Market share up 19%, profit 18%: Hard data from System1, Kantar, Analytic Partners, Arnott’s, Specsavers on running same core brand campaign for years v switching too soon

What you need to know:
- System1’s new The Magic of Compound Creativity report, in partnership with the IPA and its Effectiveness Databank, shows a commitment to creative consistency over multiple years provides a compound brand and business effect that would take £268m in extra annual media spend, or upwards of £1.1 billion over five years, to match.
- System1 also found brands with the most consistent creative get +27 per cent more very large brand effects, with the top 20 per cent chalking up +18 per cent more brand awareness and differentiation than the bottom 20 per cent. There’s also a +19 per cent differential on building brand salience and fame, plus a +27 per cent differential in changing attitudes.
- In business terms, consistency in creative translates to +10 per cent sales value gain, +18 per cent profit gain and +19 per cent market share gain – or an average of +28 per cent more very large business effects, according to System1.
- Meanwhile an unidentified TV campaign example from Kantar shows one ad remained highly effective over a decade, with enjoyment and ad distinctiveness only marginally dipping from 100 to 98 between 2013 and 2022. Impact was slightly less strong, dipping from 96 to 90, but underlined the longevity ad campaigns command if marketers can resist the urge to tinker, per the firm’s brand reputation lead, Gareth O’Neill.
- According to Analytic Partners data, only 14 ad creatives have ever ‘worn out’ in Australia. Moreover, at least 51,000 haven’t had a chance of wearing in because marketers are too quick to switch them out.
- Specsavers, a follower of consistency creative principles, is a prime example of how the effect compounds over 20+ years. For marketing planner ANZ, Shaun Briggs, consistency delivers huge efficiency in both building mental availability and cost. Importantly, it’s also a driver of consumer trust.
- For Arnott’s CMO Jenni Dill and Saatchi & Saatchi Australia MD Toby Aldred, committing and holding firm to a masterbrand strategy saw advertising ROI go from $2.95 in the first 12 months to $3.36 in the second year – and climbing.
- There’s acknowledgement annual marketing budgets, the quarterly sales focus of listed companies, plus other short-term business drivers all affect whether CMOs can commit to longer-term brand building and creative platforms.
- Yet marketers are also arguably to blame. Per Specsavers’ Briggs: “My job is to grow the brand in the medium and long-term so there is enough demand in the right now that our test rooms are full, and our partners are caring for the sight and hearing for as many Aussies and Kiwis as is realistically possible. Lose sight of that, and you’ve started to disappear into the wrong place. You’re probably more worried about your LinkedIn profile than you are about what you’re doing for your partners, business and yourself.”
The gap between the most and least consistent brands gets bigger and bigger every year to the point where at the five-year mark, you literally see advertising working twice as hard.
The long and long of it
It’s one of those maxims of the advertising industry you’ve probably heard before, but are less likely to know who authored: If brands are built over years, why are they managed over quarters*?
Yet even as marketers across publicly listed companies blame needy shareholders for their short-termism woes, or the rest of us bemoan performance and digital media channels for an addiction to almost real-time results and the loss of brand budgets, there’s another half of the picture many are guilty of switching out all-too often: The creative idea.
According to Analytic Partners, only 14 examples of Australian advertising campaigns have actually worn out.
By comparison, there are more than 51,000 examples of creative that didn’t have a chance of wearing in.
In System1’s latest report, The Magic of Compound Creativity, there’s a stack of figures underlining the criticality of consistency in creative in building more effective advertising that deliver sustained business impact. It’ll save you millions in media spend annually as a result. Even last year’s IPA Effectiveness Awards Grand Prix and The Channon Prize for Best New Learning winning entry, McCain / adam&eveDDB, is a case study in why consistency in creative idea, execution and building brand identity is a better way to go than a constant switching out an idea, agency, staff or fluent devices (and helps you retain higher price tags too).
Here, we dive into fresh data insights from System1, Kantar and Analytics Partners, plus speak to the CMO of Arnott’s Group, leader of agency stalwart Saatchi & Saatchi, and the head of marketing planning at Specsavers to find out why – and how – they’re making consistent creative platforms work.
My job is to grow the brand in the medium and long term so there is enough demand in the right now that our test rooms are full, and our partners are caring for the sight and hearing for as many Aussies and Kiwis as is realistically possible. Lose sight of that, and I think you've started to disappear into the wrong place. And you're probably more worried about your LinkedIn profile than you are about what you're doing for your partners, business and yourself.
Should’ve gone to Specsavers
When Specsavers first launched its tagline 20-odd years ago, no one saw it as a commitment to consistently delivering campaigns and brands to market. But head of marketing planning ANZ, Shaun Briggs, is in no doubt of compounding benefit from sticking with the creative platform.
“If you see some of the early should’ve ideas, you’d go ‘oh… I don’t know if we’d make that’. But the idea, strategy and insight underneath hasn’t changed,” Briggs tells Mi3. “It comes to executing it in a context that makes sense.”
Briggs describes a consistent creative platform as “starting with almost free mental availability before you even do anything”.
“The number one thing about consistency is it’s incredibly efficient because I’m not reinventing wheels, either internally or with our agency partners, internal or external,” he says. “Then I’ve got to build that association in a human’s mind, which costs an absolute fortune and takes so long. And it’s efficient from a cost perspective because I’ve got this awesome asset that is incredibly well known. Our genius is not ruining the whole thing.”
What consistent creative also does is build trust, continues Briggs. “Consumers are out there living their normal everyday lives. If you’re saying the same thing or a variation of the same thing over and over, in a world where lots of things are uncertain, then you’re reliable, which is a cornerstone of trust.”
Briggs acknowledges the multi-generational thinking of Specsavers’ family owners plays a huge role in fostering commitment to a long-term view. There’s simply less cultural emphasis on short-term sales results and more on doing the right thing for the consumer and business to ensure Specsavers is around in 30 years. Still, Briggs believes the “most dangerous thing” marketers can do is change everything frequently.
“That feels insane to me. My job is to grow the brand in the medium and long-term so there is enough demand in the right now that our test rooms are full, and our partners are caring for the sight and hearing for as many Aussies and Kiwis as is realistically possible,” he says. “Lose sight of that, and I think you’ve started to disappear into the wrong place: You’re probably more worried about your LinkedIn profile than you are about what you’re doing for your partners, business and yourself.
He channels classic Byron Sharp method: Be consistent, always on and available – and catch people when they are ready to fall.
“I work for a glasses company. For two to three weeks every two years, consumers will think ‘hey, I need to get my eyes tested or I need to go and buy some glasses’. For the other 100 weeks, let’s get real about how important we are. When you’ve got these tiny slivers of opportunity to actually have consumers thinking about you, and you know they need to do something with you as a business, I think it’s massively important that all the other work you’ve done makes you as accessible as possible in their brains to book an appointment or drive in and park their cars.”
Hard consistency data
The evidence backing up this view is out there. Released in December, System1’s The Magic of Compound Creativity report, in partnership with the IPA and its Effectiveness Databank, explores how a commitment to creative consistency over multiple years provides a compound brand and business effect. To do this, the firm studied 56 brands and more than 4,100 ads across channels worth £3.3bn (A$6.5bn) in TV spend.
According to System1, brands with the most consistent creative get +27 per cent more very large brand effects, with the top 20 per cent chalking up +18 per cent more brand awareness and differentiation than the bottom 20 per cent. There’s also a +19 per cent differential on building brand salience and fame, plus a +27 per cent differential in changing attitudes.
In business terms, consistency in creative translates to +10 per cent sales value gain, +18 per cent profit gain and +19 per cent market share gain – or an average of +28 per cent more very large business effects, according to System1. The report’s business-level data and media spend figures came from System1 results on tested brand ads, matched against the YouGov brand tracking data, then the latest IPA effectiveness campaigns.
System1 extrapolated the cost of not being creatively consistent to £268m in extra annual media spend, or upwards of £1.1 billion over five years. Notably, there’s an exponential upwards curve in the figures, with three years a turning point for generating even heftier advertising, brand and business effects.
“The first thing marketers do when they get in a role is look for what to change, but in our hearts we know consistency is the right thing to do,” report author and System1 senior VP of global partnerships, Andrew Tindall, said upon launching the new findings. “The gap between the most and least consistent brands gets bigger and bigger every year to the point where at the five-year mark, you literally see advertising working twice as hard.”
To calculate its numbers, System1 employed a ‘creativity consistency score’, measured over a multi-year period and encompassing three building blocks. The first, ‘consistent creative foundations’, covers positioning, idea tenure and agency tenure, while the second is a ‘culture of consistency’ through creative wear in, reused creative and cutdowns plus ‘commitment to the show’. Third is ‘consistent execution’ by sweating repeatable brand assets, tone of voice, fluent devices, slogan, soundtrack and hire devices.
System1 found the most consistent brands produced higher creative quality: A 3.3 creative quality star rating compared with 2.6 across the least consistent.
“The least consistent brands remained stable – they are changing agency every year, changing the idea, redoing their brand look and feel, and they are effectively starting again every year, staying around 2.5 [creative star rating]. Whereas advertising from the most consistent brands was growing by a quarter star rating annually,” Tindall said.
In reusing fluent devices, the numbers also skew to consistency as the winning approach, compounding the longer you stick at it. Against an average of 2.6 for brands with no fluent device, those remaining consistent dipped slightly in year two, before steadily rising to 2.7 in year three, then 3.5 per cent in years four and five.
In terms of expected ESOV efficiency, System1 reported the most consistent brands had a growth rate of 1.8 versus 1.1 for those somewhat consistent, and 0.8 for those least consistent. Finally, 2024 YouGov brand fame figures showed brand popularity at 62 per cent for most consistent, 54 per cent for somewhat consistent and 52 per cent for the least consistent.
“It also points to the fact you have to have something special to start with. If you start strong and then compound it, you get stronger; it’s not just about consistency over anything,” Tindall said. “Good advertising wears in, not wears out.”
You can have media saturation, which will limit the impact of an ad in that period of time, but that’s easily addressed – it may be you need more creative rotation to achieve your objectives, but that’s a separate issue from wear out, per se.
Don’t fear wear out
Kantar and Analytic Partners have similarly convincing data, strengthening the argument for marketers to embrace creative wear in.
But such consistency isn’t happening in the main. Analytic Partners bluntly puts it: Wear out – defined as cost of new creative outweighing a drop-off in the performance of old creative – has only occurred 14 times in Australia. By contrast, there are 51,218 examples of creative that didn’t have a chance of wearing in.
Take a Covid lockdown example: One unidentified campaign from 2020 with a response index of 86 per cent chalked up 100 per cent when replayed in 2021 (when new creative couldn’t be filmed), while ROI increased from 100 per cent to 121 per cent year-on-year.
An unidentified TV campaign example from Kantar meanwhile, showed one ad remained highly effective over a decade, with enjoyment and ad distinctiveness only marginally dipping from 100 to 98 between 2013 and 2022. Impact was slightly less strong, dipping from 96 to 90, but still indicated the longevity ad campaigns command. To gauge wear out, Kantar looks at an ad’s ability to deliver branded engagement and cut through, or a combination of audience involvement, enjoyment and brand, as well as an ability to drive short-term action plus build positive long-term equity.
Across a five-ad campaign for another unidentified brand, Kantar found continuing an existing creative idea through TV and digital both resulted in higher branding recognition, while slogan recall leapt from 17 per cent to 47 per cent across a five-year span.
“There are a few ways of thinking about wear out, but the most important is if it’s actually delivering your business objectives. In that context, it doesn’t occur much,” Kantar head of brand guidance APAC / Australia, Gareth O’Neill, says. “You can have media saturation, which will limit the impact of an ad in that period of time, but that’s easily addressed – it may be you need more creative rotation to achieve your objectives, but that’s a separate issue from wear out, per se.”
Even consumers being ‘fed up’ with an ad doesn’t mean it’s less impactful. “People can be fed up with seeing something but still enjoy the ad as much as they ever did,” says O’Neill. “It’s more an early warning sign if you like to look at your media saturation or other indicators of wear out. But in itself, it’s not necessarily a good measure of effectiveness.”
The decisions I and my teams have made in the past creatively were also frustrating with the benefit of hindsight. In a couple of jobs I’ve said let’s just wear out one piece of creative, let’s try and see what would happen if we got close to a wear-out point. But I think some of the problem comes with annual budget cycle and human nature of just wanting to make more work. We [Arnott’s] had to be really conscious we were going for quality and big idea scope, rather than quantity.
No substitute for Arnott’s
Launched in May 2022, Arnott’s CMO, Jenni Dill, plans to run her masterbrand campaign for at least five years. It’s worth noting the key tagline ‘There is no substitute for quality’ is at least 60 years old. The commitment to consistent creative stemmed from a real business challenge.
“We had to find the universal insights and moments; threads that could pull the portfolio together in a way that allowed us to support the entire portfolio rather than just pieces of it,” Dill says.
“We want to make sure there’s time for the work to wear in and make an impact in the marketplace. You need a certain amount of longevity, time and media ways to be able to let that happen. And you want to be able to drive business growth, not just make ads for marketing’s sake. You want it to be more than a comms strategy, you want it to be an integral part of business growth. And to do that you have to get well past the wear-in point and into the point where you’re really starting to impact business results.”
Arnott’s is already seeing the work gaining effectiveness and efficiency over time. Dill quotes strong ROI in the first six months – highly unusual in FMCG – and a steady growth trajectory at the two-and-a-half year-point.
“The FMCG benchmark is around $0.85 as a gross profit ROI; in our first six months we delivered $2.60 and then got $2.95 in first 12 months and were up to $3.36 for the second 12 months. We know it’s still growing,” she says. “We know we’ll get a better result this time, we just don’t know yet where it’s going to land.”
As well as ‘there’s no substitute for quality’, Saatchi & Saatchi Australia MD, Toby Aldred, says his team and Arnott’s are constantly going back to the powerful, inclusive and “quite timeless insight – which is usually the gold star insight when you can unearth one of those”.
“It was those little moments of human connection that matter the most,” Aldred says. “We unearthed that at a time when society was coming out of lockdown and it was something we all felt quite personally. As time has gone on and we’re now in more of a cost-of-living crisis, those little moments have more premium placed on them, as you might not be able to do the bigger moments.”
A relatable and natural brand role for Arnott’s to fit into is another ingredient, as is storytelling, an emotionally attuned tone, plus timeless track, ‘I’m still in love with you’ by Dragon.
“We’re in nine out of 10 homes so we can own that snack munching moment more than anyone else; we have a good, natural association there,” says Aldred. “And all those iconic little biscuits are brand codes in themselves.”
Adding layers vs big bang
For the last six years, Arnott’s has run what’s called The Neighbourhood integrated agency model with Publicis Groupe. The team won Grand Effie for the ‘Life’s Little Moments’ campaign and achieved an ROI that put Arnott’s in the top 10 per cent of FMCG campaigns.
From a relationship perspective, Dill and Aldred believe their approach helped both get clearer on the work Arnott’s needs faster.
“We’ve then spent more time crafting the final output, storytelling, rather than trying to decide if it’s idea one or two,” says Dill. “We’ve got to the work more speedily, more impactfully and in a more aligned way. It helped make sure we make the best work possible.
“Instead of one big episodic story, we were looking for those moments and insights that could be held together with universal consumer insight, rituals, habits and moments. That makes it broadly appealing and compelling. The whole goal was to make sure we were talking to more of our customers, across more of our portfolio, for more time throughout the year. It was that simple.”
Aldred points to 20+ SKUs so far, as well as the launch of Arnott’s gluten-free range, all going through the same campaign construct and creative theme. “Compound creativity doesn’t just mean one asset that runs, it’s all the small layers within that campaign,” says Aldred.
“In no way are we saying it’s the slam dunk. But if you’re running that many executions across all sorts of different screen formats, lengths, with sweet, savoury, snack SKUs, different demographics, with a 159-year-old product and a 12-month product and everything in between, it feels like the makings of a campaign that can continue to have layers of compound creativity interest applied to it.
“There’s no one killer device in there but there’s enough flexibility in the pot you can pick and choose and apply at the right levels.”
Balancing consistency with freshness
That’s because consistent creative commitment isn’t about just replaying the exact same ad or content.
“Kit Kat, Aldi, Specsavers – they have mixed up their ads; with Aldi, media saturation can happen really quickly so they have a lot of variety in there in terms of fresh approaches but the main idea is consistent,” O’Neill says.
“Kit Kat’s ‘Have a break’ has been the theme forever, and the brand uses the same distinctive assets and same look and feel. Within that they run individual ads for quite some time too – they’re not creating a new execution every six months.”
This is important even given the proliferation of channels campaigns execute through today. Dill agrees fragmentation has made it harder to build reach as an advertiser, but having a unified creative idea is helping here too. That, and an ability to change media flighting quickly to ride out the peaks and troughs of a normal business cycle, where you can dial up or down parts of the portfolio in your mix.
“You have to work smarter to get the overall impact you need in given timeframes and within a given budget,” she says. “That said, there are a bunch of opportunities that come with this – short and long formats, different ways of engaging, things you can track reasonably through an entire ecosystem. The goal is to make sure we have the right lengths, message, moments going into the right environments to make sure they’re resonating. We haven’t found an amazing way to do it in static formats yet, so it’s definitely video-based formats for now, but we’re still working on how we do it differently.”
In Specsavers’ case, distinctive assets include the ‘should’ve’ moniker, ellipsis eyewear shape, green colour and name.
“We’ve taken the approach we can play with the things that are really well known, and we probably can’t play with the things we’re trying to land,” explains Briggs. “For instance, we’d still like to have green better associated with us, even though it’s really strong in our category, and we’d like to do a bit more with our ellipses.
“We have been mucking around with ‘should’ve’ subtly and people haven’t noticed – should’ve to must’ve. An insight we have from it is if you’re going to play around with a distinctive asset that’s well known, don’t fiddle around the edges, muck around with it properly.”
The comfort is knowing what the idea is, versus getting distracted by executions. “Get focused on the idea, which is if you’d seen properly, you would know this isn’t right,” says Briggs.
Such clarity helped the local Specsavers team for instance tackle the much-talked about out-of-home airport campaign last year, where it switched the welcome to ‘Melbourne’ and ‘Sydney’ airport messaging in both cities. A similar campaign had previously been executed in the UK across travel locations such as train station platforms and handles on petrol pumps.
By contrast, a recent search campaign bidding on competitor terms was abandoned within days. “We walked away from it as it just felt wrong,” says Briggs.
Likewise, an idea playing with religious iconography in a famous artwork, which ticked many of the boxes on being a ‘should’ve’ campaign, from how to execute it to the context and way it would have been delivered, didn’t even get a run.
“We don’t really go into politics, we don’t go into religion, we don’t punch down,” says Briggs. “By making fun of an artwork, people by extension may feel we’re making fun of the whole idea of a particular religion, which I don’t think is the right thing to do. So by applying a risk profile on that… it was foreseeable that the result might not have been good.”
In no way are we saying it’s the slam dunk. But if you’re running that many executions across all sorts of different screen formats, lengths, with sweet, savoury, snack SKUs, different demographics, with a 159-year-old product and a 12-month product and everything inbetween, it feels like the makings of a campaign that can continue to have layers of compound creativity interest applied to it. There’s no one killer device in there but there’s enough flexibility in the pot you can pick and choose and apply at the right levels.
Measuring consistently is key
Just as important as consistent creative is consistently investing in research and tracking. Briggs says Specsavers has a database going back to 2015 in Australia, regular brand and ad tracking insights from Kantar and most importantly, consistent measures assessing creative and its performance as critical. This is viewed in parallel to daily sales and tracking.
“We have a bank that says ‘this piece of communication performed against the measures we’ve identified over many years that are important for our category and our brand. Here they are and here is how it went’,” he says. “I’m talking 25-plus executions of this type of creative that have 100 per cent performed over the long-term, through Covid, through a cost-of-living crisis, through competitors launching into the market and an explosion in the cost of local optometrists. We see them and expect they’ll have an impact on our business.
“We’ve been able to work our way through that by pulling on the right level out of the marketing toolkit, which is not always the advertising element of it – and it certainly isn’t playing with the creative element.”
O’Neill notes market mix modelling (MMM) is increasingly incorporating creative scores and how creative is impacting effectiveness. Improvements to the speed of creative testing – often in a day – is another step change. “Creative is 50 per cent of your campaign impact, so you should be testing it – you should be pre-testing it and you should be testing it when it’s in market as well to see how it’s faring and whether it is wearing out,” he advises.
Holding the brand line at Arnott’s means keeping close to consumers consistently. “We had a lot of great feedback early on that helped us make richer, more well-rounded creative story. We didn’t use research as a binary go or no-go device, we used it to help us build up those moments by staying close to consumers and making sure the work was going to connect and engage the right way,” Dill says.
“With emotional storytelling, you want to make sure consumers are feeling something at the end, and that feeling is helping drive much more positive feelings for the brand, more positive disposition to go and buy product, and showing brand preference for us versus others.”
Agency-marketer tenure boost
Another less discussed ingredient in compounding creative is employee and agency tenure. In the System1 report and over a five-year period, brands who stuck with their agency recorded an average creative quality star rating of 3.0. This dropped to 2.9 for one agency change, and 2.3 for at least two changes.
In his seventh year himself, Briggs points out Specsavers’ UK creative director has 25 years in the seat, and loads of staff with multiyear experience within its 100-strong in-house team, Specsavers Creative.
“I would call it your professional instinct, or your professional judgment from the experience you have gained,” comments Briggs. “In terms of where it’s right and where it is wrong to play with ‘should’ve’, I think we’ve honed it really well. But to define that I find incredibly difficult.”
Bad creative still bad
What consistency won’t save you from, however, is bad creative or hard-to-understand ideas in the first place. In a recent facial coding study to understand the impact of ad frequency, Kantar found if an ad is difficult to understand, repeating it or adding frequency won’t save you.
Analytic Partners equally cites the need to ensure creative is fit for purpose, suggesting TV ads don’t work as well as investing in unique digital video, reporting a +264 per cent lift in campaign response for a client who did just that.
Anecdotally, Briggs notes work Specsavers did with rugby refs in New Zealand: “It was done from the position of them needing to see better than anyone else. So we tested their eyes, their families’ eyes, and we ran all this stuff about how difficult it is for a rugby ref to see what’s going on in a scrum,” he says. “It was too obtuse. Most people probably went for brand, top of mind, and rugby is super popular in New Zealand.”
Occasional efforts running a direct trade-type message literally saying what Specsavers does are also less effective than on-brand messaging. “I’m not going to say we made a mistake on that stuff, I’m going to say we made a bit of a misstep. We quickly recognised that we pushed it and it wasn’t right, so let’s just stop,” adds Briggs.
Why marketers and agencies flip-flop
If the arguments for reusing ads and sticking by creative for years at a time are so compelling, why do so many marketers chuck creative ideas out before they have time to wear in?
“It comes down to the old adage that marketers get tired of their ads well before consumers do,” responds O’Neill. “After a while, it’s standing on its own two feet and the question for marketers becomes: What do I do now? Is it time for another one? With marketing director tenure being relatively short as well, there’s that desire as you come into a new place to shake it up, mix things up and put your own stamp on it. You’ve got factors making it more of an emotional rather than clear, clinical business decision as to when to swap out the creative execution.
“The other thing is there are a lot of other interested parties who’ll be whispering in your ear, saying ‘yes, you need a new ad’.” (And for creative agencies, there lies the rub.)
Either way, Dill cites multiple examples in her career where decisions came from somewhere else “that were a little frustrating to deal with”.
“But the decisions I and my teams have made in the past creatively were also frustrating with the benefit of hindsight,” she says. “In a couple of jobs I’ve said let’s just wear out one piece of creative, let’s try and see what would happen if we got close to a wear-out point. But I think some of the problem comes with annual budget cycle and human nature of just wanting to make more work. We [Arnott’s] had to be really conscious we were going for quality and big idea scope, rather than quantity.”
Briggs couldn’t agree more.
“My job is to make optometrists and retail partners around Australia and New Zealand confident that when they open their store today and tomorrow, there’s going to be a lot of people coming in getting their ears and eyes tested. So long as I do that, I’ll have the freedom of the budget and also the freedom and trust of the board to go and play with ‘should’ve’. I can build on ‘should’ve’, call us ‘Spooksavers’ at Halloween and get a bit of a slap over the wrist from the IP lawyers – but not get in real trouble because the intent is right,” he adds.
* https://people.duke.edu/~mela/bio/papers/Lodish_Mela_2006.pdf