Heads up creative

MOI: What recent ad campaigns have really turned your head? 

Andrew: I love giving boring answers to this question. I won’t name another campaign from Liquid Death, Surreal, or a brand you see in the marketing press or LinkedIn feeds. Instead I’ll provide a US example of “boringly effective” work: Apartments.com. There is a ten-year case study in the recent Creative Dividend work that I recommend everyone reads.

Essentially they hired Jeff Goldblum to be their brand character and, unlike most brands that hire celebrities for a one-off pop, they committed to this character for ten years. They won a Silver Effie for Sustained Success, the hardest and most flattering category to win in, because they moved from being a challenger brand, something like 20th in the market, to number two over ten years.

The work was consistent, emotional, distinctive and heavily leaned into showmanship. Crucially, though, they invested to see the results, creating an Excess Share of Creativity by backing this brilliantly creative campaign with more and more media spend.

Every year they saw more brand awareness and more revenue. Five years into the campaign they stopped scaling their media investment so aggressively, held it reasonably flat, and saw the benefits of brand building. Their awareness and share just kept growing.

Again, it shows the unfair advantage of creative quality: you can take it easier on media spend. And it demonstrates what a truly effective campaign must do, which is create profit. Honestly, it’s just a brilliant campaign. Any marketer who worked on that deserves to retire. 

MOI: What’s your favourite ad campaign of all time?

Andrew: Unlike the first question, this is a terrible question. So I’ll use it to make a point.
I’ll go with Jaffa Cakes’ “Full moon, half-moon, total eclipse.” For anyone who hasn’t seen this series of ads, it shows various characters eating a round Jaffa Cake first in half, then in full, saying the line: “Full moon, half-moon, total eclipse.” It ran for years, did wonderful things for their market share, and was famous. The line entered culture

Why do I love this? Because it proves a successful campaign does not need an “insight”. I’ve led, worked on, supported or judged thousands of campaigns at this point due to my wonderful role at System1, and whenever you see the briefing document, awards entry or internal wrap report, the page titled “insight” is usually full of a jumble of words that ranges from a story, to a fact, to a penetrating truth that is relevant to the brand, commercially useful and has some kind of emotional tension, which is what I would consider a real insight. 

It’s very clear that no marketer can agree what an insight is, and consumers do not give a shit. Advertising can be commercially successful with grand strategy that unlocks growth, or by simply making a fun ad that points out that a Jaffa Cake is round like the moon. 

I could also have named the Compare the Market work, where an intern simply found it hilarious that “market” in a Russian accent sounded like “meerkat”. No grand strategy there, yet it changed comparison advertising globally overnight.

MOI: You talk about the importance of media and creative working together, but how do you go about changing internal culture to make it happen? 

Andrew: First, stop treating media and creative like divorced parents arguing over custody of the budget. The research is pretty clear: this isn’t a debate about which matters more. Together, creative quality and media support explain 60.1% of reported business results.

The bigger internal issue is a confidence gap. Low-confidence marketers lean harder on short-term digital metrics, and creativity is still widely seen as a risk. So you change the culture by changing the conversation: one room, one scorecard, one commercial language. Measure creative quality early. Judge media against business outcomes, not just cheap clicks. Back stronger work with broader reach and more time in market.
Honestly, this is a tough question. It takes a very skilled marketer with a proper grasp of their internal stakeholders to walk them through the proof that creativity matters and that its impact scales exponentially. There’s no blueprint for achieving this.

It could be running geo-experiments where you change things with different customers or markets and show that the more consistent or emotional idea returned three times the ROI. It could be hiring a proper econometrics business and integrating System1’s creative metrics into it, showing how emotional the ad is explains about 60% of the profit return, which is a true story with a client I work with. It could be bringing Les Binet into an exec meeting and force-feeding them The Long and the Short of It. Or even getting the business onto Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing so everyone has a shared commercial language around the value of creativity and mass reach. Or all of the above. 

Achieving this is what sets marketers apart from project managers. 

MOI: What impact do you think AI will really have on the advertising industry? What changes do you think we’ll see in the coming years? 

Andrew: I’m currently in Mexico. One of my older, far wiser friends who works in investing posed this to me after about six cervezas last night.

He basically believes in system three. Humans have been shown to think in system one pathways, fast, subconscious and emotional, about 95% of the time, and system two, slow, effortful and rational, about 5% of the time. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for this research. This is why emotional broad-reach advertising works. It primes and influences our brains to tap into those system one decision pathways.

My friend believes this is over. That the best products will now be chosen regardless of brand because people will ask their AI buddy which is the highest-quality holiday destination, house or chocolate bar. And it will simply tell you the highest-quality product or service. I think this is horse shit.

The same argument would have been made when we moved from word of mouth to phone directories, the Yellow Pages, or from phone directories to the internet. And the same argument was absolutely used when Alexa and Siri were launched. These things would control our decisions and advertising and brand building would no longer matter.

First, the majority of AI is built from people writing things. So advertising to these people and creating content will influence the models, not simply what the greatest product is. Second, that person will not ask for a chocolate bar, they will ask for a filling nutty chocolate bar, because Snickers advertising works. And third, the final decision will always come down to human behaviour. All of this really points to advertising and brand building becoming far more important.

I do think this will have a greater impact in some categories, like holidays. LLMs are simply better than going to one provider with a more limited set of options and a more limited way of searching. But overall, the hype is too big. 

MOI: What impact do you think AI will really have on the advertising industry? What changes do you think we’ll see in the coming years? 

Andrew: Any other future predictions you’d like to mention?

A few. Fame will matter more. Trust will matter more. Distinctiveness will matter more. 

I think fluent devices, sonic assets and jingles are due a comeback because brands need faster recognition in lower-attention environments. I think creators and other touchpoints that can do short and long at the same time will be taken more seriously. 

And I think the brands that win will look strangely old-fashioned: broad reach, emotional creative, consistent execution, patient investment, and going big in fewer channels. Everyone else will call it unfashionable. Then copy it three years later when the profit result lands. 

And maybe, just maybe, we will return to a more fun, more human world of marketing that we are all prouder to work in.