The latest in an ongoing series of studies from marketing consultancy WARC and the Association of National Advertisers, aimed at helping brands harness the benefits of creativity in advertising, finds that while seven in 10 marketers (71%) agree their business is ambitious about delivering creative excellence, only 37% feel it has the right capabilities to deliver groundbreaking ideas.
The report, titled “Building belief: What it takes to instill a culture of creative effectiveness,” includes results from the global survey of more than 300 brand owners conducted in January and February of this year, and backs up earlier findings identifying organizational culture as the main blocker to creative excellence at brands.
“This initiative, exploring the culture of creative effectiveness at brands, shows that marketers largely lack belief in their ability to deliver creative excellence, despite a strong desire to do so,” WARC Insight Director Aditya Kishore says. “It demonstrates that to build belief in their creative capabilities, brands need to develop a culture of creative effectiveness.”
WARC’s and ANA’s report follows up last year’s initiative, which included in-depth interviews with a wide range of leading brands and outlined what the companies refer to as “the ABE framework,” an acronym for “align, build and embed.” The framework, designed to help brands deliver on their creative effectiveness agenda via strategies, structures and processes, includes six building blocks: vision and alignment, metrics and evidence, creative effectiveness opportunities, common language, partner inclusion and global diffusion.
The most notable finding from this year’s report is that marketers using three or more of these building blocks were consistently more successful in delivering creative effectiveness, and more likely to be able to justify investment in creativity during a recession, connect campaign performance to revenue and sales, and prove the benefits of creativity.
The white paper also recommends that brands should adopt the concept of a maturity curve and understand the need to progress beyond just speaking the language of the boardroom. “Being able to define what ‘good’ looks like can catalyze the journey, and this can be initiated within the marketing department itself,” the report notes.
“Transforming the intangible and essential idea of culture into a solid, measurable structure has consistently proven to be an enduring brand challenge,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice says. “For the industry to unleash the power of advertising creativity, it is critical to have the right frameworks and the relevant metrics to prove its value.”
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