This is the way

The future of creativity and growth

The Truth that ‘the future of advertising is increasingly not going to look like advertising’ is recognised by brands, agencies and platforms alike. However, the most progressive work that we celebrate at festivals often remains a sideshow to the main advertising output of our industry. Despite consistently producing far more effective brand and sales results. The inconvenient truth is that advertising is not evolving fast enough. At a time when there is more seismic creative change and opportunity than ever in marketing history. So what to do?

This piece has taken inspiration from one of the great post-pandemic pop culture heroes, The Mandalorian. Mandalorians live by a code of honor and those who adhere to it use the mantra ‘This is the way.’ They believe that ‘Foundlings are the Future’, nurturing these youngsters into great warriors. In these Foundlings, like the gifted Grogu aka “Baby Yoda”, there is already immense power. Which gives us a fitting metaphor for our industry.

The extraordinary work we celebrate but have not yet scaled represents our ‘Creative Foundlings’. The collective task for all of us is to support and nurture them, because they drive growth more powerfully than legacy advertising alone. Which means putting far greater emphasis on new ways of thinking, working and creating.  

Here are five key principles to guide the way:

Change the Data(sets) to change the Mind(set)

The biggest impediment holding back our collective success is mindset. Looking beyond the datasets we rely on is integral in shifting this. Consider this: only 53% of the time people spend with media is ad-supported, a huge 47% is not. But most brands over-invest in paid media as they are not aware of this.

So why is this a problem?

Because brands need to resonate holistically with people’s lives. Our brand opportunity is the whole world of media, not just the ad-supported half. Looking far more purposefully into culture, sports, entertainment and gaming, using data that is not currently used, will start to change mindsets. How much are you investing in non-ad environments that prioritize entertainment and value-creation over interruption? See what Mercado Libre did last year with it's Black Friday promotion? Instead of adding to the influx of Black Friday deals shown on ad breaks, it built its promotions directly into the TV shows viewers already loved. The Handshake Hunt offered a discount related to the content shown every time a handshake – which just happens to be Mercado Libre’s logo – took place. The retailer had its best-ever Black Friday, with an 80% increase in sales and 7.8 billion impacts.  

Don’t interrupt the things people love, be the thing people love

Al MacCuish, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at the Sunshine Company, and a great friend, came up with this iconic summation over a decade ago. It lays bare the truth that People often don’t care about brands and products as much as we’d like them to. They care more about what’s happening in their lives. How your work resonates depends on how well you understand and respond to this. Don’t push out content you think they should care about. Instead, find ways to delight and inspire around the things they are already interested in. 

Heinz did this by turning past failure into a viral success. Its first attempt to launch Kranch, a combination of ketchup and ranch, had failed. But when Taylor Swift was spotted eating chicken with those sauces, it launched a new product Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch in just a day, capitalizing on Taylor and Travis’s star power and the memes surrounding the moment. Without any direct connection with the couple, Heinz ended up being mentioned in 63% of Taylor and Travis coverage, gained 6 billion earned impressions and a 52,987% return on investment, with the product hitting Walmart shelves two weeks from launch.

Work with people who can do things you can’t

Changing the way you work changes what you make. The advertising and marketing industry is still largely siloed with creative, media and multiple agency and marketing divisions organized separately. This legacy structure is inefficient, complex, and slow. Integrating streamlined operating models is a priority for all businesses, but forming new project teams is a ‘fast-track hack’, bringing together people with different skill sets. Reach out and look for partners who can do things you can’t. You might be the best in your field, but collaborating across disciplines and industries always creates far more progressive and unexpected results. 

Door Dash’s Titanium winning Super Bowl experience did just this, combining media, tech, data and ecommerce expertise to take viewers by the storm. Instead of advertising its own products, it tagged on every other advertiser’s offering, creating a puzzle so gripping it caused some viewers to willingly miss some of the best touchdowns. The campaign attracted 11.9 billion impressions, 111.8 million influencer video views and a 457% increase in engagement volume across social. 

Listen to the kids - they are (al)right

As all industries have woken up to Gen Z’s profound influence and future spending power, it has exposed an intergenerational gap between those who grew up pre-internet and those who live natively online. If you want to engage Gen Z, start by transforming your intimate understanding of everything they care about. Advertising is a young industry, with the majority of workers in the US aged 20-34. Make use of this community, talk and listen to them in your workplace, get their opinions and input. Ask them what they would do? And compare that with what you are currently doing. If you are misaligned, change it. 

CeraVe tapped into the Gen Z audience’s love of social, ironic entertainment and celebrity, by turning actor Michael Cera into a skincare influencer, fueling rumors that he was the brains behind its products. The campaign stole Super Bowl, going viral amongst a storm of conspiracy theories of the star’s involvement with 30 billion earned impressions, resulting in a 25% increase in sales and a 2,200% increase in searches for the brand.

Change what you measure to change what you make. 

All of the above will be to no effect if ‘Measurement’ is not transformed. Our industry remains hamstrung by an ad-centric measurement mindset. The definition of madness is doing the same thing - in this case measuring all ideas as if they are ads - and expecting a different outcome. It is too easy to make what we can measure. The ‘Future’ will be won by looking beyond these confines, innovating and marshaling new data to find new ways to evaluate and scale our best work. At its simplest, changing what you measure will change what you make. 

With 2025 nearly with us, I hope these five principles provide useful stimulation for the year ahead. Using these combined with your wider collective learnings, successes and experience will provide the foundations to reimagine a far more successful and enlightened future. Find the Foundlings, nurture and grow them. 

This is the way. This is the future of Creativity and Growth.

The body of this article first appeared in AdAge ‘5 Ways to Drive Creativity and Spark Brand Success’ last month.