Creativity is Risky: The Data Deficit Challenge
Chris Howatson, with experience spanning both media and creative, immediately confronted the core issue: creativity is inherently riskier than media. Media risk is typically a factor of budget or audience; creative success, however, demands challenging conventions, which raises the odds of failure. Until business leaders accept that creativity requires a higher appetite for risk, the industry will remain stuck with “safe creativity,” which is not true creativity at all.
The disconnect is reinforced by misaligned incentives: media teams are rewarded for efficiency and reach, while creative teams are rewarded for distinctiveness and memorability. Howatson argued that to win the argument for bold ideas, the industry must move beyond arguing from a position of “opinion” or “hope”.
The solution is data, specifically the ability to quantify the value of creativity. While media data is “readily available, timely, instant, and objective,” creative data is harder to come by and often subjective. Tools that can quantify the relationship between distinctiveness and ROI, like Mutinex or the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work, are critical to bridging this gap.
When you present data to business leaders that demonstrates the outsized return on investment that creativity and distinctiveness and quality can have, you win.
– Chris Howatson, Founder & CEO, Howatson+Co
Speaking the Language of the Business
Mike Worden emphasized that data is a language, and many marketing teams are not fluent. They speak in terms of “reach and frequency and brand lift,” which are marketing metrics, not business metrics. To gain influence with the rest of the business, marketing must translate these into the language the C-suite speaks: revenue, profitability, and cash flow.
Worden also pushed for marketers to view creativity as an input, not an output. The creative is not the end goal; it is a lever to drive business outcomes. True accountability means measuring the impact of that creative input on the ultimate business outcome, which requires holistic models that capture interaction effects, lag effects, and non-linear relationships.
Kristiaan Kroon, representing the investment side, reinforced this point, noting that the job of an investment team is to allocate capital in the most efficient way to drive business outcomes. The increasing pressure for short-term results challenges creativity, which is often a longer-term play focused on building memory structures and brand equity.
I think the first thing that's important to understand is that data is a language.
– Mike Worden, Partner & Chief Media Officer, Solution
The New Media Math: Integrating Creative Dimensions
To properly incorporate creative value, the panel agreed that media models must evolve beyond treating creative as a binary, single input.
Mike Worden outlined the path forward for building more holistic models:
- Include granular creative metrics: Instead of one number, models need multiple dimensions of creative quality, such as distinctiveness, memorability, and emotional intensity.
- Integrate pre-testing data: Incorporating forward-looking data to predict the potential impact of creative before media runs.
- Model ad stock: Capturing the long-term effect of truly creative ideas that linger after the media campaign ends.
- Model interaction effects: Quantifying the synergistic relationship where the same creative performs differently based on the media environment (e.g. highly engaging vs. cluttered).
For Chris Howatson, this data provides the permission to be braver and the precision to understand where and how the creative idea will perform best (contextual relevance, sequencing, personalization). Most importantly, the data gives learning, allowing the continuous improvement of the creative product based on real-world business outcomes.
The data is telling us that the biggest returns come from the biggest creative ideas. And if you're not taking that risk, you're leaving money on the table.
– Kristiaan Kroon, COO, OMG Australia
The call to Arms? Stop Siloing, Start Investing.
The panel’s final advice was a clear mandate for modern marketing leaders:
Stop:
- Thinking about media in isolation.
- Thinking about media as a line item in a P&L that you can just cut and paste every year.
- Treating performance as a silo separate from brand.
Start:
- Thinking about media and creative holistically.
- Thinking about media as a capital investment that drives long-term business growth.
- Integrating data and models to understand the true, total impact of marketing spend.
- Taking more creative risk.