What you need to know:

• UK-based System1 CCO Jon Evans is in Sydney to keynote Future of TV Advertising conference on 6 March.
• He’ll use System1’s massive ad data set to underline that while the media supply chain obsesses with optimising channels – creative accounts for fully half of business results.
• Evans also aims to give stretched CMOs the data ammo to convince rational, sceptical exec teams that investing in emotional creative can drive more predictable growth results.
• He’s been in that position, after Suntory-owned Lucozade tanked 20 per cent following a product reformulation that went down with customers like lead Zeppelin. All pressure was on him, the marketing director.
• System1 data helped – along with 101 on Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics to the entire exec team – landing the biggest brand investment in the company’s history. But it still didn’t save his job.
• Evans also outlines a five point toolkit to help marketers put How brands Grow and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s theories into practice.
• And outlines the marketers that, per System1’s five point scoring system are nailing ad effectiveness. Amazon is one. And one Australian brand was last year ranked in the UK’s top 10 rating ads.
• There's always more in the podcast. Get the full download here.

A rational argument for emotion

System1 Chief Customer Officer Jon Evans is now one of the marketing world’s top podcasters, injecting Uncensored CMO deep dives with some of the biggest hitters – and thinkers – in marketing with the wry humour and clarity of someone who’s been there, done that, and at times, got his marching orders. His first CMO gig lasted three months under a maverick and extremely hands-on founder at UK craft beer pioneer Brewdog.

Before that, as Marketing Director at Suntory-owned Lucozade, he bought in System1 after sales tanked 20 per cent following a product reformulation of ‘New Coke’ proportions. His CEO told him before signing off the budget, the biggest in its history, “I want you to prove to me that this is going to deliver the business result that we need it to.” No pressure then. Evans called System1 founder John Kearon, a move that later would lead to him joining the firm first as CMO, and now as CCO. It paid off in spades as Lucozade clawed back all lost sales within a year and gained another 8 per cent. “But there’s a tough ending to this story,” says Evans. “I get fired.”

Evans thinks that decision was made before the results came in – it took a year to move the Lucozade needle, providing “a real lesson in long and short”. Either way, it ultimately led him to System1 – and now Evans is on a mission to help marketers to not just prove that their campaigns will deliver business results with data honed from more than 100,000 campaigns tested across 250 categories, but help sell them in to sceptical, rational exec teams by putting a business value on emotional creative work.

Plus to fundamentally understand that while media is where the money is spent – and where seemingly both procurement departments and most of the marketing supply chain obsesses – that strong, emotionally-driven creative is equally important over both short and long-term.

Putting creative in P&L terms

Selling emotional creative to exec teams that often see advertising as fluffy – at best – is no mean feat.

“Most businesses, and their exec teams, are very rational. So unless you can present the power of the creative idea in the context of the business performance, you're going to really struggle.”

Which is where hard analytical data comes in.

System1 is renowned for applying Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics theories to test brand creative, predict how it will perform via a five star rating system and benchmark it against the category. System 1, per the Nobel Prize winner, is the way the brain works to make snap decisions, with intuition and emotion to the fore. System 2 is the slower, more rational, logical part. The eponymously named marketing effectiveness firm focuses on the impact of creative on the brain’s fast-thinking response to stimuli, with emotional response a cornerstone of its ratings system.

Evans says its findings offer a stark, cross-category illustration of the power of emotionally charged creative to move the business needle and make a direct P&L contribution.

“We've now looked at over 260 different case studies around the world for customers that we've worked with. And what we've done in every single case is said to what extent did the media spend predict the change in market share, and to what extent did the creative also impact on the market share change in the following 12 months?”

It did that by “neutralising for media, because obviously different brands spend different amounts of money” to gauge “what affect did the creative itself have, and more than that, the emotion that it creates,” he says.  “And we reversed that back to look at those campaigns that increased the market share for the brand, and those that didn't.”

Message as critical as media

The study spanned a 15-year period.

“In every single case, the creative improved the predictability of the campaign results,” says Evans. “If you look at the correlation between how much they spent and their market share, you have a loose correlation – it’s positive, but it's loose. So in other words, how much you spend makes some impact to some degree. But the moment you put in the star rating, which is our measure of emotion, it becomes much stronger – it doubles the strength of that correlation,” he adds.

“I were to oversimplify it, basically half the impact is coming from media and half the impact is coming from the creative. But if you don't measure the creative, as we define it, by its ability to create emotion in the long-term, then you're literally missing half of the result,” says Evans.

“Basically, emotion matters and the creative matters. So when we talk about the medium and the message, we mustn't forget the message, it's as important as the media.”

Tying the two together, he says, is critical.

“The more you can demonstrate that the creative is going to work, the more confidence you then have in your media buy – probably one of the single biggest investments you're going to make as a business. Unless you know the creative is actually going to create the change that you want, why would you do that?” asks Evans.

“So you have to do the two things together. If you separate them and just talk about opportunities to see or reach or frequency and you don't actually ask yourself, is the message going to land and going to work? Will I be remembered? Will I create an emotional response? … Then you potentially could be wasting a lot of money.”

The Future of TV

Evans will be making that media-plus-message point to the Future of TV Advertising conference this week. He says TV – in all its forms – “remains the most powerful channel at our disposal to tell stories to create emotion, and build brand”.

But that’s only true if the creative is strong in the first place.

He points to Professor Karen-Nelson Field’s work on attention. Nelson Field presented at Cannes two years ago with System1’s Orlando Wood and ad effectiveness supremo Peter Field, unpacking huge effectiveness variances by channel and a weight of data to show that spending more than competitors on media in a bid for greater share of voice can no longer counterbalance dud ads spread across lower attention channels.

“If you look at the work that Karen Nelson-Field has done you'll see that the attention created on audio-visual rich environments – TV, BVOD and Youtube and so on – is hugely ahead of what you might be able to achieve on digital platforms,” says Evans.

“But there’s something called attention elasticity. It’s not just enough to get attention – and the creative can massively impact how much you get.” Evans says System1’s “experiments” suggest that the difference between a one-star rated ad and a five star ad on the same channel “can be up to three times.”

“So creative matters – and what we find from our research is that the quality of attention increases the audience’s ability to remember who you are afterwards.”

The TV industry both globally and locally is going through “a bit of a crisis of confidence” as audiences shift and marketers continue to pile into performance channels and digital media more broadly despite scepticism of platform claims that those channels can also deliver brand building.

Coca-Cola is the latest example, with CEO James Quincey on its latest earnings call stating digital now takes 60 per cent of its total ad budget, up from 30 per cent in 2019. As a long-time soft drinks marketer, Evans “understands” Coke’s move, given soft drink consumption “skews young” and because brand preferences tend to be set at a younger age – and younger audiences tend to be on digital channels. “So the logic of it makes sense,” says Young. Whether it works is another matter.

Either way, “What I'm trying to do is provide the evidence for why there is still a very powerful role for [TV] and give them the data to help them sell it in as part of media mixes. Because we know CMOs are making tough decisions, there's a lot of money being moved, particularly now, because everyone's under pressure to deliver results,” says Evans. “We're getting more short-term in our in our viewing window – and I want to give people the evidence to take a longer term view.”

Better ads in five easy pieces

Likewise, System1 is bidding to create a marketing effectiveness “toolkit” for marketers and agencies to that know they need to build mental availability, per Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – just not how to do it.

Evans says there are five key ingredients.

“The first is that emotion matters: Speak to the heart don’t bother the brain … come up with an idea that makes people feel something.

The second is to write a story arc – and keep it simple. “It’s important to tell a story. Sounds obvious, but most advertising is not storytelling, it’s lots of scenes, close-ups, messages. What you find when you overload a bit of communication, it neutralises impact – there is so much being thrown at you, you don’t take it in,” says Evans. “So take people on a journey, create drama at the beginning, create the resolution at the end, make sure people feel happy.” He nods back to Kahneman’s peak end rule, which posits that people judge an experience by how they felt at its peak and at its end. “So ending on a high is very important.”

Third is music. “If there is one hack I could give people, it’s the power of soundtrack,” says Evans. “The amazing thing we found actually is that what you hear changes the interpretation of what you're seeing. So we can take the same ad, but change the soundtrack and we can change it by about two stars on our five star scale. We can also change what people associate with the brand, the message they take out how they feel about the brands, how much they remember as well. So it's incredibly powerful.”

Fourth is characters – they need to be relatable.

Fifth is what System1 calls ‘fluency’: basically making it easy for audiences to associate the ad with the brand – which is why brands spend a lot of money on characters and characteristics to create mental shortcuts. Evans cites Specsavers as owning the screw-up that comes with not being able to see properly as one example, or Salesforce’s Astro character as nailing what System1’s Orlando Wood calls the ‘fluent device’.

Brands nailing it

Tourism Australia is another brand nailing fluency – and pretty much everything else in the System1 toolkit. Mark Ritson has raved about the effectiveness of both TA’s Say G’day big ad campaign – and its CMO – and likewise Evans.

“I’m a massive Susan Coghill fan. She is a student of the data, the science and has an appetite to understand why things work.”

Evans was both amused and bemused that Australia’s advertising cognoscenti gave it something of a mixed reaction.

“But that is the first lesson in marketing: understand that you are not the customer.”

System1 tested Say G’Day across 15 markets, “and in the vast majority it scored five stars, which would put it in the top one per cent of our database of all campaigns globally – and in the UK, it was in the top 10 ads of last year on our database. She delivers on every one of those [five] features of advertising that make it work.”

Another big advertiser nailing effectiveness is Amazon – the “joint number one ad on System1’s database last year,” per Evans. “There’s a slight irony given that a few years ago Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying that advertising is the tax you pay for an inferior product. Now Amazon is the world’s largest advertiser, but also one of the world’s best advertisers. They’ve not only embraced the medium of advertising, they have also nailed the message in a way that very few on the planet have done.”

Australian expat Jo Shoesmith, one-time Clems Melbourne Art Director turned Amazon’s Global Chief Creative Officer, has been a big part of that turnaround – and just happens to be Evans’ latest Uncensored CMO podcast interview. Get her download on building brands, creating distinctive assets, writing a good brief and moving at scale – here.

Otherwise, catch Jon Evans keynoting the Future of TV Advertising 6 March in Sydney.