Brand Strategy: 477 findings, with sources

A single video exposure is projected to still be producing sales three years later

Kantar's algorithms project that a single ad exposure on the tested platforms and formats generates between 1% and 5% more sales over the following three years than no exposure at all.

Digital video builds brands over years, and Linear TV still builds them harder

Long-term sales lift from a single exposure came out at 2% for digital video against 4.5% for Linear TV. The finding is not that digital wins - it does not - but that digital video registers a multi-year brand effect at all, which the industry shorthand of "TV builds brands, digital drives clicks" denies.

Brand size and message complexity decide whether you buy attentive reach or attentive time

dentsu's attention quadrant maps brand size against message familiarity and complexity. Salience tasks with a familiar message favour cost-efficient shorter attention formats. Meaning and difference with an unfamiliar, complex message need investment in longer attention formats supported by shorter ones. A smaller brand with a familiar message launches with longer attention formats and scales with cheaper short ones.

People are pessimistic about the world but optimistic about their own lives

People rate the state of the world at 5.5 out of 10 but their own lives at 7.2, and 69% still feel regularly hopeful for the future. VML calls the 2026 mood 'dysoptimism': darkness acknowledged, despair refused - and most consumer behaviour shifts in the report live in that gap.

Private label has opened price gaps of 25-40% against big advertisers, whose own reported growth is mostly price increases, not volume.

Much of the growth big advertisers do report comes from price increases rather than volume, while private label has opened price gaps of 25-40% and taken better shelf position.

AI adoption is mass-market but the anxiety adopted right along with it

The same public that adopted AI en masse remains deeply ambivalent: 77% feel we are rushing into AI without properly thinking through the consequences, 71% say AI is making it impossible to understand what is true in the world, 75% worry AI will lead to a Big Brother age of permanent surveillance - and 53% think AI is overhyped.

Farmer's proposed AI bargain: automate low-funnel deliverables, then split the savings - half to the client as a fee cut, half reinvested in senior agency talent.

Farmer's proposed AI bargain: automate the low-funnel deliverables, but let the client take only half the saving as a fee reduction while the agency keeps the other half to reinvest in senior strategic people.

Physical retail's edge is sensory: stores that only sell are stores people skip

86% of people say the great thing about physical stores is that they can engage all the senses, 74% say stores need to offer more than products - they should entertain - and 76% still prefer shopping in person. Physical retail's defensible ground is sensory, not transactional.

TV and CTV CPMs run about $32 versus under $10 for typical programmatic, yet buyers treat all reach as equal.

Roughly $32 CPMs for over-the-air TV or CTV against under $10 for typical programmatic, with buyers behaving as though all reach is equal - the cheap-reach reflex that hollowed out top-of-funnel advertising.

Consistency more than doubles what a point of ESOV buys

Brands in the most consistent third earn an expected ESOV efficiency of 1.7 against 0.7 for the least consistent - the same excess share of voice buys the consistent brand well over twice the market growth.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

Nike lost six points of consideration and preference in six months of performance-heavy spending

Tracksuit's US sportswear tracking for Nike between April and September 2024 shows awareness slipping from 95% to 94%, consideration from 79% to 73% and preference from 39% to 33%, after years of over-investing in conversion marketing at the expense of brand. In people, that is 5.7 million fewer Americans considering Nike and 8 million fewer preferring it, while Hoka, On and Adidas gained.

Creative decides more than half of Meta auction outcomes

Meta reported at its 2023 Performance Marketing Summit that 56% of auction outcomes are driven by the creative asset itself. With interest targeting being retired, the creative is what decides who sees the ad and whether it wins the auction.

Four in ten Gen Z, Millennial and Gen X consumers discover new products on social media

Around four in ten Gen Z (40%), Millennial (43%) and Gen X (40%) consumers have discovered new products via social media, versus 20% of Baby Boomers, and 58% of internet users use social media to research brands and products. Unless you are a legacy brand, performance channels are where most people first meet you, so a well-crafted direct response ad also builds familiarity and trust.

When buyers explained six recent purchases, purpose showed up in under one percentile of their reasons.

Kantar's reversed purpose test: instead of asking whether people care about causes (they say yes), they asked buyers to explain six purchases they had just made - purpose appeared in under one percentile of verbatim reasons.

The optimal brand share of marketing budget is trending up, from around 60% toward 62% or more, not down.

The optimal brand share of budget is trending UP, not down - from 60% toward 62%+ - because digital makes activation easier for ever more brands, leaving brand building as the scarce, hard job. "Don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise."

McDonald's measured a materially higher return on its creatively awarded work

Matt Biespiel, then McDonald's Senior Director of Global Brand Development: "Creatively awarded work gives a significantly higher return-on-investment, in our case 54% higher, than non-awarded work. It doesn't take a genius to see that more creative awards is better for business."

Mental advantage starts at a five percentage point deviation from expected

A deviation of +5 percentage points or more from the expected score is a mental advantage, -5pp or worse is a mental disadvantage, and anything between the two is classified 'as expected' - the brand is neither more nor less likely to be thought of than its size would predict.

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%).

Mental market share separates banks as sharply as real market share does

In UK business banking (n=609), Barclays held 9.8% mental market share with 78% mental penetration and a network size of 7.9. RBS held 4.4% with 53% mental penetration and a network size of 5.2. Credit Agricole sat at 2.0%, 34% and 3.7.

The performance plateau is Binet & Field translated for brands that only ever bought performance

The performance plateau chart was not new theory. Tom Roach and Dr Grace Kite built it to re-express Binet & Field's long-and-short zigzag in a shape that would land with digital-first brands who had grown through performance marketing and were sceptical of brand investment.

Share of Model is not a proxy for share of voice or share of search

Share of model sits in the same canon as share of voice and share of search, but Roach doubts it will correlate with either, because it is constructed differently. Share of voice is about money spent; share of search has several competing definitions depending on who is using it.

Creativity now outranks possessions as a marker of status

Creativity is becoming a marker of personal status: 43% say how creative someone is defines a person's status, ahead of care for the planet (39%) and positive health metrics (36%). Status is migrating from what you own to what you can make.

In every market studied, most potential buyers are not in-market yet - future demand outnumbers current demand.

Every market has two demand pools: current demand (in-market now) and future demand (will buy later). Smartphones: 15% vs 85%. Sneakers: ~25/75. Air travel: 19/81. Beer (weekly window): 37/63. No category has a majority of buyers in-market at any moment.

The brand half of the marketing budget should be split evenly across all 12 months, not spent in one seasonal burst.

Allocate the brand half of the budget by dividing it by 12 and spending it every month - continuity beats bursts, because future demand needs continuous topping-up, not a two-month campaign once a year.

Brand equity accounts for about two thirds of LLM visibility, current marketing activity about a quarter, and citation volume only about a tenth.

Two thirds of LLM visibility is accounted for by brand equity, ~25% by current marketing activity, and only ~10% by citation volume - GEO tools chasing citations optimize the smallest lever. LLMs triangulate a 'safe choice' using the same signals as humans: trust, consistency, category entry points.

Branded characters raise the odds of very large share gain by a quarter

Campaigns featuring branded characters ('fluent devices') are 23% more likely to generate very large share gain and 22% more likely to generate very large profit gain than the average campaign. The report pairs this with a revival of brand mascots as durable, ownable creator alternatives.

Media returns peak with roughly half to sixty per cent of the budget in brand building

For European e-commerce brands, media ROI peaks when roughly 47-59% of investment goes to brand building, which the report's executive summary rounds to 40-60%. Pushing performance beyond about 59% of the mix sends returns down sharply, and the lowest ROI in the dataset sits at 83% performance.

Škoda's Reddit-designed Octavia beat order expectations two and a half times over

Škoda let members of Reddit's Car Talk community vote on everything from the engine to the interior trim of a special-edition Octavia. Orders exceeded expectations by 255% and the campaign took a Cannes Lions Gold - co-creation as a commercial mechanism, not community theatre.

Campaigns that target both new and existing customers grow market share faster per year than campaigns targeting only one group.

The most effective campaigns address the whole market rather than a segment of it. Broad-reach campaigns targeting both new and existing customers delivered 1.8% annual market share growth, against 1.37% for new-customer-only and 1.15% for existing-customer-only campaigns.

Three quarters of young consumers want a hand in shaping the brands they buy

75% of gen Z and millennials say they are interested in getting more involved with their favourite brands, from co-creation to influencing innovation. The audience for co-creation is not a niche of superfans - it is three quarters of the young market.

Earned media only fires at scale online when paid and owned media are both already in place.

Earned media online only works at scale when paid and owned are already in place: 78% of campaigns combining earned, owned and paid generated significant earned media, against 11% for earned plus paid, 7% for earned plus owned, and 4% for earned alone.

A White Lotus appearance lifted resort interest four-fold and dress sales seven-fold

Entertainment IP moves real commerce: after appearing in The White Lotus, Four Seasons Maui saw online interest jump 425%, and a Jim Thompson kimono dress worn on the show sold up 671% in four days. Placement inside story worlds now outperforms placement beside them.

Online paid media drives far more market share growth than online unpaid media.

Inside online, paid decisively beats unpaid: online paid drove 2.6% average market share growth against 0.9% for online unpaid, and paid social was roughly twice as effective as unpaid social.

Five in six consumers want their money going to brands that reflect their values

84% of people want their money to go to brands that reflect their values, 79% say brands have a responsibility to take care of the planet and its people, and 74% say brands should make more effort to speak to people like them. The brand mandate skews to values and representation over price.

Paid search and email are the strongest activation channels, well ahead of DRTV and SMS.

Paid search and email are the strongest activation channels, each adding around 17% to effectiveness, ahead of DRTV at 10% and SMS at 6%.

Market share and penetration effects - the two metrics most tied to long-term growth - have fallen faster than any other effectiveness measure.

The two metrics falling fastest are the two most tied to long-term growth: market share effects and penetration effects each shed around 7 percentage points, roughly a fifth of their original level.

Short-termism rose sharply among IPA cases, from a long-run average of 8% to about 25%, while campaigns with activation objectives kept climbing after the financial crisis.

Short-termism rose from a long-run average of 8% of IPA cases to about 25%, while campaigns with activation objectives went from 47% before the financial crisis to 55% and then 72% in the four years to 2016.

Seven in ten shoppers plan to buy off-price even if their budget grows

Value retail is booming alongside experience retail: 70% of customers plan to buy from outlets or off-price retailers in the next 12 months even if their budget increases (BoF-McKinsey), and US warehouse clubs grew revenue roughly 50% from 2020 to 2024. The middle of the market is what's emptying.

Two real IPA campaigns show ROMI can mislead: the campaign with the lower ROMI generated 45% more net profit.

Two real IPA cases show why ROMI misleads: case A returned 103% ROMI on a £426k budget for £439k net profit, while case B returned 65% ROMI on £980k for £637k - 45% more profit from the campaign with the worse ratio.

Brand building and sales activation work over different timescales

Brand building and sales activation work on different clocks. Activation produces a sharp sales spike that decays back to base within weeks, so it never accumulates. Brand building moves slowly but each gain is held, ratcheting the base upward over years. Judge them on the same reporting period and brand building always looks like the weaker investment.

Brand building and sales activation need different media

The two jobs need different media because they work differently. Brand building needs broad reach, emotion and mental availability - it is buying memory across the whole category. Sales activation needs targeting, information and physical availability - it is converting people who are already in the market. A plan optimised for one is mis-built for the other.

Creative quality and media support together explain most of what a campaign achieves

Matching 1,265 Effie award cases to System1 creative testing, creative quality alone explains 24.2% of the Business Results a campaign reports. Adding media support raises that to 60.1%, at 99.9% confidence. Most of what a campaign achieves sits inside two decisions marketers already control.

Creative Dividend and Excess Share of Creativity - creative advantage, then creative advantage at scale

The Creative Dividend measures how much more creative a campaign is than its own category. It is positive emotion, distinctiveness, showmanship and consistency, each divided by the category average and multiplied together. Excess Share of Creativity (ESOC) is that dividend multiplied by media spend.

GLP-1 use is reshaping spending in categories far from food

17% of people have taken or are taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, up from 12% a year earlier, and UBS forecasts 40 million users and $126 billion in sales by 2029. Second-order effects are already visible: US perfume sales to GLP-1 users rose 23% as suppressed appetite redirects the desire for pleasure into other categories.

Creative quality is the largest profit multiplier a marketer actually controls

Paul Dyson's ranking of profit multipliers puts brand size first at x20, but that is not something a marketer can change this quarter. Creative quality is second at x12, ahead of budget setting across markets (x5.0), multimedia (x2.5) and target audience (x1.1).

Everyone thinks truth is dying - and most think they personally can spot the fakes

81% of people say the truth is an endangered concept these days and 71% believe AI is making it impossible to understand what is true - yet 68% are confident they personally can distinguish real from fake online. The confidence gap is exactly where misinformation lives.

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.

A brand character outperforms a celebrity on almost every commercial outcome

Campaigns built around a Fluent Device report profit growth 14% of the time, against 7% for campaigns using neither a device nor a celebrity and 6% for celebrity campaigns. On market share the split is 49%, 34% and 28%. Celebrities rarely beat having no asset at all.

Well-branded creator content delivers over 60% more brand impact than weakly branded content

Creator content in the top 30% for branding strength indexes 164 on brand KPIs, against 144 for the middle 40% and 100 for the bottom 30%. Creator content works when the brand actually lands in it.

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.

Published versions of the Dyson profitability multipliers do not match exactly

The Dyson profitability multipliers also differ between published versions. Kantar shows brand size at 18 and brand versus product versus season at 1.4; the version reproduced in Google's Effectiveness Equation shows 20 and 2.0. Check which cut you are quoting before it reaches a slide.

Loop Earplugs doubled orders in a quarter by tripling creative testing volume

Loop Earplugs, working with agency TRGT, went from 5 to 20 A/B tests and from 45 to 120 creatives tested in three months, plus a conversion lift study. Revenue rose 119% and orders doubled quarter on quarter.

GLP-1 use among weight-loss consumers jumped from 6% to 9% in a year

9% of consumers trying to lose weight take GLP-1 drugs, up from 6% in 2024 - a 50% relative jump in one year. Once taboo or clinical-only treatments are moving mainstream, and adjacent categories are already adapting: Nestlé's Boost launched a pre-meal protein shot formulated for GLP-1 users' appetite control.

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.

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.

Engagement and effectiveness align in only 1 in 3 pieces of creator content

Platform engagement and effectiveness data align in only one in three pieces of creator content - relying on likes, comments and views alone points creator investment in the wrong direction two-thirds of the time.

Creator content is the second fastest-rising brand touchpoint since 2022

Creator content's impact on brand equity has grown +39% since 2022 - the second fastest rising touchpoint after video streaming (+77%) and far ahead of the top-20 touchpoint average (+4%).

Creator content beats other digital advertising on awareness and consideration lift

Creator content outperforms other digital advertising on brand impact: top-of-mind awareness +15.7 vs +14.0 and consideration +3.4 vs +1.9 (% change between exposed and unexposed).

A creator saying the brand name out loud lifts brand linkage by 22 points - half never do

When a creator says the brand name out loud, brand linkage rises on average +22 percentile points - the strongest branding driver Kantar measured - yet only 49% of sponsored creator content includes a verbal brand mention; the brand is often relegated to a caption.

Creators as main touchpoint among Effie Europe winners nearly doubled in a year

The share of Effie Europe winners using creators as their primary communication touchpoint nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025, from 7% to 13%. Before 2024, no winning case had used creators as the main touchpoint.

New brands at launch should split budget close to 56/44 toward brand, but as brands mature the optimal split shifts back to around 76/24 for brand leaders.

New brands in the launch phase are the exception to brand-heavy splits: ~56/44, because brand metrics move easily from zero - so make the product easy to buy first. As brands grow and mature the balance tilts back: brand leaders sit around 76/24.

Brands with major product innovation should tilt budget toward brand at around 72/28, while minor, tweak-level innovation performs worse than no innovation at all.

Significant product innovation makes activation easy (great products sell themselves short-term), so innovative brands should tilt toward brand (~72/28). But minor innovation is WORSE than no innovation at all - the 'new news' model of endless tweaks and variants actively hurts effectiveness.

The AA cut brand spend to near zero over 8 years while chasing short-term ROI, ending up with 6% of Britons never having heard of the brand and an internal warning that it would go out of business within five years.

The AA cut brand spend to ~zero over ~8 years for pure price-promotion activation: short-term ROIs looked fantastic while 6% of Britons had never heard of the AA, searches went generic, comparison sites commoditized the category and churn spiralled. Internal projection: 'Our ROIs are fantastic and in five years we will be out of business.'

Creativity is a long game and needs a measurement window longer than six months

Creativity does not drive short-term response. Its impact only arises when campaigns are evaluated over more than six months, and 'topbox' effects - profound business changes - start to emerge over longer horizons still. Measure it in a quarter and you will conclude it does not work.

The fewer buying situations a customer links to your brand, the more likely they are to leave

Regression modelling across 17 business insurance products found a significant relationship between a customer's probability of defection and the number of CEPs they link to the brand in 16 of the 17 categories, at p<0.05. The single exception was travel insurance, which just failed to meet the threshold at p=0.10.

What a real mental advantage looks like in a brand-by-CEP matrix

In the worked example, the largest mental advantage was LinkedIn on the CEP 'the board/senior management would approve' at +9 percentage points, alongside Company G on 'reach a tightly defined/very specific target' at +7pp. The single mental disadvantage was a brand scoring -6pp on 'confident your advertising will be noticed/cut through'.

The average US brand loses money on every new customer it acquires.

US brands now lose an average of $29 for every new customer acquired - the acquisition machine costs more than it returns.

Advertising conversion rates - about 1% typically, 15% at best - have not changed in 100 years despite a century of advances in creativity, targeting and testing.

Advertising conversion rates (~1% typical, ~15% ceiling) have not changed in 100 years despite creativity, targeting technology, planning and testing disciplines - evidence that advertising does not work by persuading people to buy.

Most organisations have no agreed definition of what marketing effectiveness means

Only 40% of senior marketing decision-makers believe their organisation has a clear marketing effectiveness goal, and just 20% strongly agree there is a common understanding between marketing and the rest of the business on how to measure it.

Half of advertising's sales effect arrives after the fourth month

Analysis of hundreds of effectiveness studies shows that the long-term sales impact of media investment during months 5-24 typically equals that of the first four months. Measuring only the short window means ignoring half the value a campaign creates.

Every dark quarter costs future revenue that takes years to rebuild

Nielsen's analysis finds brands risk losing 2% of future revenue for each quarter they forgo advertising, and that recovering from extended periods of marketing inactivity can take three to five years of consistent brand building.

A competitor took 15% more awareness in six months while the brand went quiet

When one major footwear brand reduced marketing spend by 40% during economic uncertainty, its main competitor held investment and launched an aggressive growth campaign. Within six months the competitor had increased brand awareness by 15% and consideration by 11%. Absence creates a vacuum competitors fill.

Finance thinks the relationship with marketing is going better than marketing does

Finance rates the quality of collaboration with marketing higher than marketing does, on every single measure. Shared understanding of marketing strategy: 61% finance against 43% marketing. Joint assessment of campaign effectiveness: 53% against 36%. Regular data sharing: 68% against 48%.

Widening reach drives incremental sales that high-frequency targeting misses

Reach typically drives 14% of incremental sales, a multiplier effect that highlights the untapped potential of a wider audience. In a meta-analysis of 21 EMEA CPG brands advertising on YouTube, weekly frequency of more than 2 indexed at 180 against 100 for frequency 1.

Personalising with first-party data doubles what a challenger brand can take from a leader

When those same invented brands tailored their propositions using simulated first-party data, the gain rose to between +10 and +26 percentage points of preference share. In the hotel category the invented brand went from 25% preference to 51%, overtaking the shopper's first choice.

Wall's Ice Cream: social media drove nearly half of campaign sales, and almost all of that social effect came from paid advertising, not organic or viral spread.

Wall's Ice Cream case: social media drove nearly half the campaign's sales, and 99% of that social effect came from paid advertising rather than organic or viral spread.

The share of annual market share growth explained by excess share of voice (ESOV) rose from 6% before the digital era to 12% after it.

Share of voice matters more in the digital era, not less: the share of annual market share growth explained by ESOV rose from 6% (1998-2006) to 12% (2008-2016), at an unchanged efficiency of 0.6 share points per 10 points of ESOV.

Specsavers' long-term campaign generated over £600m of incremental net profit across 20 years, with returns growing five-fold as long-term effects built up.

Specsavers ran the long-term case to its conclusion: over £600m of incremental net profit across 20 years at 129% ROMI, with returns growing five-fold as long-term effects accumulated - a scale of growth no sequence of short-term activation campaigns could produce.

Distinctiveness turns spend into revenue, emotion turns revenue into profit

Distinctiveness makes media spend more likely to turn into revenue, but barely moves profit on its own. Positive emotion is what converts that revenue into profit. At extra-large budgets, above-average distinctiveness lifts revenue reporting from 58% to 87%, a 29 point gap.

The rise of short-term campaign objectives tracks platform revenue almost perfectly

The average number of short-term objectives per campaign rose from 0.3 in 2013 to 1.3 in 2023. Over the same period that count correlates 91% with Meta's global revenue, which grew from $7bn to $155.6bn. Correlation, not proof, but the timing is exact.

Brand consistency has fallen by a quarter over the past decade

Brands are getting less consistent. The Compound Creativity Score across 139 US and UK brands fell from 65% in 2010 to 49% in 2022, meaning brands are around a quarter less consistent than a decade ago. Average reported Brand Effects per campaign fell from 3.3 in 2011 to 2.1 in 2023.

Entertainment makes media budget work harder at every spend level

Showmanship pays at every budget level and pays most at the largest. Market share reporting rises from 20% to 35% at small spend and from 35% to 57% at extra-large spend when comparing the least to the most showmanship. In short-form, the most showmanship-heavy TikTok ads delivered +39% ad recall lift, twice the brand awareness lift and 2.8x the brand image lift.

Well-funded campaigns that underperform are usually dull rather than unbranded

Paid Noise campaigns, those with plenty of media behind weak creative, are below average on distinctiveness only 30% of the time but below average on positive emotion and showmanship over 70% of the time. The problem with well-funded underperformers is usually that the work is dull, not that the brand is unrecognisable.

Brands with strong pricing power are measurably more resilient to price increases

Pricing power is a Kantar Brand Equity metric predicting whether consumers are predisposed to pay a higher price relative to competitors. Modelled against price elasticity across ten brands in an example FMCG category, the relationship has an R squared of 0.76.

Nearly three quarters of creator content fails to link back to the brand paying for it

Only 27% of creator content links to the intended brand. Nearly three quarters of what brands pay creators to make does not connect back to the brand that paid for it.

Google's planning benchmarks are 40% weekly on-target reach and 2.7x weekly frequency

Brands with higher awareness were more likely to be following established media planning principles, which in turn correlated with greater Share of Search. Google's two published numbers for these Golden Rules: a minimum 40% weekly on-target reach for peak campaign effectiveness, and a median optimal weekly frequency of 2.7x on YouTube.

Natural-claim FMCG is a USD 377 billion market

FMCG products carrying a natural claim generated USD 377.2 billion in global retail sales in 2024, with more than 8,000 new natural-claim products launched online in a single year. Comfort-seeking consumers read natural as calmer, safer and less processed.

3 in 7 consumers enjoy life without planning for the future

3 in 7 consumers say they like to enjoy life and do not worry about planning for the future, and outstanding balances on short-term personal loans keep rising globally. Short-term fulfilment - including doom spending - is a durable consumer posture, not a blip.

Three quarters of consumers track their health with a device or app

3 in 4 consumers track their health with a device or app, nearly 40% are comfortable using at-home diagnostic kits, and 34% of Gen Z track their sleep. Everyday wellness is becoming clinical-grade, real-time and self-directed.

Health goods and medical services will be a USD 6.9 trillion market in 2026

Global consumer expenditure on health goods and medical services is expected to reach USD 6.9 trillion in 2026, with dermocosmetics posting double-digit CAGR in every region from 2020 to 2024. Euromonitor's Rewired Wellness prescription: move from seller to partner - brands as copilots in ongoing personal health journeys.

Four of the five top global e-commerce retailers originated or are based in China

Four of the five top retailers by 2024 global e-commerce sales either originated or are based in China, China is forecast to export USD 4 trillion in goods and services in 2026, and its cross-border retail e-commerce is projected at USD 127.4 billion. The Next Asian Wave is a distribution fact, not a cultural curiosity.

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.

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.

A net 61% of marketers plan to increase creator spend in 2026

A net 61% of marketers plan to increase creator spend in 2026, making creator content one of the fastest growing marketing investments (Kantar Media Reactions).

Dr. Max x ZOMRI: a meme page as cultural asset sold out co-created product in 24 hours

Dr. Max built its Effie Europe-winning "NEZOMRI (Don't Die) Bag" around ZOMRI, a Slovak meme page whose name means "die": co-created bags filled with vitamins and supplements sold out in 24 hours. The idea depended entirely on ZOMRI's humour, cultural currency and audience trust - a creator as cultural asset, not an amplification layer.

The price per Scope Metric Unit at Ogilvy UK fell from $435,000 in 1992 to about $110,000 today, well below Farmer's $175,000 estimate of its true worth.

Price per scope metric unit has fallen from $435,000 at Ogilvy UK in 1992 to about $110,000 today. Farmer estimates the work is worth roughly $175,000.

Adaptations eat 40% of agency hours and fees - exactly the work AI can automate - yet automating half of it and cutting fees 20% would put the office out of business.

Adaptations consume 40% of agency man hours and therefore 40% of fees - and adaptation is precisely the work AI can do. Asked whether it could survive a 20% fee cut from automating half of it, the office said it would be out of business.

Since 2009, 40 of the top 60 advertisers have grown at about 2% a year - roughly half the nominal GDP growth rate of 4.7%.

Since 2009, 40 of the top 60 advertisers have grown at about 2% a year against a nominal GDP benchmark of roughly 4.7% (2.3% Western productivity plus 2.4% inflation) - half the economy's rate, sustained for fifteen years.

Generative AI use is mainstream, from research all the way to companionship

82% of people have used generative AI tools in the past six months - 81% for research, 69% to learn new skills, 66% to get recommendations, 48% for therapy and 38% for companionship. Adoption is mainstream across every use from utility to intimacy.

Consumers will let AI plan the shop but not spend the money

Consumers will let an AI agent plan but not pay: 33% are comfortable with an AI planning their grocery shopping, 25% would let it place the order, and only 22% would allow it to make a purchase. The agentic-commerce funnel narrows exactly where the money moves.

Unilever is moving half its spend to creators as the creator economy doubles

Unilever plans to increase creator spend from 30% to 50% of its budget, and Goldman Sachs forecasts the creator economy will be worth $480 billion by 2027, up from $250 billion in 2023. Creator budgets are compounding, not experimenting.

Four in five consumers now doubt luxury is worth the premium

The global luxury market is in its worst period since 2009: Bain expected personal luxury goods to shrink 2-5% in 2025, China's luxury market fell 18-20% in 2024, and 81% of people globally now say luxury goods are not always worth paying more for. Among gen Z, 70% say luxury brands no longer define status - though 65% still aspire to a luxurious lifestyle.

Ad distinctiveness compounds only for consistent brands

The same five-year divergence shows in branding: the most consistent third of brands grew ad distinctiveness from 89 to 99 fluency (+2.6 points a year) while the least consistent stayed flat at 87. The gap is not who starts stronger but who compounds.

The most consistent brands create nearly five times the brand effects

Ranked on the full Compound Creativity Score, the most consistent quartile of brands generates 2.9 very large brand effects per campaign against 0.6 for the least consistent - 4.8 times more - and 3.0 very large business effects against 1.3.

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.

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.

Lucozade's real penetration nearly doubled from 26% at 12 months to 46% at three years - not the 8 weeks it was given to prove itself.

Lucozade's relaunch lesson: 12-month penetration was 26% but three-year penetration was 46% - typical for consumer brands (it roughly doubles over three years). The team had been given an eight-week relaunch objective; the honest timeline was eight years.

Brand advertising works immediately, but only about 5% of buyers can act on it each week, so effects appear spread out rather than delayed.

Both Sharp and Ritson reject the phrase 'long-term' with CFOs - it implies waiting. The truth per 95/5: brand advertising works immediately, but each week only ~5% of buyers can act, so effects are spread out and lasting, not delayed.

Brands with 60% awareness convert at 2.86x the rate of brands with 20% awareness

In the TikTok x Tracksuit Awareness Advantage study, brands with 60% brand awareness achieved 2.86 times the conversion rate of brands with 20% awareness, and brands at 40% awareness achieved 1.48 times. Brand awareness is a controlling factor for how efficiently performance marketing converts.

Brands earn the right to playfully reinvent their distinctive assets only after roughly 40 years of consistent enforcement.

Distinctive brand assets earn the right to be played with only after decades of enforcement - '40 years of enforcement, then you can play': KFC's Colonel, Louis Vuitton x Murakami's neon monogram, Barilla's spaghetti fireworks. Playing before the codes are drilled just destroys them.

Brands learn and scale faster with performance marketing: creative volume grows exponentially with spend

Performance marketing is a test-and-learn engine, not just short-term ROI. Across TRGT's client accounts the number of creatives launched rises steeply with spend on a log-log scale: the accounts that spend the most also launch by far the most creatives, and the relationship is exponential rather than linear. Scale is earned by learning faster, which is why brands learn and scale faster with performance marketing.

Half of marketing leaders cannot tell whether CTV works as well as Linear TV

49% of global marketing leaders say they find it challenging to assess whether new video formats like Connected TV can deliver as effectively as Linear TV.

Two in five CMOs cannot measure the efficiency of next-gen video at all

43% of CMOs say they are struggling to measure the efficiency of next-gen video formats - the measurement gap that pushes budgets back toward whatever can be counted immediately.

P&G under Jim Stengel

Reflecting on the period when he turned P&G's conservative FMCG marketing into globally lauded campaigns, former CMO Jim Stengel said: "We doubled our size. We went from about $43 billion to about $83 billion in basically seven years. Our margins went up ten points. We went from nine billion dollar brands to 25. And our earning per share went up four-fold."

Attention stops paying its way after about twenty seconds

More attention does produce greater brand-building effects, but the return flattens: after roughly 20 attentive seconds, additional attention delivers little extra impact. It contradicts the assumption that more attention is always better.

Almost no marketing organisation judges its own success on the bravery of its ideas

Only 16% of marketers said that "the originality and bravery of ideas" was the primary means by which their company evaluated success.

Buying past thirty seconds buys length the attention curve no longer pays for

If a consumer watches about half an ad's duration most of the time, even on non-skippable formats, then the value of ads longer than 30 seconds should be questioned - you are buying length that the attention curve has already stopped rewarding.

The seven W's - a prompt set for generating a category's buying situations

The W's framework structures CEP generation across seven prompts: When (timing), Where (location), While (co-activities), with What (co-purchased categories), Why (motives and benefits), hoW feeling (emotions), and with/for Whom (other people involved). Each acts as a prompt to reach a comprehensive and diverse list of buying situations.

High demand power comes with nine times the volume share and four times the odds of growing

Kantar's Meaningful, Different, Salient framework, externally validated by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, finds that brands with high demand power have 9x higher volume share and are 4x more likely to grow.

The 3C's - Credibility, Competitiveness, Commonality

Three forces determine whether a CEP is worth investing in. Credibility: can your brand plausibly deliver here, internally and in customer perception. Competitiveness: how many rivals already hold a mental advantage on this cue. Commonality: how often the situation arises and how much revenue it carries.

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.

Mental Penetration x Network Size = Mental Market Share

Mental Availability has three measurable components. Mental Penetration is the share of category buyers with at least one CEP link to the brand. Network Size is the average number of CEP links among those buyers. Multiplied together they produce Mental Market Share, the brand's share of all CEP-brand linkages in the category.

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.

For a digital-first brand, performance spend is a floor, not a variable

In a digital-first business, performance spend is drawn as a base layer that never switches off. Roach: propose pulsing it off and your CFO will look at you like a complete mad person, because a good percentage of sales drops away immediately and there is no base of brand-built sales underneath to catch you.

The flat part of the growth curve is the most dangerous moment in a scale-up's life

The plateau looks placid on a slide and is existential in the business. The pattern Roach and Kite kept seeing: performance saturated, CPMs rising, cost per acquisition rising, no more efficient sales available to buy, and a finite amount of runway left to find a new source of growth.

Most US marketers say performance marketing spend has diminishing returns, and two thirds say their dashboards look good but growth doesn't follow.

75% of US marketers report diminishing returns on performance marketing spend, and 66% say their performance metrics look successful on dashboards yet fail to deliver real growth.

Most people don't care if an ad was made by AI - but music gets judged harder

When an ad is primarily made by AI, 56% of people say it makes no difference to how they feel, 23% would like it more and 21% less. Music is judged more harshly: 32% would like an AI-made song less. Acceptance of AI creative varies by medium, not by principle.

Treatonomics: consumers trade down everywhere except the small joys

Austerity and indulgence coexist: 79% of global consumers are trading down (McKinsey), yet 38% of gen Z say they are spending more on themselves and 30% more on little treats - against 14% of gen X. VML calls it treatonomics: small affordable rewards as resilience infrastructure.

Brands with pricing power command roughly twice the price of brands without it

Brands with high pricing power achieve prices indexed at 1.39 against the category average, while brands with low pricing power sit at 0.69. Shoppers are willing to pay roughly twice as much for the same category from a brand with pricing power.

A UK skincare brand turned a 2% revenue increase into 7% by lowering its price elasticity first

A UK skincare brand raised prices by 14%. Modelling suggested that without brand investment this would have cost 10% of sales volume. Because the brand had reduced its price elasticity from -0.7 to -0.6, volume fell only 7%, turning what would have been a 2% revenue increase into a 7% one. Analytics attributed 76% of that improvement to increased pricing power.

Adding earned media lifts campaign effectiveness by 26%, compared with 13% for adding owned media.

Adding owned media lifts effectiveness by 13% and adding earned media by 26% - real amplification, but amplification of paid activity rather than a substitute for it.

The most successful 2016 campaigns still split their budget close to 60:40 between brand building and activation.

The 60:40 brand-to-activation split survived the digital era. The 2016 cases with very large share growth sat at 62:38, the most efficient cases and the very large profit growth cases at 64:36.

Campaigns near the 60:40 brand-to-activation split produce more very large business effects than campaigns that over- or under-invest in brand building.

Deviating from the 60:40 optimum has a measurable penalty in both directions: campaigns putting 50-70% of budget into brand building averaged 1.5 very large business effects, against 1.1 for those below 50% and 1.1 for those above 70%.

Combining TV with online video lifts business effects well beyond what either medium delivers alone.

The most effective campaigns use TV and online video together: 54% uplift in business effects, against 32% for TV alone and 25% for online video alone. On market share the same pattern holds - 3.1% for both against 2.6% and 1.1%.

Average campaign effectiveness has fallen since its 2012 peak to the lowest level on record.

Campaign effectiveness has been falling since the financial crisis: the average number of very large business effects per IPA case peaked around 1.87 in 2012 and dropped to about 1.5 by 2016, the lowest level recorded on a ten-year rolling basis.

Fewer than half strongly trust brands to tell the truth - and trust commands a premium

Only 44% of people strongly trust the brands they use to share accurate information, and 87% of customers will pay more for products from trusted brands (Salsify). Trust is scarce and priced accordingly - honesty is a competitive advantage, not a compliance line.

Long-running campaigns generate 4.6 times more market share growth than short-term campaigns, even though short-term campaigns look better on activation.

Campaigns running longer than six months generate 4.6 times as much market share growth as short-term ones: 38% of three-year-plus cases reported very large share effects against 3% of short-term cases. But short-term cases win on activation (65% versus 33%), which is exactly why short-term measurement keeps recommending the weaker strategy.

Spending more than the median share of budget on brand TV or online video sharply lifts the odds of very large market share effects, while over-spending on online non-video lowers them.

The budget-share diagnosis names the under-funded and over-funded channels directly: raising brand TV or online video above median budget share lifts very large share effects sharply (35% versus 14%, and 42% versus 15%), while raising online non-video above median lowers them (14% versus 27%).

The profit payoff from creative advantage compounds rather than accumulates

The relationship between ESOC and profit is not linear, it is exponential. Across ESOC deciles the chance of reporting profit growth rises from 2.4% to 17.4%, which the authors summarise as increasing the likelihood of profit growth by around seven times.

Stacking short-term objectives onto a campaign drives its chance of profit to zero

Campaigns with no short-term objectives report profit growth 16% of the time and share growth 48% of the time. Campaigns carrying four or more short-term objectives report profit growth 0.0% of the time and share growth 14% of the time.

Consistency multiplies profit likelihood more than emotion, showmanship or distinctiveness

Consistency is the single largest multiplier in the Creativity Stack. Measured as the likelihood a campaign reports incremental profit, top versus bottom quartile: consistency x2.9, emotion x2.4, showmanship x1.6, distinctiveness x1.4.

Sonic assets and brand characters build distinctiveness more than logos or celebrities

Not all distinctive brand assets work equally hard. Ranked by the chance a long-form ad achieves high distinctiveness: logo or symbol 1.0, celebrity 1.2, brand colours 1.2, slogan 1.3, typeface 1.6, distinct product shape 1.9, jingles 1.9, fluent character device 2.2, sonic device 2.3.

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.

Pricing power comes overwhelmingly from meaningful difference rather than salience

In Kantar's BrandZ database, pricing power breaks down as being Different (49%) and Meaningful (45%), with Salient contributing just 6%. Being noticed is not the same as being worth more: 94% of pricing power comes from meaningful difference.

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.

Integration lifts brand impact by 30%, integration plus channel customisation by 57%

Campaigns that are well integrated deliver 30% more brand impact than campaigns that are neither integrated nor customised. Campaigns that are integrated and also customised well to each medium deliver 57% more.

The share of brand impact created by channels working together has more than doubled since 2014

Synergy effects, the share of campaign impact on brand KPIs created by exposure to multiple channels, accounted for 18% of brand impact before 2014. Across 2020 to 2025 they account for 43%. Channels working together now produce more than twice the share of impact they used to.

At low awareness, brand growth converts into search demand roughly one for one

For a brand sitting at around 30% awareness, every +5 points of brand awareness translated into roughly +5 points of Share of Search. A one-to-one exchange rate, and the single ratio the study publishes.

The cheaper half of the awareness curve is the half you are on before anyone knows you

The return on awareness diminishes as awareness rises. The relationship was strongest among low and mid-awareness brands; a brand already at high awareness has to buy considerably more awareness to move Share of Search at all. Only the low-awareness ratio is published, so the shape of the decline is directional rather than quantified.

42% of finance leaders cannot measure the long-term impact of brand

Brand building is marketers' number one priority for 2025, yet it does not appear in finance leaders' top five, and 42% of finance leaders say they struggle to measure the long-term impact of brand building.

Belief that individual choices can change the world fell from 56% to 51% in a year

The share of consumers who feel they can make a difference to the world through their choices and actions fell to 51% in 2025, from 56% in 2024. Consumers are shifting from activism to pragmatic adaptation - air conditioner sales are expected to pass 189 million units globally in 2026.

58% of consumers seek curated experiences and half want uniquely tailored products

Personalisation demand is now explicit and majority-scale: 58% of consumers seek curated experiences tailored to their tastes, 50% want products and services uniquely tailored to them, 47% like to be distinct from others, and 43% want to engage with brands to influence product innovation.

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.

A $2,000 billboard bought for the photo, not the footfall

MagicBrief bought a Sydney billboard for roughly $2,000 not for the passers-by in Surry Hills but so it could run a photo of the billboard as a Facebook ad, carrying the credibility of out-of-home with the reach and targeting of performance media.

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.

Overspending on brand costs about 20% of effectiveness and is easily corrected, but overspending on activation costs over half of effectiveness and cannot be quickly corrected.

The budget-balance mistake is asymmetric: overshooting toward brand costs ~20% effectiveness and is instantly correctable by adding activation; overshooting toward activation loses over half the effectiveness, weakens the brand, and has no quick comeback. If you must err, err toward brand.

Product benefits communicated is the top driver of long-term effectiveness in creator content

In creator content, communicating product benefits is the primary driver of long-term brand building (+18 Brand Power, +12 Sales Power, present in 71% of content). Innovation framing (+19/+10), product demos (+17/+9) and convenience (+15/+9) follow. Lifts are consistently larger for brand building than for short-term sales - the brand-building formula is clearer.

Brands that are heavily researched online, sell online, or run on subscriptions need more brand building, with an optimal split of around 74/26 toward brand.

Brands heavily researched online, brands that sell online, and subscription brands all need MORE brand building, not less: optimal splits around 74/26 toward brand, because digital makes their activation easy and the hard job is what remains.

Across more than 1,000 IPA cases, no brand has ever reduced price sensitivity through short-term activation alone, and premium brands need an optimal split of around 64/36 or more toward brand.

In over 1,000 IPA cases there is not a single example of a brand reducing price sensitivity through short-term activation - premium pricing power can only be built through long-term brand building (premium brands: ~64/36+ toward brand).

Only a tiny fraction of all campaigns are creative enough to win any creative award

The IPA estimates that as little as one in every 7,000 campaigns is creative enough to win a creative award. The base rate for genuinely outstanding creative work is brutal.

Each extra buying situation linked to your brand lowers defection risk

The average slope of the defection regression line is -0.2, against an average baseline defection probability of 4.4 for a customer with 0-2 CEPs. Read across the 17 categories, that suggests each additional CEP a customer links to the brand lowers their probability of defection by around 5%.

The funnel survived because it made ad inventory easy to sell, not because it was ever accurate

The funnel first appears around 1924 as a teaching aid for door-to-door salespeople - hook them, create desire, add facts, close. It came back from about 2000 onward because Google and Meta needed a simple way to lay their ad inventory out on a slide and differentiate formats by intent level.

A roughly even 50/50 split between brand and performance spend delivers the highest total marketing ROI.

Brands splitting budget roughly 50/50 between brand and performance achieve the highest total marketing ROI - a generalizable pattern found independently by Google's Effectiveness Equation (2025, e-commerce), Analytic Partners, IPA's 60/40 (Binet & Field 2013) and Peter Kim (1992).

Even the most aggressive forecasts put AI agentic commerce at only 10-14% of total consumer spend, leaving 86-90% of buying to happen the traditional way.

Even the most aggressive forecasts put agentic commerce at 10-14% of total consumer spend - agents will help shortlist, but humans still pick, and the remaining ~86-90% of buying continues the traditional way. Brand becomes no less important in an AI future.

Pricing power and resistance to price rises correlate strongly and measurably

The link between pricing power and price elasticity is measurable: correlation coefficients of 0.76 in the UK and 0.65 in Germany in the skincare category. Brands with strong pricing power see less volume decline when prices rise.

Finance considers marketing budgets flexible, which means the constraint is the argument

Marketing budgets are more movable than marketers assume. 72% of finance decision-makers describe the marketing budget as at least moderately flexible, and 81% say reallocating budget between channels is at least moderately easy. The constraint is usually the business case, not the budget line.

TV builds awareness while YouTube and social skew toward purchase intent

Different channels do different jobs across the funnel. Of TV's brand impact, 59% lands on awareness and only 9% on purchase intent. For YouTube the split is 41% awareness and 35% purchase intent, and for social media 34% awareness and 41% purchase intent.

Brand website visitors spend more on the category than on the brand itself, showing they're deal-hunting category buyers rather than loyalists the website created.

The online loyalty correlation trap: visitors to a brand's website spend 37% more on the brand but 53% more on the category, with 10% lower brand share of category spend and 7% lower price per unit. They are heavy category buyers hunting deals, not loyalists created by the website.

Optimising for ROMI rewards spending less - bigger-budget campaigns average a lower ROMI than smaller ones, and average excess share of voice has fallen accordingly.

Optimising ROMI shrinks budgets: campaigns with above-median ESOV averaged 312% ROMI against 386% for smaller-budget campaigns, so the metric systematically rewards spending less. Average ESOV fell from roughly 12% in 2006-2008 to around 4% by 2016.

Distinctive and emotional work multiplies profit hardest on the smallest budgets

When advertising is both above-average distinctive and above-average positive in emotion, profit reporting jumps at every spend level. At small budgets it goes from 2% to 14%, a seven-fold multiplier, and at large budgets from 9% to 19%.

Revenue is the easy result, profit is the rare one

Revenue growth is common and profit growth is rare. Across award-winning campaigns, 77% report revenue growth, 49% new customer penetration, 36% market share, 14% loyalty, 9% profit and just 5% reduced price sensitivity.

Creative quality compounds for consistent brands and decays for inconsistent ones

Consistent brands do not just hold their creative quality, they grow it. Over five years, the most consistent third of brands lifted average positive emotion from 3.1 to 4.0 and distinctiveness from 89 to 99, while the least consistent third went backwards on emotion, from 2.6 to 2.3.

The dullest advertising returns around 40% less than the least dull

Dull advertising costs money directly. The dullest campaigns in the dataset average $4.40 ROI against $7.10 for the least dull, roughly 40% lower. Neutrality is highest in pharmaceutical, healthcare and B2B at 46%, and lowest in food and drink at 35%.

Narrow targeting plus dull creative produced zero profit reports over a year

No campaign running for over a year with narrow targeting and low positive emotion reported incremental profit. Broad targeting combined with high positive emotion took profit reporting from 8% under three months to 33% beyond three years.

For challenger brands differentiation beats distinctiveness, the opposite of the general rule

Challenger brands should chase differentiation rather than distinctiveness. Challenger campaigns reporting perceived differentiation growth are more than twice as likely to also report share growth (56%) as those reporting distinctiveness growth (25%), which reverses the pattern for the dataset as a whole.

Advertising Planning Matrix - Growth Engine, Cult Hit, Paid Noise, Busy Work

The Advertising Planning Matrix crosses Creative Dividend against media support. Growth Engine (invest and protect) is 17% of campaigns and reports profit 14% of the time. Busy Work (below average on both) is the most common landing spot at 38% of campaigns and reports profit 5% of the time. Cult Hit needs scale; Paid Noise needs better work before more media.

Aldi and Kevin the Carrot - what six years of one character is worth

Aldi committed to Kevin the Carrot as a Fluent Device across six Christmases. The character's System1 Star Rating rose from 3.0 in 2016 to 5.8 by 2020, and the platform delivered £618m in incremental revenue, 54% value share growth, £2.63 net profit per £1 spent and a 263% ROMI on £42.52m of advertising, winning the Global Grand Effie in 2023.

Consumer predisposition pays in volume, growth and price simultaneously

Brands that people are strongly predisposed to have 9x higher volume share, 4x the likelihood of growing value share and 2x higher price paid than brands with weaker predisposition. Predisposition pays in volume, in growth and in margin at the same time.

Strong creative content returns four times the marketing investment behind it

Strong creative content delivers a 4x return on marketing investment across short and long-term impact combined.

Share of Search moves 6 to 12 months before market share does

Share of Search works as a leading indicator rather than a report card. The study cites Les Binet's finding that Share of Search correlates strongly with market share, and that changes in Share of Search often precede shifts in market share by 6 to 12 months.

Google puts its own search volume at over five trillion queries a year and says AI is growing it

Google states it processes over 5 trillion searches annually, that commercial queries are rising year over year even at that scale, and that AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are growing the overall search pie rather than shrinking it. This is Google's own claim inside a Google co-authored report.

More than half of consumers only buy from brands they completely trust

More than 50% of consumers only buy from brands or companies they completely trust, and only 15% associate social acceptance with their definition of beauty. Euromonitor's read: authenticity has moved beyond a desirable brand trait to a social currency - a marker of trust in an uncertain world.

Half of professionals expect individualism to reshape their industry within five years

53% of industry professionals say the growth of individualism and personalisation trends will highly influence their industry over the next five years, and 48% say their company has already refocused marketing activity in response to changing consumer trends.

Half of consumers will pay a 10% premium for scientifically formulated beauty

49% of consumers would pay at least 10% more for premium beauty products with a scientific formulation, and more than half rate medical endorsement or medicated formulation as premium-worthy features. Science and clinical proof, not indulgence, now justify the beauty premium.

One in five consumers associate Chinese beauty products with innovative technology

Perception of Chinese brands is shifting from cheap to innovative: 1 in 5 consumers already associate Chinese beauty products with innovative technology and formats, and 62% say international products are more readily available than five years ago. The affordability remains - Chinese-origin beauty SKUs in the UK sell at a fraction of non-Asian prices.

One in four TikTok users has bought directly inside the platform

As of early 2025, one in four TikTok users had made a purchase inside the platform, and 37% of livestream shoppers use the channel to discover new brands, products or services. Content and commerce have converged - discovery, persuasion and checkout happen in one scroll.

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.

Only 6% of creator content is both highly engaging and strongly brand-building

Only 6% of sponsored creator content scores high on both platform engagement and brand-building potential. Of content with high platform engagement, fewer than 1 in 5 pieces shows strong potential to build the brand, and roughly 1 in 8 strong short-term sales potential.

High scores on Kantar's creator impact algorithm mean +45% more awareness

Kantar's creator-adapted impact algorithm is strongly validated against brand lift: content scoring high generates +45% more awareness than average, while low scorers generate -26% less.

The same exposure that builds the brand also moves sales in the next three months

Alongside its long-term effect, each single exposure is credited with a short-term sales effect of between 2% and 15%, spanning the three months after exposure. dentsu's framing: brand-building advertising is a win-win rather than a trade against short-term sales.

A comparably staffed Ogilvy creative department went from producing 360 ads a year in 1992 to about 15,000 ads today.

Ogilvy UK in 1992: 52 creatives producing 360 ads a year. A comparable Ogilvy office recently: about 50 creatives producing 15,000 ads - 2,000 originations and 13,000 adaptations.

Connected TV now delivers roughly three quarters of Linear TV's long-term brand effect

Connected TV delivered a 3.21% long-term sales lift against 4.43% for Linear TV. dentsu reads this as CTV building brands on par with Linear; the number is closer to three quarters of Linear's effect, which is a real structural shift rather than parity.

Nine in ten people want experiences that outlast the experience itself

91% of people value experiences that stay with them after they're over, 88% want experiences that feel meaningful rather than just entertaining, 87% want to be left feeling changed in some way, and 86% are drawn to experiences that inspire awe, wonder or a new perspective.

People are openly asking brands to entertain them - and say most brands all look the same

73% of people say brands should make more effort to be entertaining, 72% want brands to engage all of their senses, and 69% want brands to wow them with their marketing - while 76% say very few brands really stand out as different from one another.

Pruning scope of work while holding fees flat could lift the effective price per unit of work from $110k toward $175k, at no extra client cost.

The realistic fix is not higher fees, it is pruning the scope of work: cut the deliverables that add nothing, hold the fee flat, and the price per unit of real work rises from $110k toward $175k at no extra cost to the client.

Consumers protect spending on children, health and pets and cut nearly everything else

Under cost-of-living pressure, spending is triaged by love: spending on children (+21% net), healthcare (+8%) and pets (+3%) are protected while big-ticket items (-31%), alcohol (-31%), home decor (-28%) and eating out (-26%) fund the cuts. 36% say they have cut back on things they used to consider necessities.

Unbundling media from creative let media agencies work for 5% of the old 15% commission, but clients wouldn't pay the remaining 10% for creative, pushing creative onto labor-based fees that procurement then halved again.

Splitting media from creative freed media agencies to chase any client but hung creative out to dry: media offered to do the work for 5% of the 15% commission, clients refused to pay the remaining 10% for creative, and labour-based fees followed - which procurement then halved again.

Consistent brands' ads get better every year - inconsistent brands' ads get worse

Over five years, the most consistent third of brands improved their advertising's emotional quality by +0.23 star rating per year (3.1 to 4.0) while the least consistent third declined by -0.08 per year (2.6 to 2.3). Consistency does not just preserve ad quality - it compounds it, and inconsistency actively erodes it.

Kit Kat and Volvo have each repeated a single positioning idea for roughly 40 years.

Position on one or two things at most, then say them more often, more consistently and for longer than competitors: Kit Kat and Volvo have each spent roughly 40 years repeating a single idea. If assets plus positioning don't fit one page, it's already over.

The 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of category buyers are not in the market to buy.

The 95/5 rule: at any moment roughly 95% of category buyers are not in market. It was coined by John Dawes from B2B negative binomial distributions - so 'does it apply to B2B?' has it backwards; it came from B2B.

In B2B pitches, about 80% of the buying decision is effectively made before the process starts.

In B2B pitches, ~80% of buying decisions are effectively made before the pitch process starts - the brand that comes to mind first wins. Being on the shortlist of three or four is 70% of the battle.

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.

The strongest brands returned more than twice the S&P 500 over 2007-2019

Kantar BrandZ tracked company returns from 2007 to 2019 ranked by brand strength: the Most Powerful Brands portfolio returned +317% and the Strong Brands portfolio +196%, against +128% for the S&P 500 and +59% for the MSCI World Index. Strong brands also held up better in the 2008-2009 downturn.

Harvest the 5-15% in market today and create future demand among the other 85-95%

Marketers have two jobs: harvest existing demand from the 5-15% of the category that is ready to buy now, and create future demand among the 85-95% who will enter the category later. Both matter equally and multiply each other, and labelling brand work as 'creating future demand' makes it far easier to win CFO buy-in.

Broad-reach advertising has a typical short-term sales elasticity of about 0.0008 - statistically zero - while search and performance elasticities run 10-20x higher.

The typical advertising elasticity of broad-reach media is ~0.0008 - statistically zero in short-term sales. You cannot see your best advertising working in weekly numbers; measure the memories of the 95% instead. Search/performance elasticities run 10-20x higher only because they harvest the in-market 5%.

Creatively awarded campaigns drive market share growth far more efficiently than non-awarded ones

The IPA merged ten years of its Effectiveness Awards data with Gunn Report creative scores and found creatively-awarded campaigns were 12 times more efficient than non-awarded ones at driving market share growth.

The creative effectiveness advantage halved in six years

Six years after the original 12x finding, Peter Field re-ran the analysis on more recent campaigns for the IPA and put the multiplier at six. He attributes the decline to short-termism: metric-led marketing reshaping planning priorities and squeezing budgets.

The biggest obstacle to creative work is colleagues, not time or ideas

In a Cannes Lions survey of 239 people employed in creative communications globally, one in three people in creative roles said "working with people who are caustic to creativity" was their number one day-to-day challenge - ahead of both lack of time and the hunt for genuinely new ideas.

Bigger brands are linked to more buying situations by more buyers

In US business insurance, the number of CEPs decision-makers link to a brand tracks brand size directly. State Farm at 25% penetration had 40% of decision-makers linking it to six or more CEPs and 25% linking it to none. Hanover at 5% penetration had 8% with six or more and 64% with none.

In B2B every buying situation has a business motive and a personal one

In B2B categories, run each of the W's from two perspectives. The Business covers objectives and characteristics such as company size or time in market. The Professional covers the decision-maker as a person with their own desires: making a splash to get promoted, demonstrating skill, or simply not getting fired.

Prioritise buying situations by elimination, not by selection

Choosing which CEPs to invest in is a process of elimination rather than selection. You strip away the CEPs that are poor choices for your brand so that the possible ones remain, ending with a long-short list of 5-8 CEPs that give the brand messaging options in the short, medium and long term.

Almost every brand scores exactly as expected on almost every buying situation

In a study of 311 US online advertising decision-makers covering 9 brands and 11 CEPs, 93% of the 99 brand-CEP cells scored as expected, inside the +/-5pp band. Six were mental advantages and only one was a mental disadvantage. Most brands are unremarkable on most buying situations.

A growth target translated into memory metrics

Mental Availability metrics turn a growth ambition into a specific brief. For RBS to reach Santander's level, mental market share would go from 4.4 to 6.8, a 55% increase, requiring mental penetration to grow around 13 percentage points and network size to rise from 5.2 to around 6.5.

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.

Long and short have to be drawn as one system, or the chart itself invites a choice

The design brief for the performance plateau was explicitly to stop long and short reading as a choice. Roach: the earlier ways of drawing it can look separate, like an either/or, and they wanted a system you deploy together. The industry shorthand for that position is bothism.

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.

Build, Nudge and Connect - the funnel rewritten around how memory works rather than how inventory sells

Roach's modified funnel replaces awareness, consideration and conversion with build, nudge and connect. Build mental availability, associations and brand assets. Nudge refreshes those memories closer to purchase and adds a few extra hooks. Connect is a navigational job that points people to brands they have already decided on.

Four in five shoppers still prefer a human over a bot

80% of people still prefer speaking with a human representative when shopping, and 87% value experiences that foster connection with themselves or others. The more synthetic the landscape gets, the more the human touchpoint differentiates.

84% of purchasers end up choosing a brand they were already biased toward before they started shopping.

84% of purchasers choose a brand they were already biased toward before entering the market (WPP × Oxford 'How Humans Decide', 1.2 million purchase journeys) - persuasion at the moment of purchase loses to familiarity built beforehand.

Brand awareness does not move click-through rate, but it strongly predicts conversion rate: a brand at 60% awareness converts nearly 3x better than one at 20%.

Tracksuit × TikTok data: brand awareness has no correlation with click-through rate (CTR is a vanity metric) but correlates strongly with conversion rate - a brand at 60% awareness converts nearly 3x better than one at 20%.

Two thirds follow creators for authenticity, and most feel a personal connection

68% of people follow creators because they seem authentic and relatable, and 60% feel a personal connection to them. The mechanism behind creator effectiveness is parasocial trust, not reach.

Pricing power comes from meaningful difference, not from salience

Driver analysis across 52 UK and 35 German categories attributes brand pricing power to brand differentiation (52% in Germany, 51% in the UK) and brand meaningfulness (44% and 46%). Brand salience accounts for just 4% and 3%. Being known is not what lets you charge more; being meaningfully different is.

Promotion-heavy communication raises price sensitivity; balanced brand building lowers it

Marketing communication can significantly improve price elasticity, but an excessive focus on promotional messaging does the opposite. Moving away from promotion-heavy communication toward balanced brand building can reduce price elasticity by up to 20% in the long run.

Raising brand awareness lifts short-term sales as well as long-term ones

Brand investment does not only build the long term, it amplifies the short term. A 1% increase in brand awareness typically drives a 0.6% lift in long-term sales while also boosting short-term sales by 0.4%. For consideration, both effects are 0.6%.

Reach is the single biggest driver of media effectiveness, accounting for roughly 83% of the variation in how well media perform.

Reach is the dominant driver of media effectiveness: across the IPA Databank, a medium's average daily reach correlates 91% with business effects (dwell time 86%), and reach accounts for roughly 83% of the observed variation in how well media perform.

Existing-customer campaigns beat new-customer campaigns on short-term activation far more often, which is exactly why activation metrics keep pointing marketers toward the growth-limiting strategy.

Targeting existing customers is genuinely better at exactly one thing: short-term activation. Around 50% of existing-customer campaigns produced very large activation effects, against 33% of new-customer ones - which is why activation metrics keep recommending a strategy that limits long-term growth.

Real-time Big Data targeting raises the share of campaigns with strong activation effects, but comes at the cost of weaker market share growth and price elasticity.

Using Big Data for real-time tight targeting buys activation at the cost of growth: activation effects jump (roughly 75% of campaigns versus 40%), but annualised market share growth and price elasticity improvements are both materially worse than for campaigns that do not.

Boycotts move real numbers: Disney churn spiked four-fold in a single week

Consumer punishment is as measurable as fandom: Disney+ cancellations ran 436% above the usual churn rate in the week after Jimmy Kimmel's firing, 53% of US gen Z have taken part in brand boycotts (Statista), and Americana - the Middle East's largest fast-food franchise - saw net profits fall nearly 40% amid local boycotts.

TV's uplift to business effectiveness has grown across three eras, from 12% in 1980-1996 to 40% in 2008-2016.

TV raises overall business effectiveness by about 40%, and its effect has grown as the internet has grown: the uplift from adding TV rose from 12% (1980-1996) to 27% (1998-2006) to 40% (2008-2016).

Press, radio and out-of-home all became more effective across eras as the internet grew, not less.

The internet made traditional media more effective rather than obsolete: press effectiveness rose from 22% to 27% across eras, radio from 13% to 22%, and out-of-home turned upward from 14% to 27%, with digital OOH at 37% against 15% for non-digital.

Profit growth and ROMI are driven by almost entirely different effects - profit follows broad business effects and sales gain, while ROMI follows activation and is hurt by penetration growth.

The drivers of ROMI and the drivers of profit are almost entirely different lists. Profit growth correlates most with broad business effects (64%), sales gain (40%), market share and brand effects (23% each) and penetration (21%); ROMI correlates most with activation effects (23%) and negatively with penetration growth (-3%).

Gen alpha already influences four in ten dollars of US household spending

Gen alpha already steers 42% of US household spending - 49% in households earning over $100k - and 61% of gen alpha parents say their kids have the final say on which car they buy. Their own spending power exceeds $100 billion a year.

Broadcast TV still takes the overwhelming share of video budgets

Broadcast TV still takes the overwhelming share of video money: 82% of video budget in 2016 IPA cases and 89% of total UK video spend in H1 2015. Other online video takes 16% of IPA case budgets against 7% of UK spend - the gap is largely production, which the IPA figures include and the IAB/PWC ones do not. Broadcaster VoD remains small in both, at 2% and 4%.

Seven in ten people now call loneliness an epidemic

70% of people globally now see loneliness as an epidemic, up from 67% a year earlier; WHO reports one in six people experienced loneliness. VML frames 'social health' - connection as a wellness category - as one of the biggest white spaces for brands in 2026.

Creative advantage backed by media raises the odds of market share growth in a straight line

Across ESOC deciles the chance of reporting market share growth rises linearly from 23% to 49%, at +2.1 percentage points per decile with 99.9% confidence. A greater Excess Share of Creativity can double the chance of share growth.

Marketers rank targeting above creativity, and the data says it is the other way round

68% of American and 62% of European marketers rank creativity's impact on profit below the level Dyson's modelling found, while 61% of American and 45% of European marketers rank campaign targeting above it. The industry systematically undervalues its biggest controllable lever and overvalues one of its smallest.

The most consistent brands earn four times the return of the least consistent

Ranked by Compound Creativity Score, brands in the most consistent quartile average 8.8 ROI and report profit growth 17.6% of the time. The least consistent quartile averages 2.1 ROI and reports profit growth 6.1% of the time. That is roughly four times the ROI and three times the profit likelihood.

Emotion buys pricing power, distinctiveness buys share, consistency buys trust, showmanship buys fame

The four layers of creativity do different jobs. Positive emotion dominates reduced price sensitivity (178% lift) and profit (140%). Distinctiveness dominates loyalty (94%) and market share (70%). Consistency dominates trust (115%) and distinctiveness (103%). Showmanship dominates fame (51%).

Marketers and CFOs disagree by 28 points about whether marketing drives long-term growth

63% of marketers agree that marketing drives long-term growth. Among CFOs the figure is 35%. Kantar calls this the credibility gap, and it is the reason marketers are asked to prove their budgets rather than plan them.

Strong brands outperformed both the S&P 500 and the MSCI World index over nineteen years

The Kantar BrandZ Strong Brands Portfolio returned 435% between April 2006 and March 2025, against 353% for the S&P 500 and 171% for the MSCI World index. Nineteen years, through two market crashes.

Creative quality is the largest profitability multiplier a marketer can actually change

Kantar and Paul Dyson's top ten drivers of advertising profitability, expressed as profitability multipliers: brand size 18, creative quality 12, budget setting across geographies 5, across portfolios 3, multimedia 2.5, across variants 1.7, cost and product seasonability 1.6, brand versus product versus season 1.4, laydown and phasing 1.15, target audience 1.1.

Paid media accounts for under a third of what builds brand equity

Average global impact on brand equity splits as earned exposures 39%, paid media exposures 29% and owned experiences 27%. The touchpoints a brand does not buy contribute more to equity than the ones it does.

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.

The finding rests on 31 brands in two markets over a single year

Return on Awareness analysed 31 brands across 15 categories in Australia and New Zealand between July 2024 and June 2025, joining two data sources: Tracksuit's always-on tracking of Awareness, Consideration and Preference, and Google's indexed Share of Search for each brand within its competitive set.

Awareness, Share of Search and sales together tell you which part of the funnel broke

Tracking awareness, Share of Search and sales together turns a stall into a diagnosis. Not enough people know you is a top-of-funnel problem. They know you but are not searching is a consideration gap. They search but do not convert is bottom of funnel. Three different failures with three different fixes.

The stress gap: 58% of consumers are stressed daily, far fewer act on it weekly

58% of consumers experience moderate to extreme stress on a daily basis, and 2 in 5 feel under constant pressure to get things done - yet in every region the share doing weekly stress-reduction activities is roughly half the share reporting the stress. Euromonitor calls it the stress gap: high levels, low relief.

The four Euromonitor consumer trends for 2026

Euromonitor's four consumer trends for 2026: Comfort Zone (consumers in protection mode reward calm, simplicity and control), Fiercely Unfiltered (radical honesty and individuality make authenticity a trust currency), Rewired Wellness (clinical-grade self-care moves home, brands become health copilots) and Next Asian Wave (Chinese brands win on innovation, price and mobile-first commerce).

Digital performance channels take 73% of global ad spend

Digital performance channels account for 73% of global ad spend, and it is performance creative that built and scaled today's most influential challenger brands such as Gymshark, Hismile, Dollar Shave Club and Wild.

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.

Brand effects build and decay slowly while activation effects spike and fade fast, and brand only overtakes activation as the growth driver around 6 months into a campaign.

Brand building and activation are two different speed mechanisms: brand effects build slowly and decay slowly (memory/emotion based), activation spikes immediately and decays fast (information based). The crossover where brand overtakes activation as the growth driver is ~6 months into a campaign - and many campaigns no longer run that long.

Creator content wins on involvement and relevance but runs -7 points on branding

Against digital advertising benchmarks, creator content runs +12 percentile points on Active Involvement, +8 on Relevance, +6 on Enjoyment and +5 on long-term equity, but -7 on Branding - the editorial style that makes it compelling softens conventional brand signals. Measure it on creator-specific benchmarks, not standard ad norms.

The branding toolkit in creator content, ranked by lift

Branding drivers in creator content, by lift in brand linkage: brand name in audio +22, brand logo outside product +20, interaction with product +17, logo on product +16, shopping activities in action +15, packaging +14, product aesthetics +14, using the product +11 (percentile points, present vs absent).

Not-for-profit causes nearly invert the standard rule, with an optimal split of around 44/56 toward activation because their emotional brand effect already comes easily.

Not-for-profit nearly inverts the 60/40 rule (~44/56 toward activation): causes are inherently emotive, so brand effects come easily and the money should flow to activation - the same balancing logic in reverse.

One broad-reach emotional brand campaign plus a 60/40 budget reallocation reversed the AA's five-year market share decline within a single year.

The AA's recovery: one broad-reach emotional brand campaign (two-thirds TV, online video amplification) plus a 60/40 reallocation reversed a five-year market share decline in a single year - brand building also makes the short-term work better, because the two work in synergy.

Winning back share costs nearly twice what cutting the budget saved

Regaining lost market share typically requires a disproportionate reinvestment: approximately $1.85 for every $1 initially saved through marketing cuts. Cutting is not a pause, it is a retreat that has to be bought back at a premium.

Shifting a shrinking budget into performance can destroy the returns performance depends on

Cutting the budget is one mistake; reallocating what remains to performance is another. One brand with a strong marketing history pivoted sharply to performance channels under economic pressure and saw marketing ROI drop 44% within two quarters, because the brand building that made performance effective had been removed.

Marketing and finance agree marketing matters and disagree completely on what to prioritise

Marketing and finance agree that marketing matters: 90% of marketing and 89% of finance decision-makers agree it drives long-term growth, and 88% and 81% that it is essential for profitability. They disagree on priority. 48% of marketers named brand building the top company priority; it did not appear in finance's top five, which led with increasing profitability at 45%.

Unknown brands can take preference from category leaders on behavioural principles alone

In an experiment across eleven categories, invented brands using superior expressions of social proof and power of now took between 9% and 27% preference share from shoppers' first-choice brands, without any personalisation.

Pure loyalty campaigns nearly disappeared from the IPA case base, falling from about 10% to 3% of cases.

Pure loyalty campaigns collapsed from around 10% to 3% of IPA cases over the 2014-16 period. Loyalty effects still occur, but mostly as a side effect of penetration growth rather than as something a campaign can target directly.

Pure viral transmission drove only about 4% of IPA campaigns' success - roughly a one-in-twenty-five hit rate.

Only about 4% of IPA campaigns worked through pure viral transmission. Hosting great content and hoping it spreads is a strategy with a roughly one-in-twenty-five hit rate.

John Lewis's Christmas ad reputation for going viral was mostly manufactured by paid TV - online views made up only about 3% of its total exposure.

John Lewis's Christmas campaigns generated 2,453 million views across four years for £16.5m, at 0.7 pence per view - but online views were only about 3% of total exposure. The earned effect was manufactured by paid TV, not by letting the ad go viral.

Online video beats every other online display format, and works far better as a paid medium than an owned one.

Online video outperforms every other online display format (21% uplift against 7% for online non-video), and it works far better as a paid medium than an owned one (27% against 18%).

Activation's share of comms budget jumped in just two years, from 31% to 45% of IPA campaign spend.

Activation is now over-funded relative to the evidence: its share of comms budget in IPA cases rose from 31% (2014) to 45% (2016), reaching 54% in short-term campaigns and 43% even in long-term ones. Enders Analysis put direct response at 49% of all UK advertising spend in 2016, against 39% in 2000.

Mattessons Fridge Raiders: the pure-social campaign left no measurable effect six weeks after it ended, while the TV-broadened version delivered 70% greater net profit growth.

Mattessons Fridge Raiders ran the same brand both ways: the 2013 pure-play social campaign returned just over 100% ROMI but had no measurable residual effect six weeks after it ended, while the 2014-15 version broadened with TV over seven months returned 87% long-term ROMI and 70% greater net profit growth.

Campaigns that deliver several business outcomes are dramatically more likely to deliver profit

Business Results compound. A campaign reporting no other business result has a 1% chance of reporting profit growth and 8% for market share. A campaign reporting five has a 50% chance of profit and 67% of market share.

Emotional and distinctive work pays more the longer it runs, dull work barely improves

Emotional and distinctive campaigns report profit growth 8% of the time under six months and 45% of the time after three years. Campaigns that are not emotional move from 2% to 6% over the same span. Creative quality needs time to pay, and time does almost nothing for work without it.

Challenger brands convert loyalty into profit more reliably than penetration

Challenger brands are six times more likely to report profit growth when they also report loyalty gains (21%) than when they report neither (3.5%), and roughly twice as likely as when they report new customer penetration (10.9%). For challengers, being chosen repeatedly by a smaller group comes before being familiar to everyone.

Workday - emotional B2B advertising against a dull category benchmark

Workday scored a 3.3 System1 Star Rating against a B2B category average of 1.8 by treating a business audience as a cultural one. The work generated 4.35bn earned impressions, moved consideration among finance and HR decision-makers from 36% to 63%, and reversed five years of declining pipeline with 50% year-on-year growth in a single quarter.