Brand & Creativity: 179 findings, with sources

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.

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 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.

System1 describes Neutrality as the dark matter of advertising response: it leaves no trace, it does not interact with anything else, but in many cases it represents more of the audience reaction than all seven measured emotions combined.

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.

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.

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.

The core reframe of the paper: the problem of dull is not damage, it is waste. A neutral ad does not harm a brand. It simply costs more, sometimes a lot more, to get the same business impact with a dull ad as with an interesting one.

Each of the four drivers of dullness is individually justifiable and even sensible. Taken together they create a toxic atmosphere for fresh work, and AI makes all four of them move at warp speed.

Showmanship is the kryptonite of dull. The desire to entertain your audience, to give them something to look at, is what drives dullness out of creative work: humour, story, vivid characters and other right-brained elements.

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.

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.

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 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.

Poor briefs start a loop: shallow creative thinking, mediocre ideas, additional rounds of concepting and approvals, more time and money spent, less motivated staff, and less effective work - which makes the next brief no better.

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.

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.

The four quadrants of the Distinctive Brand Assets Grid: 'Ignore or test' (low fame, low uniqueness), 'Avoid solo use' (high fame, low uniqueness - it evokes competitors, so it needs the brand name alongside), 'Investment potential' (low fame, high uniqueness - needs wider and more consistent use), and 'Use or lose' (high on both - can supplement or replace the name in advertising, but decays if neglected).

Lloyds Bank in the UK has applied 'fresh consistency' to its black horse symbol for more than 125 years: the same asset restated across eras, not replaced. Consistency means consumers do not have to work hard to recognise a brand.

The case against over-relying on distinctive assets: they draw their power from the creativity of the work they accompany and are 'no substitute for creativity, imagination, wit, and empathy for the audience'. Oxford professor Felipe Thomaz found that distinctiveness of assets does not break into the top 10 characteristics that drive performance.

Jenni Romaniuk's advice for digital commerce: develop assets suited to the environments the brand will appear in, marry branding and design so assets are used attractively, and prioritise images over words - especially for smaller brands with lower awareness. But build awareness first: 'Prominence builds prior to reaching the screen, through the mental structures previously created and refreshed in buyer memory.'

A sonic logo is 'a few seconds of distinctive, distilled brand experience that is sufficiently unique to be associated with only one brand'. To count as a brand asset rather than just a marketing asset, a sonic cue has to make people immediately think of one specific brand.

Sonic branding is not a brand-saving strategy. It accelerates existing momentum; if a brand is struggling, a new sonic identity is unlikely to help. Fix the brand first, because consumers must be positively disposed to it before an emotional link can be made.

Shell's sonic identity uses one memorable melody expressed in many styles, from hard-hitting electric guitars to Thai and Turkish adaptations. Beyond winning awards, it has saved the company tens of millions of dollars in music licensing fees.

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.

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

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

If we think of a brand as a promise, experience is the moment it comes true. Brand experience is any way someone interacts with a brand - the hello at the end of the phone, the swipe of an app, the unboxing, the fragrance of the hotel lobby.

Distinctive experiences are Effective (they do what they say they do), Unique (they offer something customers cannot get elsewhere) and Empathetic (they make space for people and acknowledge them).

Real belief is deeper than product proofs, reasons to believe, or purpose statements. A strong brand turns a real category need into a shared belief - something customers already feel should be true, which the brand then commits to deliver on distinctively and consistently.

A shared belief or emotional bond alone is not enough. The brain needs a recognisable signal to attach to the emotion it is feeling. Distinctive brand assets are emotional bookmarks - they help someone find their way back to a feeling.

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'.

Stella Artois at Wimbledon is a three-part lesson in distinctive experience: Effective (players wear white, so the can went white), Unique (only available at Wimbledon, and not even for purchase), Empathetic (the 'Perfect Serve' platform invites guests to learn to pour it themselves).

Frictionless is not the same as distinctive. Some experiences get the job done but do not connect people to the brand emotionally, so they build no positive association and no affinity - efficiency without difference.

A Fluent Device is a fictitious character or characters, human or creature, created by the brand and used as the primary vehicle for the drama in more than one ad across a campaign. Two conditions matter: the brand owns it, and it carries the story rather than decorating it.

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.

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 paper's own explanation for why duller B2B ads attract more investment: B2B ads are often laden with information, which makes audiences tune out. B2B marketers appear to be pursuing the false efficiency of getting info-rich ads in front of more people. As the authors put it, too often B2B means Budget 2 Boredom.

Optimisation explains why every logo now looks the same. The more channels and formats you advertise across, the simpler your assets have to be to work everywhere, which is why distinctive colourful marks have been redrawn as monotone sans-serif wordmarks. The price of flexibility is dullness.

The instinctive way to make an ad less dull is the worst available move. Orlando Wood's mapping puts flat colours, words obtruding on screen, highly rhythmic soundtracks, freeze-frame effects and product-centricity in the low-attention, low-emotion quadrant. Animals, characters with vitality, dialogue and spontaneous facial expression sit in the high-attention, high-emotion one.

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.

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.

Run in reverse, the same loop is the argument for investment: better briefs produce richer creative thinking, better ideas, fewer rounds of concepting and approvals, more time and money saved, more motivated staff and more effective work.

Uniqueness comes from the combination of brand elements, not from the individual elements. Red and white is not a unique colour combination and reads as Coca-Cola; The Economist's grid or typeface alone would not identify it either. Brought together, the effect is far more unique and famous than its individual parts.

Competing vocabularies have muddied brand-asset best practice: Ehrenberg-Bass says 'Distinctive Brand Assets', System1 says 'Fluent Devices', others say brand codes or iconic triggers. Some argue it is all a rebranding of decades-old identity and recognition principles.

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.'

Service brands have a weakened toolkit because there is no physical product buyers can see, hold or trip over. Six counters: make the intangible tangible, use touchpoints where service brands have an advantage (emails and letters as branding occasions), use wide-reaching media to build assets among non-buyers, refresh memories among existing buyers, get creative with shopping assets, and make consistency your mantra because every inconsistent moment is a wasted chance to build.

Three steps to a sonic identity: define the brand personality first (a strong brand appeal rating materially affects whether a sonic strategy works), test the sonic logo with consumers who have no brand association so it enters the world already 'on brand', then expand from a single logo to a 'sonic DNA' adapted across touchpoints.

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.

Mastercard removed its own name from its logo after finding the interlocking circles alone were recognisable and highly flexible across devices, then built a 'sonic brand architecture' that keeps its audio cues consistent while allowing local variation across 210 markets, including an acceptance sound at point of sale.

Haptics are emerging as a distinctive brand asset: the Apple Watch's pulse on the wrist is a recognisable brand cue, and multi-sensory experiences trigger more activity in the parts of the brain linked to emotion and memorability. More is not better - haptics work best when the burst matches the pace and energy of the accompanying visual, short for fast scenes and long and gradual for slow motion.

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.

The Distinctive Experience Cycle has four parts around a shared brand belief: a Distinctive Expression that motivates people to participate, Participation itself, a Distinctive Experience that fulfils the desire to participate, and Validation that feeds back into the belief.

Four questions to ask of any brand experience before you build it: How will people get involved? How will they know how it works? How long will it take? How will it make them feel?

Do something, and feel it? You remember. Do something, and feel it often? You believe. Repetition is what converts a memorable experience into a belief.

Heinz shows how small repeat behaviours build belief: the glass bottle ritual, 'the 57 trick', the Kegchup format. Years of consistent investment mean nobody is disturbed when a restaurant serves them Heinz, and nobody reaches for another ketchup brand.

Too many companies treat brand experience as an afterthought, or isolate what the brand says from what it does - expression in one team, service in another, product in a third. Consumers do not experience it that way, and many say they will switch after just two bad experiences.

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.

Successful communications need to create three things. FAME, the availability heuristic, measured as percentage reach. FEELING, the affect heuristic, measured as the share of category buyers who feel happiness toward the comms. FLUENCY, processing fluency, measured as the extent and speed with which the brand is correctly attributed.

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.

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.

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.

People find things more pleasurable the more times they are repeated - unless they become aware of the repetition. Musicologist David Huron calls it disguised repetition, and it dissolves the consistency-versus-freshness trade-off: the craft is variation on a theme, not reinvention. Monet painted 250 waterlilies; Marmite has run love-it-or-hate-it for decades.

The compound creativity curve has an inconvenient shape: in the first 12 months consistency delivers limited benefit, and the advantage over inconsistent brands only opens up after year one, compounding thereafter. This is why consistency keeps being abandoned right before it pays.

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.

Adam Morgan names four structural forces driving dullness, the Four Horsemen of the Dullocalypse: Performance (spend moving to channels measured on short-term transactional metrics), Optimisation (assets simplified to work at any size on any screen), Averaging (brands copying what works until everything converges), and Procurement (budget cuts leaving no time to get from good to great).

The Anti-Dull Dial is a five-question self-check from eatbigfish. Are we meeting them where they care and speaking their language? Are we using the real bar to judge what is interesting, or one we invented? Are we showing real distinctiveness and character? Are we using emotion, drama and storytelling? Are we denying one of their key assumptions and surprising them?

Generative AI produces the average of the data it was trained on by default, and generic means dull. The industry commentary focuses on when AI gets things wrong, but the bigger problem is when it gets things dull. In an era where average is a click away, dodging the cost of dull becomes more urgent, not less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Showing brand assets beats saying the brand name

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

Brand assets are not inherent, they have to be learned through consistent messaging. That is why advertising wearout is common but brand-asset wearout is comparatively rare, which makes assets an unusually efficient long-term investment.

Too much focus on repeating prescribed brand elements can stifle creativity and produce mediocre work. Brands need 'fresh consistency': well thought-through updates that retain the core attributes and refresh rather than replace existing elements.

'Blanding' is the digital-native failure mode: early DTC brands converged on pastel colours, serif type and humanly elevated missions because machine learning rewarded those ideas. Bloomberg's definition is claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose and singular in delivery while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel and tone of voice.

Having a sonic identity is not a sonic strategy. David Courtier-Dutton, CEO of SoundOut: a sonic identity is an additional creative element; a sonic strategy is a thread running through the business that anchors music to brand personality at every consumer touchpoint, from sonic brand cue to sonic marketing to live events.

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.

The same brand cue needs different framing per platform. In China: e-commerce is shifting from informational product detail to emotion-driven video, Weibo is text-heavy with internet slang, RED needs carefully refined visual compositions, WeChat requires interactive images and games to penetrate a private social space, Bilibili favours advertorial-style ACG video, and Douyin rewards unpolished authentic livestream content.

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 test for whether an experience is distinctive: could this experience, or this collection of experiences, have been offered by anyone else? If yes, you may be meeting a customer need but you are not building difference.

Distinctive brand assets are Clear (simple, connected use of colour, design and phrasing), Consistent (used again and again across channels and time) and Communicative (they reinforce brand belief, messaging and personality).

Daryl Bem's self-perception theory applied to brands: people do not change what they believe because a brand tells them a good story. A story might convince them to try a product, but to believe something a person needs skin in the game - they need to participate.

KFC rebuilt around one belief - banishing the bland, 'nothing hits like KFC' - and fused its five most distinctive assets (the colonel, the wordmark, the stripes, the colour and the bucket) into a single logo asset called The Bucketverse, then systemised it across logo, palette, photography, illustration, typography and tone of voice.

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.