Participants:
- Traci Alford, global CEO, Effie Worldwide
- Toby Horry, global marketing director, TUI
- Oli Marlow Thomas, chief innovation officer, Smartly
- Moderator: Alison Weissbrot, Campaign US editor in chief
Consumers today expect a lot more from brands. Any doubt of that reality was quickly stemmed by the leaders who took part in this Smartly-curated panel at Cannes Lions 2024.
New research launched at Cannes from Smartly on what consumers want from their creative, challenges some long-held beliefs about effective advertising, including the role of price and promotion in performance advertising and relevance across generations.
While price and features remain important throughout the purchase journey, the report finds that creative execution, especially when personalized and authentic, becomes a key factor influencing buying decisions, particularly for younger generations.
What makes an effective ad today
Smartly’s research report — entitled “The State of Digital Creative: What Do Consumers Really Want From Ads?” — identifies authenticity, creative velocity and leading with the product as key factors in more effective advertising today. In addition, “brands need to develop a more efficient and scalable way to iterate and create more content.” said Smartly’s Oli Marlow Thomas.
Personalization is key.
“It’s more about identifying where that individual is in the purchase journey,” added TUI’s Toby Horry, “and making sure you’re serving the right message at the right time. Increasingly, you can do that in an addressable way at an individual level.
As a travel brand, TUI “drives that love for the brand,” so that its name is top of mind when it comes time to book.
“The stronger our brand is,” he explained, “[the more] we are seeing those correlations between direct and organic traffic and increased conversion rate.”
Authenticity, relevance and personalization certainly matter for Gen-Z consumers.
“Media needs to be much more like Beyoncé, more exciting and up for taking risks, because creative is pushing the envelope with a lot of innovation,” underscored Thomas. Consider the media strategy for different parts of the funnel and times of the year, he advised.
“Entertaining at the right point in the journey is crucial,” Horry said. For example, one of TUI’s top 10 most effective ads last year was a Christmas campaign featuring hard-working elves on holiday after Father Christmas took off on his sleigh.
“There was not a single price insight,” he asserted. “It was just there to entertain people.”
Similarly, TUI’s authentic Rabbit Hole campaign during the Super Bowl helped build awareness of a brand that had “little to no awareness,” pointed out Effie Worldwide’s Traci Alford. “It's about the timing, being crystal clear on the audience, understanding an insight, creating it and using technology.”
The role of Gen AI
Generative AI will play a crucial role in “being able to generate interesting, relevant, appropriate assets,” Thomas said. It’s important that brands start to use data to understand what’s working and what’s not.
“As marketers, you have to be more in a testing mindset all the time,” added Horry. “You must be prepared to take all those data points, create hypotheses and start to generate tests off the back of them.”
Personalization through Gen AI makes the landscape more complex for brands.
“It's a collapsed funnel with millions of different consumer journeys,” Alford explained. Brands have to look at “how to take these insights and apply them in a much more personalized and fragmented world.”
Many brands can embrace a test-and-learn mindset in the mid-funnel where they “have to think more creatively about what's important to the customer at that point of the journey,” Horry advised. With all the data and tools today, “there is potential for a new era, which is a much closer connection between creativity and effectiveness.”
Data can help unlock insights into how to better engage an audience. However, “there's still work to be done in our industry to create as much data around creative as there is around media,” suggested Thomas.
As a final note, Alford emphasized that activation is not all about data.
“It’s really important that everybody understands you cannot be truly effective and get the hardcore data results unless you're brilliantly creative,” she concluded. “They are not mutually exclusive. They go hand-in-hand.”
Smartly’s full new research report can be found here.
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