Mark Ritson and System1 Unpack the Creative Dividend in Advertising
A databank of 1,265 campaigns shows that long-term, emotionally charged and well-branded advertising delivers profit and share — while short-term, click-driven work falls flat.
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The Creative Dividend: Why Emotion, Branding and Time Still Rule Advertising
System1 and Effie’s new Creative Dividend databank provides one of the clearest pieces of evidence yet that creativity isn’t just a nice-to-have in advertising; it is the difference between campaigns that drive long-term profit and those that fade into obscurity. Spanning more than 1,200 campaigns across Europe and North America, the project connects System1’s testing of advertising with Effie’s library of case studies to show, with unusual clarity, what actually works. The results are sobering: while ad spend has risen by nearly 30 per cent in the last decade, the brand effects achieved have declined. In other words, marketers are paying more for less.The Creative Dividend provides a practical route out of this spiral anchored around three pillars: emotion, branding and time.
A wake-up call for advertising
Their presentation opened with a simple but striking chart: advertising spend has surged over the past decade, but the number of brand effects — awareness, salience, trust, differentiation — has steadily declined. The point was not lost on the audience. This is not an industry in rude health. It is one working harder for diminishing returns.
Andrew Tindal described the central paradox: never before has advertising been so measurable, yet rarely has it delivered so little. He argued that marketers have allowed dashboards to dictate decisions. Short-term performance indicators, clicks, conversions, impressions have taken precedence over the business outcomes that matter to the CFO: profit, penetration and loyalty. It is not that marketers lack information, it is that they measure the wrong things.
Andrew Tindal, SVP Partnerships, System1
This reframing is crucial. For years the industry has obsessed over attribution models, customer journeys and programmatic precision. Yet the Creative Dividend shows that these efforts, while perhaps useful for optimisation at the margin, are not what drives serious growth. The lever that moves markets remains creativity. And creativity, in this databank, is defined in clear, testable terms: emotion, fluency and consistency.
Emotion: the multiplier effect
The first pillar, emotion, has long been debated in marketing. Critics dismiss it as woolly, defenders call it essential. The Creative Dividend puts the argument to rest. Campaigns in the top quartile for System1’s emotional Star Rating deliver between 50 and 57% more business results than those in the bottom quartile. When such campaigns run consistently for several years, the compounding effect multiplies further.
What counts as emotion here is not simply joy or sentimentality. System1’s framework includes a wide palette pride, amusement, surprise, even fear and disgust. The only unforgivable sin is neutrality. Work that leaves people unmoved might please a cautious committee, but it delivers 40% less ROI on average. Neutral campaigns are safe to sign off, but expensive to run.
Mark Ritson made the point forcefully in the session: brands do not need to be liked, they need to be felt. A campaign that irritates but is remembered will beat one that slips past unnoticed. This is not carte blanche for shock tactics, but a reminder that advertising must provoke a human reaction. In practice, that means giving agencies licence to push beyond rational explanation and into entertainment.
Mark Ritson, Columnist, Marketing Guru, professor and behind the hugely successful MiniMBA series
Branding: ensuring people know it’s you
Emotion, though vital, leaks value if people cannot tell who the ad is for. System1’s fluency data reveal a startling fact: even after watching a full ad, two in ten viewers fail to identify the brand. That is wasted spend.
The fix is brand codes, or distinctive assets. These range from logos and colours to product shapes, slogans, characters and sonic cues. The databank shows that their power lies not only in existence but in repetition. Ads that feature a brand code at least seven times generate a step-change in recall.
Ritson boiled it down to a practical rule: keep the palette tight logo plus three codes and then deploy them unapologetically. In marketing culture, subtlety is often prized. End-frame reveals, whispered slogans, minimalist branding. But the data suggest a different strategy. Obvious branding, delivered early and often, is what works. In an era of fragmented attention, ads must shout who they are for.
Time: compounding creativity
The third pillar is time. The databank shows that campaigns which run for at least three years are far more likely to deliver profit than those that vanish after a few months. This is because memory structures require repetition and reinforcement. Consistency compounds.
Yet marketers are often their own worst enemy. The industry fetishises novelty, with brand managers eager to refresh campaigns before they have matured. Ritson called it the 'pornography of change' the belief that constant reinvention signals dynamism. In reality, it erodes effectiveness.
KitKat provides the counterexample. Its 'Have a break' slogan has endured for over five decades. The execution has evolved, but the core brand code has remained untouched. The result is cumulative memory and reliable distinctiveness. KitKat has not suffered from consistency; it has thrived on it.
Media: the super touchpoints
Another strand of the research concerned media choices. Plotting long-term brand potential against short-term conversion revealed a handful of 'super touchpoints':television, radio, outdoor, PR and direct mail. These channels break the trade-off, delivering both reach and response.
Podcasts also performed well, reflecting the growth of audio as a medium that commands attention in intimate contexts. Creators offered potential too, but with caveats. When creative is strong, influencer partnerships can extend cultural reach. When it is weak, they add little. The conclusion is pragmatic: invest in super touch-points, use creators carefully, and avoid channels that neither entertain nor brand effectively.
Leaders, challengers and the myth of brand-building costs
One myth the databank punctures is that brand building is the preserve of big players. Both leaders and challengers benefit from emotional, consistent campaigns. The difference lies in risk. For large brands, weak branding wastes money but does not necessarily transfer value to rivals. For challengers, the penalty is harsher. If their emotional work is not clearly attributed, the gains flow directly to bigger competitors.
The lesson is that leaders must defend reach with distinctiveness, while challengers must use differentiation to justify their share. Distinctiveness opens the door, differentiation closes the sale. Both are essential, but the stakes are higher for smaller brands.
Neutrality: the silent killer
If there is a villain in the Creative Dividend story, it is neutrality. Too many ads emerge bland, the product of over-engineered processes. With multiple stakeholders sanding off edges, the result is work that looks like a PowerPoint slide with a soundtrack. Safe enough to approve, but inert in market.
The numbers confirm the intuition. Neutral campaigns deliver 40% ROI than emotional ones. In a world where consumers are bombarded by over a thousand ads a day, dullness is indistinguishable from invisibility.
Positive and negative emotions
The databank also sheds light on the relative power of positive and negative emotions. The evidence suggests that both can be effective in the short term. Fear, tension or surprise can jolt attention and boost immediate response. But for long-term memory and brand equity, positive emotions have the edge. Campaigns that leave audiences amused, proud or uplifted create memories that sustain behaviour for years rather than weeks.
The attention span myth
Marketers often lament that attention spans are shrinking. The Creative Dividend suggests otherwise. Human attention has not collapsed; what has changed is ad load. A decade ago, people saw about 600 ads a day. Now it is closer to 1,200. The result is not shorter attention, but divided attention. People still have the capacity to engage deeply, but they have more messages competing for it.
This has practical consequences. Strategies that rely on end-frame reveals are no longer viable. With fragmented viewing, branding must happen early and often. Entertaining content will still hold attention, but bland or overly rational work will simply be skipped.
The digital trap: short-termism and its costs
Perhaps the most sobering part of the Creative Dividend is its analysis of short-termism. Digital media have made advertising measurable in real time. This has encouraged marketers to optimise for immediate indicators. But the data show that the more a case study emphasises short-term metrics, the less likely it is to report profit.
The industry has confused what is easy to measure with what is meaningful. Clicks, conversions and impressions may comfort managers, but they rarely shift market share. By contrast, the brand effects that build penetration and loyalty are harder to track daily, but far more valuable over years.
The Creative Dividend checklist
System1 and Effie distilled their findings into a practical checklist:
Start with diagnosis: use tools to understand memory structures.
Commit to emotion: aim for entertainment, not explanation.
Codify with discipline: use logo plus three brand codes, shown at least seven times.
Run broad and long: maintain campaigns for at least three years.
Choose super touchpoints: TV, radio, outdoor, PR, direct mail.
Report business outcomes: focus on profit, revenue, penetration, loyalty.
Build creative confidence: train teams in market orientation, not dashboards.
The broader lesson
The Creative Dividend is not a revolutionary theory but a return to fundamentals, supported by unusually robust evidence. It shows that despite technological change, the rules of effective advertising remain remarkably consistent. Emotion drives effectiveness, branding ensures attribution, and consistency compounds returns.
The real problem facing the industry is not that consumers dislike ads, but that too many ads are not worth liking. The fix is straightforward: entertain, brand clearly, and hold campaigns long enough to let memory do its work. In this light, creativity is not the risky option. It is the only safe one.
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