Key points
- Marketers have increased advertising spend by roughly 50% over the past 15 years (adjusted for inflation), but the average number of brand effects reported in effectiveness case studies has been falling over the same period
- Contrary to arguments that brand advertising matters less now, Andrew argues it matters more: purchasing has moved online (reducing the role of physical availability), consumers see roughly double the number of ads they did a decade ago, and strong brands are what feeds the word of mouth that trains AI systems to recommend them
- Creatively awarded campaigns make media spend work roughly five times harder than non-awarded campaigns
- Four principles drive effective advertising: emotion, distinctiveness, showmanship, and consistency, together explaining around 60% of the business results reported in a large effectiveness dataset
- Marketers are currently getting several of these wrong at once: using more low-attention media, setting more short-term objectives, using distinctive brand assets less (celebrities are rising while brand characters and jingles are falling), and making less emotional advertising overall
- Consistency compounds: brands holding to the same creative platform for years report four times the ROI and are three times more likely to report incremental profit, apartments.com’s decade-long Jeff Goldblum campaign, and Kit Kat’s “Have a break” (running for nearly 70 years), were both cited as standout examples
Table of Contents
- Spend is up. Effectiveness is down.
- The case for brand advertising mattering more, not less
- Distinctiveness is table stakes, not the whole picture
- Emotion matters, and not all emotion is equal
- Showmanship versus salesmanship
- Consistency compounds
- Excess share of creativity (ESOC)
- The 60% rule
Andrew Tindall is Chief Growth Officer at System1, an effectiveness platform that measures emotional response to advertising, and previously worked brand-side at Diageo and Bacardi. This session focused specifically on advertising, one of the four Ps within the wider marketing mix, and drew on research from System1’s Creative Dividend study, built on effectiveness case studies submitted to global marketing effectiveness awards.
Spend is up. Effectiveness is down.
Andrew opened with what he called the uncomfortable headline: marketers have increased inflation-adjusted advertising spend by roughly 50% over the past 15 years, but the average number of brand effects (awareness, equity, differentiation, distinctiveness, trust) reported in effectiveness case studies has fallen over the same period. More spend, less to show for it.
The case for brand advertising mattering more, not less
Responding directly to the argument that strong brands matter less now (some businesses have grown to significant scale with little to no advertising), Andrew offered three counterpoints. First, purchasing has shifted heavily online, which reduces the influence of physical availability and increases reliance on mental availability, being the brand a customer already thinks of. Second, the average consumer now sees roughly double the number of ads they did a decade ago, which raises the bar for cutting through. Third, brand reputation increasingly shapes the word of mouth that trains AI systems to recommend one brand over another. Across the effectiveness dataset, campaigns reporting stronger brand effects also tend to report stronger business results.
Distinctiveness is table stakes, not the whole picture
Andrew showed the highest-scoring ad his team had ever tested for pure brand recognition, a Tesla ad that achieved a perfect recognition score. But when tested for emotional response, it scored just one star out of five, a score that historically predicts weak future growth.
“Distinctiveness in advertising is table stakes of creativity. It’s creative efficiency. If you put your media spend in and you’re not distinctive, you’re going to lose a chunk of it.”
On which distinctive assets actually work best: brand characters tend to build distinctiveness more reliably than celebrities, since a celebrity is often shared across multiple brands, while a dedicated character forces long-term consistency and draws attention to itself within an ad. Audio assets (jingles, sonic branding) were also flagged as consistently under-used and effective, “you can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears.” Yet the data shows brand character and jingle use falling over time, while celebrity use is rising, a shift Andrew described as choosing the wrong kind of distinctive asset more often than the right one.
Emotion matters, and not all emotion is equal
Emotional response correlates strongly with whether a campaign successfully builds the brand association it set out to build. Two findings stood out: leaving audiences feeling nothing (the “cost of dull”) sharply reduces the likelihood of building any brand association at all, and making audiences feel negative can actually backfire, triggering what Andrew called an “ostrich effect,” where people disengage rather than absorb the message. Positive emotions, particularly surprise and happiness, correlate far more strongly with both brand association growth and “fame” (people talking about a brand, from the Latin fama).
“The antidote to the cost of dull is making people feel something, ideally something positive.”
Showmanship versus salesmanship
Drawing on Orlando Wood’s research (System1’s Chief Creative Officer), Andrew described two broad creative approaches. “Showmanship” earns attention rather than assuming it, using character, place, music, and dialogue, and speaks to the roughly 95% of people who might buy a brand in future. “Salesmanship” speaks directly to the small percentage already in-market today, often through flat, studio-based, fact-led advertising. Andrew illustrated the contrast with two Super Bowl broadband ads: T-Mobile’s character-led, entertaining campaign (showmanship) against a straightforward Spectrum ad built around price and a call to action (salesmanship). Both styles have a place depending on funnel position, but showmanship use has been declining across the effectiveness dataset while salesmanship has crept up.
Consistency compounds
Andrew’s own research (Compound Creativity, developed with the IPA) breaks consistency into three parts: creative foundations (sticking with the same positioning, idea, and team over years), a culture of consistency (letting ads run longer, reusing creative assets, committing to one creative style), and consistent brand look and feel (visual assets, tone of voice, sound). Brands scoring well across all three report four times the average ROI and are three times more likely to report incremental profit.
Two examples anchored this: apartments.com’s decade-long campaign with Jeff Goldblum took the brand from 27th to 2nd in the US rental market, with media spend held flat since 2019 while creative consistency continued compounding. Kit Kat’s “Have a break, have a Kit Kat” campaign, running for nearly 70 years, was offered as the longest-running example of the same principle.
Excess share of creativity (ESOC)
Andrew’s proposed framework combines media spend and creative quality into a single measure he calls excess share of creativity. Across the effectiveness dataset, only 17% of campaigns land in the ideal quadrant: genuinely creative and well-supported by media. Around 40% fall into what he called “busy work,” under-invested in both creativity and media support, and roughly three times less likely to report profit growth. Campaigns with heavy media spend but weak creative quality (“paid noise”) tend to be missing emotion, showmanship, or consistency specifically, distinctiveness, Andrew argued, is now well understood industry-wide; the remaining three principles are where the gap sits.
The 60% rule
Modelling creative quality and media spend together explains roughly 60% of the business results reported across the effectiveness dataset, a figure that varies by category (lower in categories still reliant on physical availability, like food and drink; higher in categories with less genuine product differentiation, like pharmaceuticals). Andrew’s takeaway: this shows advertising effectiveness isn’t down to chance. Creative and media choices are within a marketer’s control, which makes advertising a repeatable growth investment rather than a gamble.