VIEWPOINT: ROI Begins With Creativity

Maintaining creative independence in a world of marketing shortcuts

The best digital marketers can never have too much information. The ability to harness the quantitative insights relevant to any campaign, and use them to create actionable strategies, is essential to every successful marketing enterprise in 2024. At the same time, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. More data is available than ever before. Although data should inform every aspect of a campaign strategy, the secret sauce that makes a successful campaign stand out is something no computer can script: creativity. It’s true that marketing has become more of a science than ever, with algorithms and “buyer’s journeys” reducing every task to one step in a decision tree or flow chart. During each process, however, a dash of human ingenuity is still required to stand out in a competitive landscape. Here’s a closer look at the “why” and “how” behind the creative elements of today’s marketing best practices.

Why creativity matters

Creativity helps make your message stand out in a cluttered world of information. Customers and clients respond to messaging that speaks to them on a personal level more than any algorithm-generated insights. Any long-term effort to build brand equity starts with fostering a sense of personal familiarity with your brand and maintaining that familiarity over time. Organizations in the B2B and B2C space recognize the need to creatively evolve and respond to shifting trends while maintaining a familiar voice. Data should inform that process, but human insights are always the first ingredient in seeing what is possible — the “mother of invention.” Creativity allows us to be the first to identify when something might be possible. Innovation is applied creativity, turning a new idea into a valuable solution or novel process. The Harvard Business Review’s “Creativity in Advertising: When It Works and When It Doesn’t” outlines five dimensions of creativity as they relate to successful advertising results:  • Originality: Ads containing elements that are rare or surprising, or that move away from the obvious and commonplace. • Flexibility: A highly flexible ad smoothly links a product to a range of different uses or ideas.  • Elaboration: Successful ads containing unexpected details, or extending simple ideas so they become more intricate and complicated. • Synthesis: Blending or connecting normally unrelated objects or ideas.  • Artistic value: Ads with a high level of artistic creativity containing aesthetically appealing verbal, visual, or sound elements. According to HBR’s research, highly creative ad campaigns have twice the sales impact of noncreative ad campaigns. Investing in developing highly creative ads pays off in higher ROI, engagement, and performance impact. Creativity and digital marketing Digital marketing practices — such as email, text, social-media channels, etc. — evolved in parallel with online consumer tracking practices. The race to turn consumer data into a game-changing insight is a tempting one to win. While it’s easy to fall behind the competition when data-driven insights are ignored, creativity is the separator that allows a marketing campaign to surge ahead. When creative insights are applied, digital marketers thrive, allowing for a unique ability to make messages stand out either through a message or its application. The majority of marketers believe that creative effectiveness is one of the most influential factors in the overall success of a campaign, according to a July 2023 survey (https://www.marketingweek.com/marketers-creative-effectiveness/) published by Marketing Week. Yet for all its emphasis on capturing measurable insights, digital marketing has not risen to the challenge of measuring creativity. Just 57.3 percent of marketers surveyed had an analysis in place to measure creative effectiveness, according to the same survey, and 33.2 percent did not have any method of tracking creative effectiveness (the examples given were gauging an emotional response or influencing customer behavior). More than any metrics that capture creative effectiveness, the biggest advocates for creativity are corporate leaders. An organization whose leaders value creativity understands that creativity can go well beyond brand communications and advertisements, using innovative thinking to shape how systems are designed, how challenges are converted into opportunities, how employees collaborate, and how organizations engage with customers and other stakeholders. Cross-collaboration within an organization can tap into your marketers’ creative potential in a variety of initiatives. For example, by combining media-buying processes with high-performing creative ads, organizations can dramatically power campaigns on CTV and beyond. While being able to adopt this approach is dependent on working with an ad partner that can enable it, doing so can enable advertisers to create many more creative assets to launch. Brands are also engaging influencers and peer creatives as strategic partners, both in B2B and B2C settings. A January 2023 report from Deloitte (https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/marketing-and-sales-operations/global-marketing-trends/2023/creativity-to-solve-marketing-challenges.html) concluded that “organizations may now lack the creativity needed to meet the challenges of the modern business world, as manifested in fewer creative leaders in the C-suite and lower emphasis on creative skills among CMOs and marketing talent.” Advertisers need a large creative pipeline to generate fresh content assets to test, learn from, and optimize to drive better performance. If that’s the case, it makes sense that brands in both the B2B and B2C space are increasingly associating with independent digital creators and influencers, who bring in their own audiences as sources of potential demand generation — as well as the creative content brands desire. Whether insourced or outsourced, the need for creativity in marketing remains as strong as ever. Leaders who recognize that need, and foster the creative freedom to push the boundaries of their existing initiatives, will in time see a better ROI from campaigns than those who merely follow the script.      

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Jordan Buning is president of ddm marketing + communications, a marketing agency for complex and regulated industries, including health care, financial services, and global manufacturing, as well as public transportation, higher education, and recreational products.