CREATIVE AGENCIES = EFFECTIVE AGENCIES

In his Perspective column in the latest edition of Campaign Brief, Martin Trevaskis refers to an article in the May/June edition of the national edition which argues that agencies that perform best in creative awards also perform best in effectiveness awards. It is posted here in full.

I recently had a  lively quarrel with a  friend about  the merits of  creativity in advertising. A logical and responsible cynic, he vented his frustration with our industry’s immoderate appetite for creativity, and particularly our much maligned mania for creative awards.

“Creativity for creativity’s sake is both futile and negligent,” he expounded, echoing a scepticism that found its way long ago into marketing’s common sense. 

“Clearly!” I agreed. “It’d be foolish to suggest that we should give precedence to the creativity of our work at the cost of its effectiveness. Our responsibilities to our clients are unambiguous.”

It was a perfect day for such  jubilant agreement,  the  clouds having  been banished now  for  over a fortnight and the breeze daring only to steal the burn away from the sun.

“Yet,” he returned, “we seem all too often to do just that. We continue to pig out on creativity, distancing ourselves from the sobriety of our clients with our conspicuous bias toward the artistic and ‘Cannes or bust’ catchcries.”

I opened him a bottle of beer and passed it over the patio table.

“Well,  it’s  the secret  to success,”  I reasoned. “Uncreative  advertising  simply doesn’t work as well.  There’s a distinct correlation between creativity and effectiveness.”

“It’s just, uh, kinda tricky to actually prove,” he smirked.

“Or is it?” Little did he know that he’d crawled out upon a flimsy limb. Serendipitously, this discourse was happening just days after I’d completed a piece of research on the topic, and I entered into the aged squabble  with  a  freshly assembled set of data pertaining to the creativity and effectiveness of advertising agencies from all over the world.

“So,” he inquired, as a monarch flittered past, “you think that creatively fundamentalist agencies are more effective than those concerned with strategy, with persuasion, with effectiveness itself?” 

I smiled as I sipped on a particularly agreeable rosé.

“Pah! You’ve become fooled by your own rhetoric!”

While he adjusted his chair to meet more of the sun I appealed to him to consider the performance of Auckland’s most creative agencies. Colenso BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB and Publicis Mojo are what you might call ‘creatively driven’ when compared with the likes of Ogilvy, JWT, Grey and Y&R who’ve historically taken a softer line on creativity.

“As you’d expect, the agencies with the higher creative ambitions are also the ones winning the most creative awards. Campaign Brief magazine’s creative rankings show Colenso, Saatchis, DDB and Mojo as the top four globally awarded NZ agencies.”

“Indeed,” he observed.

“And holding true to my defence, they’re also the agencies that have had the most success at the local Effectiveness Awards. Based on performance at the last four ceremonies, Colenso, Saatchi’s and DDB are the three ‘most effective’ agencies in New Zealand, with Mojo coming in fifth. And together they’ve won seven times as many effectiveness gongs as the not so creative foursome of Ogilvy, JWT, Y&R and Grey.” 

“A trouncing!” he cried.

“Shellacked!” I concurred.

“But,” he reproached, “your argument is flawed. Those creative agencies are also the biggest agencies. They have the most chances to produce award winning work, the most chances to produce effective work. Purely by virtue of scale they  should be at the top of those lists. Your observation proves nothing!”

“I agree,” I told him. “We’re an anomaly here in New Zealand. Our biggest agencies are also our best in creative terms, which is unique to us. It’s hard to prove much in a market so small and idiosyncratic.”

Of course, I’d looked further a field in the days past, to the two biggest advertising markets in the world – the UK and USA. Markets big enough to provide more robust data and to absorb the anomalies.

“So if you’ll allow me,” I began.  

“By all means,” he replied.

“The 2007 Gunn Report,  the  world’s foremost record of ad agency performance at creative award shows, provides a tidy list of the twenty best performing UK and US agencies in terms of creativity; ten from each market. That glamorous register involves such celebrity marques as AMV BBDO, DDB London, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fallon and Weiden & Kennedy. The agency brands most tenacious in their prioritisation of creativity.”

“A shimmering cluster!” he agreed.

“I then built a source of comparison by compiling the top ten agencies from each market that didn’t make it into the Gunn Report. The highest achievers in terms of billings and effectiveness awards. The best performing not-so-creative agencies  from  the UK and US. That equally auspicious  list  includes industry mainstays like JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, McCann-Erickson and M&C Saatchi.”

“The great journeymen!” he declared.

“And finally I built lists of the twenty most effective UK and US agencies according to Effectiveness Award performance tracked across the last four ceremonies. These lists reveal the agencies that are most able to consistently, over a number of years, produce work for their clients that stimulates the kind of results worthy of an Effie. Which, by the way, are given out far less liberally than creative awards.”

“Some of us require less encouragement than others!” he proclaimed.

“In those lists appear agencies from both sides of the creative divide. The BBDO’s, DDB’s and Goodby’s rub shoulders with the McCann’s, Ogilvy’s and JWT’s. The creative agencies seem to dominate the higher ranks, but the not-so-creative agencies are more numerous.”

My friend saw immediate vindication. “See! The most effective agencies are not all the most creative ones! Many of your not-so-creative  agencies are winning more effectiveness awards than their creatively fundamentalist siblings! By your own proof JWT is a better agency than Goodby Silverstein!”

A celebratory sip of beer was taken.

“You’re right,” I again conceded. “You could shine these findings in either light. It’s difficult to isolate the performance of the creative  agencies and compare  their  apples  with those of the not-so-creative shops.”

“Impossible!” he insisted.

“And so to bring more meaning to the data, I separated the contingencies back out and compared the averages.”

“Oh?” he asked.

“You see, the creative agencies have been awarded an average of 11.2 Effies each across the past four ceremonies, while the not-so-creative ones have managed an average of just 8.2. Does this not suggest that the creative shops are more consistently effective?”

He thought for a moment before happening upon yet another flaw in my logic. “No,” he said, “it does not. Those creative agencies are much bigger than the not-so-creative ones. You’ve stumbled into the same trap as before
. Because of those agencies’ size, they’ve a greater chance of winning both creative and effectiveness awards, and so the cause of consistent effectiveness is down to size, not creativity.”

Again, a celebratory sip was enjoyed. However it was of rosé this time, for alas, his logical assumption was incorrect. Imploring to him to reassess his viewpoint, I  showed him the billing figures  for  the agencies in question.

“While some of the creative agencies are indeed enormous, their average billing, at US$259.6M is in fact 20% smaller than the not-so-creative average of US$327.7M.” 

“The creative agencies,” I proffered, “win more Effies even  though they’re smaller and produce  less advertising than the not-so-creative shops.” 

“Astonishing!” he exclaimed.

“And if we do a simple bit of maths, we can find our way to a figure that shows exactly how effective each group is. By dividing the average billing score by the average number of Effies won, we can see crudely how much money an agency  needs  to bill  in order  to  generate a result. This  shows  a  true measure of efficacy – how efficient an agency is at achieving effectiveness.”

“Quite,” he said, both of us smiling at the impropriety of performing maths on an afternoon like this.

“In the case of the creative agencies, that figure is US$23M. In the case of the not-so-creative agencies, the figure is US$40M.”

“You see,” I concluded, “in real terms the creative agencies are almost twice as effective as the not-so-creative ones.”

“Another trouncing,” he admitted, this time less triumphantly.

A few pensive moments passed, and with another sip of beer his position softened. “Well I’m not saying I’m against creativity. In fact, I agree that creativity is an essential part of effective communication. I just don’t see how you  can argue against prioritising  effectiveness first and foremost, and  employing creativity when need be. Creativity should be a means, not an end.”

“Certainly,” I replied. “It’s a logical ideal. I can’t argue with you philosophically. But sometimes the world doesn’t work in the way we reason it should. If you were right, then those agencies that did prioritise effectiveness or strategy or research and  did use creativity only as a means would surely be the ones generating the most effective work. And conversely the egotism of the creative-at-all-costs shops would go unrewarded. But out there in the real world, that isn’t what happens.”

“Ah but could it not be,” he interrupted, “that those agencies are simply better at winning awards? Are you sure your ‘most effective’ lists aren’t really ‘most effective at writing winning Effie entry’ lists?”

“Well  anything’s  possible,”  I  replied,  “but  the  skill  required  to  write a winning  Effie  is  persuasive communication. Being able to position your campaign – your product – in such a way that the judges – the consumers of the entry – are compelled to feel the right way about it, and to act on that feeling.”

“Sounds familiar,” he said, foreshadowing my argument.

“Wouldn’t you rather,” I continued, “employ an agency full of persuasive communicators? After all, if an agency can’t sell it’s own product, how on earth will it sell its clients’?” 

“Hmmm… then explain to me,” he insisted, “why the campaigns that win creative awards aren’t the same ones that win at the Effies? Don’t you find it contradictory that those creative agencies you talk about win their effectiveness awards for their less creative work? We all know that many of those ads the industry holds up as their best haven’t actually driven results for their clients.”

The flowers on a nearby bougainvillea deepened in hue as the sun dipped from their sight.  

“Again,” I replied, “you’re right. The campaigns we win creative awards for often do differ from those for which we’re awarded  Effies. But before you infer from  that observation that creatively  awarded campaigns are ineffective I’d appeal to you to look to the work of Donald Gunn, the creator of The Gunn Report, who’s twice completed his ‘Does award-winning advertising sell?’ study. In 1996 he looked at the case histories of the 400 most awarded campaigns between 1992 and 1995, revealing 86.5% of them to have been associated with marketplace success. The report’s conclusion was that “ads with award-winning qualities are two-and-a-half times more likely to be associated with market success than ads on average”. In 2002 they found a similar number – 82% – to have been effective.”

“That does seem rather a lot more  than I’d presumed,”  he confessed,  “but have you not been suggesting that the more creative we are, the more effective we are? You still haven’t explained why the most creative advertising isn’t the  most effective.”

“Well, for a start, often it is,” I said. “Recent creative award darlings Guinness ‘noitulovE’, Sony Bravia ‘Balls’, Honda ‘Grrr’ and Carlton Draught’s ‘Big Ad’ have all garnered huge effectiveness accolades for AMV, Fallon, Weiden & Kennedy and George Patterson Y&R. Here in NZ, my own agency’s work for Frank, NZI, Sky City and Mini has all been lauded on both stages in recent years.” 

“And I’ve been there to applaud in all cases,” he assured.  

“But it’s also true that a big share of our twenty-six Effies have been won for campaigns that wouldn’t have had a  look in at Axis, let alone Cannes. They’re the kind of campaigns  that a consumer would consider creative, but an award judge, looking for the last word in originality and imagination, would critique more severely.”

“And the truth is that the vast majority of what an agency produces is that sort of work,” he said.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “There’s the tip of the iceberg – the creatively awarded stuff – then a massive body of work that’s creative, but not award winning. And mostly it’s that work that a client buys from an agency.”

“So what does it matter whether the agency cares about creativity?” he asked.

“The big difference between agencies with a strong creative focus and ones without is that the creative agencies  are consistently better at  doing that mainstream kind of  work.  Their singular creative ment
ality, as egotistical as it may seem, makes them more creative, more engaging, in everything they do, not just the creatively awarded bits. The benefit of which, as evidenced by the data, is a much higher level of engagement and effectiveness across their entire body of work.

“Without much scrutiny,” I continued, “the ‘we put the client first and don’t let creativity get in the way’ approach seems indisputably sensible. But upon closer inspection it’s revealed as unambitious and ultimately ineffective.”

“Perhaps,” he allowed.

“You know, it was Leo Burnett himself who said ‘if you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either’.”

“And how’s his agency going?” inquired my friend.

“Both UK and US agencies made it into the Gunn Report, they’ve won more Effies than anyone in the US and they’re seventh most effective in London.”

“José!”

“And if I were a client, I’d feel  far  safer with an agency that produced a consistently effective and engaging body of work and occasionally did something a wee bit too creative than an agency that kept its feet on the ground and my hands full of mud.” 

I looked for a change in his resolve, but his sunglasses veiled his thoughts.

“As would you,” I hinted.

“Now, now,” he said, finishing his beer.