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In the bustling digital landscape, in the era of information overload and declining attention spans, how can brands ensure they are remembered long after the screen goes dark?
Attention comes at a cost. No one actually cares about advertising. Advertising interrupts social feeds, tv shows and commutes, and is a nuisance people actively ignore. Brands can interrupt people into a purchase- but if they do, they won’t love your brand afterwards because you’ve interrupted the thing they were more interested in.
The price of that attention will just go up next time. They’ll raise their mental barrier to your message, needing more reach and frequency to make your campaign effective.
If brands are investing the same, or greater media budget every year to be effective with the same campaigns, they might need to be a better tenant to their audience-landlords, and give them something they would truly enjoy seeing in their feeds.
When I was a kid in the 90s there was an ad for Sprite, where some guys all answered the phone with ‘Wazzz-upppp’. It was so dumb and so brilliant. Kids at school would go around saying Wassup for years and years to come- It became a mnemonic device where anyone who answered the phone in the 90s would pretty much do it. It became a part of pop culture at the time.
The effects of that campaign lasted thousands of times longer than the initial 30 seconds of attention given to the TV commercials.
And it was so effective; I can recall it being for Sprite almost 25 years later.
In today’s digital world, brands are competing not just with each other but with a barrage of content from social media, news, entertainment, and more. The challenge to cut through the noise and create a lasting impression beyond the scroll requires much more creativity - not less.
While brands can pay for attention, these transactions are often fleeting. You will need to keep paying the same price every time for that slice of attention, which is an inefficient use of budget and energy.
By investing in better creative work upfront, brands can build a community that looks forward to their content. This not only enhances recall and memorability but also fosters a deeper connection with the audience— and a greater yield of your media budget.
Courtesy of our friends at Tracksuit, you can increase your conversions with more memorable advertising (aka unprompted awareness).
With the rise of generative AI, the digital landscape is experiencing a flood of content that, while glossy and exciting, can lack depth and originality. This influx of AI-generated content creates a new challenge for brands: cutting through even more noise.
In the hands of the right team, Ai tools can unlock amazing production efficiencies. But to create insightful campaigns that truly resonate with people and connect with culture- need a human hand.
Running with this rent-free metaphor for a bit longer- investing in doing the thinking upfront is kind of like paying a returnable bond to your future audience landlords.
The upfront cost of quality creative thinking may be higher, but you’ll get it returned through greater performance of your campaigns. These gains can then be reinvested for even greater return.
Here are just three ways in which your brand can benefit from compelling creative campaigns.
As the digital space becomes more saturated, the call for greater creativity grows louder. Brands can’t rely on cookie-cutter or exclusively-AI approaches for generic content. To truly live in their audience’s heads rent-free, they must innovate and push creative boundaries through the following strategies.
There are lots of resources, guidelines and playbooks for optimising creative to perform better in algorithms, which is great for incremental gains, but we can reach so much higher than simply making the message shorter, the colours bolder and the logo bigger.
Reason has developed a Creative Review service to help diagnose where things might be going wrong and ways to improve to capture human attention.
We assess the strengths and weaknesses of the creative against a set of criteria. Each section is marked on a sliding scale for us to accurately identify areas of improvement.
We provide a score on each section, and provide feedback and recommendations for next steps.
There is a place for creativity in performance marketing - it should be a central pillar of measuring effectiveness. Brands need to ensure they not only capture attention but also retain it in the long run.
Building an audience is a continuous process that requires consistent and engaging content. Successful brands create a loyal following that values and anticipates their content, ensuring they remain memorable and effective in the minds of their audience.
