To win the long game, brands must use data to make sure their creative choices match up with their principles, argues Anastasia Leng from CreativeX.
This past February, seated in a freezing conference room in sunny Boca Raton, I watched chief executives (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) of the top 25 consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies in the world get on stage in a stream of 60-minute sessions to talk about their business to market analysts.
Their goal was to secure a coveted “buy” stamp from the Wall Street bankers, and that involved providing an overview of the business strategy along with forward-looking statements of anticipated financial performance.
Typically, we hear about marketing from chief marketing officers (CMOs), and I was curious to hear how their boss would frame the value of this function in a room full of financial analysts.
Unsurprisingly, 100% of CEOs mentioned marketing as part of its core strategy, though how they talked about it varied: Half showed examples of standalone ads as the “proof point” of marketing’s impact, while 60% referenced the criticality of data and the investments they were making to better track and measure their marketing bets moving forward.
Eventually, their strategy converged on a central thesis where marketing was the lynchpin: Brand is the lever for scale. From here, the playbook looked strikingly similar: Take a brand, invest in advertising to make it famous and follow on with new “product innovations” to grow revenue.
Plenty of research validates this play: Strong brands command higher prices, better withstand economic turndowns, and achieve success for new products simply because of consumer trust in the brand name.
Even on the balance sheet, the importance of brand has grown over time. In 1980, the value of S&P companies was mainly tied up in tangible assets. But, by 2010, such assets accounted for 40% to 45% of market capitalization, while the rest was tied up in intangible assets – more than half of which was the brand itself.
Gazing into a brand’s soul
As David Ogilvy once quipped, “Every advertisement is part of the long-term investment in the personality of the brand.”
Yet, when it comes to that “brand personality,” consumers are demanding some behavioral tweaks. For decades, companies have invested millions into molding brands into instruments that serve as identity markers and emit micro-signals about who we are and what we care about to the world at large.
Today’s younger consumers want signals that not only demonstrate purpose, but also accurately reflect the changing culture around them. When they don’t see that, or so they claim, they tune out.
If a brand is the soul of the company, then what do we see when we gaze into its eyes, or look at its advertising? We see a delta between ad land and the world at large – and, in turn, a threat that hinders the scaling power of brand.
A case in point: CreativeX’s 2024 Gender in Advertising Report looked at over 30,000 ads supported by $260 million in ad spend from 2023, and found that while there has been improvement in non-stereotypical portrayals of women, this is limited to younger, whiter women.
Women over the age of 60 remained largely unseen, appearing in just 1.5% of ads. And when older women did appear, they were twice as likely to be depicted in domestic roles than their male counterparts. Conversely, older men were three times more likely to be shown in leadership roles.
Stereotypes were similarly divided by skin tone. Women with lighter skin tones appeared five times more frequently in professional settings and seven times more frequently in leadership roles than darker-skinned women.
Across the board, women with the darkest skin tones received only 2.6% of brands’ total ad spend, with spending on darker skin tones decreasing by 9% year on year.
Communication is naturally fraught with misunderstanding. How will consumers interpret their absence, their invisibility even, from our advertising? Will this be seen as a slowness to adapt, or as a statement about a brand’s fundamental values and beliefs?
Mixing data and creativity
In tech-land, scaling has meant being able to handle increasing amounts of work without a degradation in performance. And technology companies’ ability to scale has always relied on data, from which measurements of system performance were regularly reviewed and optimized to make sure obstacles to scale were routinely addressed.
Watching CEOs and CFOs armed to their teeth with data in that unnaturally cold Florida conference room, it was impossible not to notice that the impact of marketing was still a story many told in anecdotes: “Watch this great ad!” “Look at this innovative influencer partnership!” “Notice how our ad spend is going up.”
But, at large, what brand story are our creatives telling? If we rigorously tracked every piece of creative our brand produced in the last 12 months, how would the results line up with our strategy? Would it be like looking in the mirror or staring at a stranger?
Put another way: Would we like what we see? Would investors? Would consumers?
Now more than ever, data-driven tools – powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning – are making it possible to ask, and answer, those questions in a consistent way for every piece of creative, in every campaign, in every market. And the answers may hold the key to a brand’s growth potential – on Wall Street and beyond.
