £1.61bn of £5.11bn in the UK (31.5%). The Extremely Dull quartile attracts the least.

Marketers rate their own briefs eight times more highly than the agencies receiving them do

80% of marketers consider themselves good at writing briefs. Only 10% of creative agencies agree that their clients are. The confidence a marketer feels writing a brief carries almost no information about how it lands.

Hot Topic's TikTok sitcom nearly doubled store-visit intent

Hot Topic's TikTok-first series Mall Rats drew 10m+ views, and a custom lift study showed intent to visit a Hot Topic store rose from 18% in the control group to 34% among viewers.

Vaseline turned creator hacks into shoppable ads and grew sales

Vaseline took the beauty 'hacks' 450+ creators were already doing with its product, verified which ones worked and turned those UGC videos into shoppable social spots. Sales jumped 43%.

Agencies describe the typical client brief as unfocused, unclear and dull

Asked to choose words describing the typical client brief, creative agencies picked unfocused (83%), unclear (79%), dull (65%), thoughtless (44%) and shoddy (39%). The positive options barely registered: inspiring 9%, clear 7%, well-crafted 4%, sharp 3%.

Anime is now a mass fandom among Gen Z

Anime is watched at least weekly by 50% of Gen Z, even in markets traditionally dominated by Hollywood studio entertainment, making it a fandom many brands have successfully joined.

Objectives are the most critical part of a brief, and both sides agree by a wide margin

Asked to rank the most critical element of a marketing brief, both sides put objectives first by a wide margin: 61% of marketers and 71% of agencies. Insights came second at 18% and 9%, target group definition third at 13% and 8%.

Surprise amplifies emotion by up to 400% and imprints the moment on memory

Surprise lasts around one 125th of a second but amplifies the emotion it rides on, positive or negative, by up to 400%. A noradrenaline spike imprints the surprising moment on memory, which is why surprising ads are remembered when merely pleasant ones fade.

Brands with the strongest distinctive assets are 52% more salient (Kantar) and their campaigns perform 62% better (Ebiquity) than weaker-asset rivals.

Kantar found brands with the strongest long-term brand assets are on average 52% more 'salient' than competitors. Ebiquity found campaigns using strong distinctive brand assets perform 62% better than campaigns that do not.

The most surprising ads reach fame five times as often as the dullest

Splitting the System1 ad database into the dullest, most negative, happiest and most surprising ads, 38% of the most surprising ads achieve fame versus 7% of the dullest - roughly five times as many - and the surprising ads even beat the happiest ones (34%).

Not all brand assets are created equal

Ehrenberg-Bass tested 1,281 brand identity elements across 13 FMCG categories and 19 countries. Brand characters led on uniqueness with 47% scoring highly, followed by logos at 37%. Colours, taglines and pack images scored lowest. The top three asset types for uniqueness are character, logo and typography.

A third of UK adults can name no brand with a sonic identity

A third of UK adults (32%) associate no brands at all with having a sonic identity. The best-recognised are McDonald's at 44%, Coca-Cola 33% and Netflix 26%. One in three adults under 35 feels more favourable towards brands with a sonic identity, and 18% of under-35s are more inclined to buy from one, against 10% of all adults.

The most successful new products and ads blend about 80% happiness with 20% surprise

System1's innovation testing puts numbers on the MAYA principle: five-star product concepts (highest chance of in-market success) average about 78% happiness to 22% surprise in their emotional profile, while the riskiest failures run about 64/36. The most effective ads sit at the same roughly 80/20 blend - surprise works in service of happiness, not instead of it.

Consistency compounds into growth

Brands that show up the same way everywhere deliver a +111% growth advantage over brands with less consistent perceptions, which show 0%. Each interaction reinforces the last, building clarity, trust and memory.

Ten years of McCain consistency added £79m of profit, mostly through pricing power

McCain held its 'We Are Family' real-teatimes platform consistently across media for ten years, sustaining investment through the pandemic and inflation. Advertising added £79m of profit, price elasticity halved, and the big payback came through the price effect - protected margins as costs rose. It became the most awarded IPA paper of all time.

The touchpoint hierarchy changes by category

The touchpoint hierarchy changes by category. In Automotive the top experience-led touchpoints are seeing the car on the road, own product experience, search and the online configurator. In Financial Services it is the brand app, then website, ATMs and search. In Personal Care it is shelf presence in store, own product experience and in-store promo.

Creative commitment scales business effects almost linearly

Creative commitment - the combination of campaign duration, number of media and budget - scales business effects almost linearly: campaigns scoring 12-15 on Hurman & Field's commitment scale average 1.8 very large business effects against 1.0 for those scoring 3-7.

The most distinctive brand asset portfolios in the USA

The top 10 most distinctive brand asset portfolios in the USA: Disney 164, Coca-Cola 152, McDonald's 152, Pepsi 149, US Postal Service 148, Dunkin' 146, Facebook 144, Subway 143, Starbucks 142, Hershey Park 142. Even within Disney, some assets are far more distinctive than others.

The most entertaining short-form ads double the awareness lift

Brands that commit to showmanship - entertainment-led creative - earn more attention and awareness: in 847 TikTok ads with brand-lift data, the most entertaining quartile delivered +45% emotional response, +54% five-second view rates and twice the brand awareness lift of the least entertaining.

A brand character raises the odds of very large market share and profit effects by roughly a third

Expressed as relative uplift, campaigns with a character Fluent Device were around 38% more likely to achieve very large market share gain, 28% more likely on new customer gain and 30% more likely on profit gain than campaigns without one.

Almost no advertising uses a brand character, which is exactly why it still works

Fewer than one ad in ten uses a character Fluent Device. In the UK it is 7% of ads, in the US 4%. A mechanism with measured long-term advantage is sitting almost entirely unused.

The pursuit of relevance may be what killed the brand character

System1 overlays the decline in Fluent Device use against the share of long-term campaigns using any online channel, which rose from around 20% at the turn of the century to effectively 100%. Their question: is the quest for audience relevance killing off the pure artifice of the Fluent Device?

Brands leave their own character on television instead of using it where the impressions are

Even brands that own a Fluent Device largely confine it to television. Among UK brands advertising on TV with a device, it appears in 63% of their TV ads but only 39% of YouTube ads, 39% of direct mail packs, 26% of Facebook ads, 24% of all Facebook content and 21% of tweets.

Specsavers - long-term format investment as a defence against dullness

Specsavers built ads that are never dull in a purely functional category by combining humour with schadenfreude and, critically, by investing in the same format long-term until it became widely known. The familiarity itself adds to the pleasure and makes a Neutral response less likely. Their recent ad scores 5.0 Stars.

You break each social ceiling with a different move, and none of them is more volume

Each ceiling on social is broken by a different move, and neither is posting more. You get past the platform ceiling by designing creative ideas that travel, and past the cultural ceiling by refusing to chase trends. The axis underneath the whole model is commitment over time.

The more uncertainty leaders face, the more they say bold work outperforms safe work

Leaders already operating under high uncertainty rate bold work's outcomes far higher than those who aren't - attracting earned media (~76% vs ~53%), competitive differentiation (~72% vs ~52%), trending-topic leadership, audience attention, brand influence and new customers all show gaps of roughly 15-20 points. The more chaos leaders experience, the more they value boldness.

Chaos-winning work leads with owned media and leans on social for amplification

Chaos Advantage campaigns are earned-first by design: owned media is the most common lead channel (17%, with social 16%, TV 16%, online video 12%), while support media is dominated by social (54%), PR & events (46%) and online video (39%) - the channels where people discuss, share and react rather than just receive reach.

Agencies think most clients do not know what a brief is supposed to contain

80% of creative agencies believe marketers have a poor (23%) or limited (57%) understanding of what agencies actually need from a brief. Only 1% rate that understanding as good.

Chaos-winning campaigns measure PR value and brand equity, not short-term ROI

Chaos Advantage campaigns measure success in brand terms: PR value (70%), awareness (56%), behavior change (55%), brand equity (55%) and market penetration (46%) are the most referenced success metrics, while direct revenue and ROI appear in just 8% each - brand building drives growth over a longer period than single commercial metrics capture.

Writing briefs does not get easier with experience, it gets harder

82% of marketers and 83% of agencies agree that writing briefs is hard. Among marketers it rises with experience rather than falling: 78% at 0-7 years, 81% at 8-14 years, 84% at 15 or more years.

The further you sit from writing the brief, the less enthusiastic you are about it

Enthusiasm for briefs decays with distance from the pen. Among marketers, 82% of brief writers are actively positive, against 79% of approvers and 65% of contributors. Inside agencies it runs 54% in account management, 46% creative, 45% management and 40% strategy.

94% of Irish adults recognise the National Lottery's waterslide visual even with no logo or tagline present.

The Irish National Lottery's waterslide visual is associated with the brand by 94% of Irish adults without any logo or tagline present. Social Media Manager Stephen Cleary: 'you can lean on your distinctive brand assets to get your brand noticed. We do this deliberately big, early and often.'

Sonic logos that include the brand name are twice as effective at reinforcing brand association as those that don't - Just Eat's is ranked the UK's most effective sonic logo.

Just Eat's 'Did somebody say Just Eat?' is ranked the UK's most effective sonic logo, with iterations by Snoop Dogg and Katy Perry pushing it into pop culture. SoundOut found sonic logos that include the brand name are twice as effective at reinforcing brand association as those that do not.

Improving customer experience makes a brand 2.5x more likely to significantly grow market share

Brands that improve their customer experience are 2.5x more likely to significantly increase their market share.

Meaningful Difference accounts for 94% of a brand's pricing power

Meaningful Difference accounts for 94% of a brand's pricing power.

A recurring character makes correct brand attribution close to automatic

Plotting TV spend against brand fluency, the percentage of viewers who correctly recognise the advertiser, ads without a character device spread from around 20% fluency upward, while ads with a device sit almost entirely above 70%. Correct attribution stops being something you have to buy with media weight.

Dove's Real Beauty: one brand idea applied to every new chaos since 2004, $28.34bn incremental revenue

Dove is the long-game proof of chaos-resistant brand building: since 2004 it has applied one consistent brand idea (Real Beauty) to each new wave of pressure on women's self-esteem - traditional media looks, filters and retouching apps, now AI reproducing biased ideals - driving an estimated $28.34bn in incremental revenue. Consistency rooted in brand truth makes a brand more relevant amid chaos.

No inconsistent brand grew distinctiveness - none

Not a single brand in the least consistent quartile grew distinctiveness over five years - 0%, against 35.3% of the most consistent. Inconsistent brands were also a third as likely to grow differentiation (11.1% vs 37.3%). The penalty of change lands on exactly the two assets rebrands promise to improve.

Young audiences are more excited by creator content than by new TV shows or films

57% of 14- to 24-year-olds say they have been more excited to see new content from creators than new TV shows or movies.

Adding radio and OOH lifted Meta CTR by 86% at stable spend

In a UK geo experiment, adding four weeks of radio to a stable Meta budget lifted Meta click-through rates by 29%; adding radio plus two weeks of out-of-home lifted them by 86%. Channels compound each other - the digital campaign performs better because the offline one exists.

Feeling nothing is the single most common reaction to a television ad

The most common response to advertising is not happiness, surprise or anger. It is Neutrality, the absence of any emotion at all. For the average UK TV ad 52% of responses are Neutral, and in the US it is 47%.

The most entertaining ads multiply memory, awareness and image lift

Comparing the top and bottom quartile of ads on showmanship features, the most entertaining ads delivered 39% higher memory lift, 2x brand awareness lift and 2.8x brand image lift.

Dullness kills happiness and surprise while leaving negative reaction untouched

Splitting US TV ads into quartiles by Neutral response shows dullness only destroys positive feeling. As Neutrality climbs from 32% to 62%, Happiness falls from 43% to 21% and Surprise from 14% to 8%. Negative emotions including anger, contempt and disgust stay essentially constant.

The dullest quartile of advertising buys roughly a thirteenth of the share growth of the most interesting

Modelling every brand at 5% market share with +10 points of Excess Share of Voice, Non-Dull ads are projected to deliver 1.30 points of annualised market share gain. Moderately Dull deliver 0.60, Very Dull 0.30 and Extremely Dull just 0.10. Identical media money, one thirteenth of the growth.

Entertaining brands are far more likely to be people's preferred brand

17 of the 30 most entertaining brands have at least double the preference level of the Bottom 30 brands' average of 9%. Preference was low only for luxury goods and emerging brands.

Liquid Death graduates ideas from a small social test to TV

Liquid Death tests ideas with around $5k of social spend outside its usual audience; if save and share ratios hold, the idea becomes a YouTube pre-roll, and if people don't skip after five seconds, it can move to TV.

The gap between how marketers and agencies rate briefs is widening, not closing

In the USA the same question was asked in 2015 and again in 2021. Marketers went from 58% to 90% saying they write good briefs, while agencies went from 27% down to 6%. The gap did not close, it roughly tripled.

Marketers and agencies do not even agree that briefs are written in plain language

83% of marketers say their briefs contain clear and concise language. 7% of creative agencies agree. The two sides are not just disagreeing about quality, they are not reading the same document the same way.

What agencies say is missing from briefs is objectives, not inspiration

Asked what is missing from most marketing briefs, creative agencies named clear objectives or outcomes (55%), clear strategy or problem definition (34%), clarity in general (30%) and single-mindedness (10%).

A third of marketing budget is estimated to be lost to poor briefs and misdirected work

The study estimates that one third of marketing budgets are wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work. Reported elsewhere as marketing's 200 billion dollar black hole, this is the report's own estimate rather than an audited figure.

Marketers feel motivated by briefs; agencies feel frustrated by the same ones

The emotional response to briefs is close to a mirror image. Marketers report feeling motivated (77%), satisfied (65%), excited (64%) and energised (63%). Agencies report frustrated (78%), irritated (67%), bored (57%) and disengaged (51%). On satisfaction the split is 65% against 16%.

Showing brand assets beats saying the brand name

Saying the brand name more often barely moves branded attention. Across 2,015 US cases, brand mentions shifted the likelihood of being a high-performing ad by +3, while the appearance of brand assets shifted it by +34 - roughly eleven times more.

Companies change brand assets without hard data

The main reason companies change their brand properties is organisation change, at 55%. Only 24% change them on the basis of strategy using data, and 20% on strategy based on judgement. Roughly three quarters of asset churn has no data behind it.

Tubi's fake channel-switch Super Bowl ad drove 70,000 app opens in minutes

Tubi's Super Bowl 57 stunt faked a channel change in the game's final minutes, sending America hunting for the remote. 70,000 people opened the Tubi app within minutes of the ad - a challenger streaming service buying the biggest stage and using surprise, not budget, to be the brand everyone talked about.

Social ads are watched for less than three seconds

Measured with human eye-tracking rather than platform data, most people watch social ads for under 2.5 seconds. Active Attention Seconds by platform: Twitter 3.2, YouTube 2.7, Instagram 2.2, Facebook 1.7.

Loewe's Maggie Smith casting beat its ambassador average by 55% on earned media

When Loewe added the then 80-something Maggie Smith to a brand ambassador lineup of expected names, the surprising choice outperformed the brand's ambassador average by 55% on earned media and 68% on engagement - surprise working in luxury and in social, not just in TV ads.

A shared belief gives brands 9x higher volume share, 2x higher price paid, and 4x greater odds of growing value share

Brands with a strong predisposition built on a shared belief see 9x higher volume share, 2x higher price paid, and are 4x more likely to grow value share.

Affinity nearly doubles repeat purchase

Customers with above-average affinity to a brand repeat-purchase at 50%, against 25% for customers with below-average affinity. Affinity nearly doubles repeat buying.

Ads wear in, not out: longer-lived campaigns build recognition faster

Ad wear-in is measurable: the longer a brand keeps its ads alive, the faster its distinctiveness grows (r=0.52, p<0.01 across 80 UK brands and 4,000+ TV ads). The brand with a 713-day average campaign life gains +15% ad-brand recognition annually. Retiring ads early forfeits recognition they were still building.

The most distinctive brands more than doubled the growth

Over 12 years, the top third of brands on Kantar's Brand Imprint Index (a measure of distinctiveness across all assets) grew brand value to $1,987B, against $881B for the bottom third - more than twice the growth.

Felix rode one consistent cat from near-death to a billion-dollar brand

Felix cat food ran one black-and-white cartoon cat consistently from 1989 to 2011 - through recessions, new channels and new markets. Sales and market share rose five-fold, price elasticity halved, the brand moved from budget to premium pricing and toppled the market leader on a fraction of its budget, ending up a global brand worth over a billion dollars.

Nationwide's belief-led rebrand produced the highest account-switching gains in UK banking in 2025

Nationwide's rebrand started from the shared belief that 'banking should be fairer, more human and easier to trust', backed by a service-led promise and a branch experience to match. It produced the highest gains from account switching in the UK banking category in 2025.

Growth tracks clarity of feeling

Growth tracks with clarity of feeling: brands that own one clear feeling grew fastest in 2025. Rolex/Sophistication 4%, Hermes/Distinction 9%, LEGO/Ingenuity 12%, lululemon/Self-betterment 22%, Liquid Death/Rebellion 40%, TikTok/Creativity 43%, Strava/Connection 50%, Oura/Knowledge 100%, OpenAI/Possibility 128%.

A 20-second film of grazing cows beats more than a quarter of all advertising

One ad in the System1 database is 20 seconds of cows gently munching in a field. It scores a 2.8 Star Rating, in line with the average TV ad, with 56% Neutrality. That is still not dull enough for the bottom quartile: more than one in four ads generate less response than a film of a cow in a field.

Brand characters shift the whole distribution of emotional response upward

In a US audit of 13,423 TV ads, character Fluent Device ads scored higher across the whole emotional star distribution. Ads without a device (12,862 ads): 57% one star, 28% two, 12% three, 3% four, 1% five. Character device ads (561 ads): 41%, 29%, 23%, 4%, 3%. System1 converts the gap into an average uplift of 8 percentage points of share of voice.

B2B advertising loses positive emotion to dullness at exactly the same rate as consumer work

The same pattern holds exactly in B2B. Across dullness quartiles, Neutrality rises from 33% to 63% while Happiness falls from 42% to 20% and Surprise from 15% to 8%. If you are worried about a negative response to your B2B ad, making it duller is not the way to reduce that.

British Gas and Wilbur the Penguin in a single static press ad

A British Gas press ad reading 'Free Electricity' was split-tested with and without Wilbur the Penguin. Adding the character lifted the System1 Star Rating from 2 to 3, effective reach from 69% to 74% viewing, average dwell time from 0.6 to 0.9 seconds, and spontaneous brand recall from 28% to 35%.

Emotional response acts as a multiplier on share of voice, not an alternative to it

System1's Star Rating runs from 1 to 5 and functions as an emotional share of voice amplifier: 1 star predicts no growth, 2 modest, 3 good, 4 strong and 5 exceptional growth. It multiplies the Binet & Field finding that market share growth is proportional to 0.05 times extra share of voice.

Creative quality explained ten times more category value than advertising weight alone

In the same UK Cereals period, total brand sales across the category moved £56.6m year on year. A quantity-only model explained £3.4m of that. Quantity plus creative quality explained £37.1m. The £33.7m difference is what System1 attributes to creativity in that category in that period.

The majority of television advertising scores the lowest possible emotional rating

Most advertising is not built to grow anything. Across 19,101 US TV ads measured between July 2017 and June 2018, 54% scored one star on emotional response and took 46% of TV media spend. Only 1% reached five stars, taking 2% of spend.

The longer a campaign runs, the wider the profit gap between emotional and rational work

Binet & Field's profit curves show emotional campaigns pulling further ahead of rational ones the longer they run. Share reporting very large profit growth: 13% vs 10% at one year, 30% vs 20% at two years, 43% vs 23% at three years.

Social has three ceilings - the algorithm, the moment, and credibility

WARC's Pace Principle stacks three ceilings on social. The platform ceiling is set by the algorithm: organic content has a short shelf life and reach stops when spend stops. The cultural ceiling is set by the moment: relevance fades when the trend moves on. The self-sustaining ceiling is set only by credibility, where creators carry ideas they trust and influence compounds across communities.

Orange WoMen's Football - denying an audience assumption to defeat dullness

Orange's 2023 Women's World Cup ad by Marcel showed famous male players making terrific plays, then revealed through VFX and deepfake technology that the footage was of female athletes all along. Denying a key audience assumption in order to surprise them produced a 4.7 Star result with football fans and the Entertainment for Sport Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024.

92% of chaos-winning campaigns carried brand-building objectives

Chaos Advantage work is strategic, not tactical: of 118 qualifying Cannes Lions campaigns (2023-2026), 92% had brand-building objectives - most commonly building equity (67%) and raising awareness (65%) - while seasonal activity (13%), brand relaunches (5%) and internal marketing (3%) barely feature.

The creative process is being used to work out the strategy it was supposed to execute

60% of marketers admit to using the creative process to clarify the strategy. In the UK, marketer admission of this rose from 35% in 2003 to 57% in 2021, while agencies reported it at 79% then and 81% now. Agencies have been describing the same behaviour for eighteen years.

Half of briefs are approved by the wrong people, and most briefings lack structure

Two fixable process failures: 72% of marketers say agency briefings could work better if they were more structured, and half the time the right people are not signing off marketing briefs internally.

Audio appears in under 10% of video ads, even though sonic cues are the single most effective asset type for branded attention.

Audio was used in less than 10% of the 2,000+ video creatives in Ipsos's dataset, despite sonic cues being the single most effective asset type for branded attention. It is the widest gap between evidence and practice in brand assets.

Campaigns with a recurring "Fluent Device" character are 23% more likely to gain market share.

System1 found that 'Fluent Devices' - recurring characters or devices in long-running campaigns - make a campaign 23% more likely to achieve market share gain.

Renault's new audio identity made the brand feel up to 65% more modern and momentum-driven among people under 35.

Renault repositioned from product-directed to lifestyle-oriented and found the automotive category defaulted to metallic, car and engine UX sounds. A new audio vocabulary improved perception among people aged 35 and under: 65% more modern, 62% more enthusiastic, 60% more unique, 65% more momentum.

Reviving Schmackos's 30-year-old jingle and characters instead of replacing them lifted annual sales 21% and volume market share 19%.

Schmackos, an Australian dog food brand, reversed a five-year sales decline by reinvigorating a 30-year-old campaign platform rather than replacing it. It brought back Roger the dog, Dorothy his owner and the iconic jingle with revamped characters and a consistent story structure. Annual sales rose 21%, volume market share grew 19% and reliance on promotions fell.

Distinctiveness, experience and product factors drive 62% of what makes a brand different - communication only 20%

When you decompose what makes a brand different from its competition, 62% of the difference is driven by distinctiveness, experience and product factors. Only 20% comes from communication.

The route out of short-termism is cutting the half of advertising that builds nothing

System1's own conclusion on how to fix falling effectiveness: identify the roughly 50% of advertising that does not contribute to the long term, and develop and invest in the kind of work that does.

The average big-brand ad on the major platforms lasts barely over a month

The average ad on YouTube, TikTok or Meta runs for 36 days, and that figure covers big brands only - the advertisers most able to sustain a campaign over time. No base size is given with the number.

86% of marketing leaders say the environment is more unpredictable than three years ago

86% of marketing leaders say the current business environment is more unpredictable and disruptive than three years ago, and 78% expect to operate under moderate to very high uncertainty over the next 12 months (US 86%, UK 85%). Chaos stopped being an event and became the operating environment.

Cautious brands get backlash at the same rate as bold ones - 20% vs 21%

The false-safety paradox: cautious and less cautious organizations attract public backlash at near-identical rates - 20% vs 21%. Silence does not provide the protection it promises, and 58% of leaders say missing opportunities through caution is more common than suffering negative outcomes from boldness.