Marketing
Issue No. 2 - September/October 2001
let's hear it for the creatives
by Dr David Corkindale
Australian Advertising Agencies were particularly successful at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival in June and the country’s biggest agency won its first Gold Lion in 25 years. The Awards are mainly for creativity so does this mean that company marketing directors, who pay for the advertising, will be rejoicing too? Probably not. It is a perennial concern of many marketing people that ad agencies seek to make ads that will win awards but not necessarily sell their products. Why else do the major agencies hire famous movie directors to make TV ads for vast sums of money? Should Australian clients crack down on this award-winning streak and get the creatives back in line? Are they right to worry?
Surprisingly, the answer is ‘no’. Getting your agency to be creative is a good thing. In fact, it is about the only thing, these days, that clients cannot do themselves. The Awards are a way of demonstrating that they still possess this magic.
Let me explain why ‘no’ is the right answer to the above question.
WHY SHOULD ADVERTISING STRIVE TO BE CREATIVE?
Well, we need to know how advertising works in the heavily advertised categories to answer this. Many people who have succumbed to the myths of advertising believe such adages as: ‘Advertising must seek to differentiate the brand in the minds of the customers’; ‘it must give them a reason to buy’; ‘it should stress and build the USP (unique selling proposition)’; ‘in a “me too” world advertising can develop the brand values that “like a feather" can tip the balance’.
What does substantial academic research and study of advertising now tell us? For most product categories that are heavily advertised, advertising expenditure largely reflects the market share size of the brand — that is, sales; when brands spend above this level they show little, if any, gai...
