Key Themes in great creativeDelivering Meaningful Difference
Predisposing more peoplefor brand growth
We’ve noted the essential importance of retaining viewers and gaining emotional connection in our previous sections. But delivering engaging content is not the end game – it gives us the opportunity to impact brand predisposition, so what we then say to our viewers matters.
Kantar’s Brandz data shows that those brands which can use their communications to amplify a message of meaningful difference grow faster and at the right price. A brand’s advertising builds mental connections with consumers – delivering Meaningful Difference alongside other factors such as customer experience or brand architecture. These connections, when strong and consistent, Predispose More People to buy the brand more often, in more places, and for a higher price.
Our 2024 winners illustrate a breadth of messaging that drives Meaningful Difference, resulting in very high predisposition for the brand in both the short and long-term
How can we make a brand Meaningful in our content? By creating impressions that boost brand affinity or by demonstrating that we can meet consumer needs with a relevant product or service. The latter embraces all consumer needs – the physical, emotional, functional, social and other ways that brands work in consumers’ lives.
Content which builds clear, consistent and strong connections to emotional needs succeeds in going beyond features and benefits to touch the soul and tap into underlying aspirations, desires and dreams.
Delta Air Lines' ‘Kaleidoscope’, is our #1 overall North American TV winner in 2024. It is a visual wonder – an immersive and deeply involving journey into the spectrum of color. The ad uses fast pace to great effect, as it illustrates the variety of locations Delta covers, but its real strength is in its ability to make a yearning for exciting travel and exotic locations an emotional imperative – we can’t help but want to get out there.
Meaningfulness can also be demonstrated through creative expression of functional needs, superior qualities, benefits and features that set the brand apart from others.
These qualities may be practical and pragmatic, but truly great creative can succeed by enhancing and enriching the practical through storytelling and engagement.
Safelite’s ‘Festival Bound’ delivers a familiar and consistent message about the brand’s offer. But while it undoubtedly communicates the realities of the process involved with windshield replacement, it does this in a new, highly creative, unique, fun and personal ‘social-media’ style that doesn’t feel pragmatic in any way.
Being different is about being unique in comparison to other brands in some way. Here difference is not a definition of simple product differentiation. Rather, it defines how successful brands create memories that separate the brand from others and set themselves apart.
Difference in communication can come from content which establishes distinctive memories, creative which delivers a highly original look and feel, which only the brand in question might be expected to deliver.
Coca-Cola’s ‘Masterpiece’, a global as well as North American winner, is a dramatic and unique creative journey. Not only is it impossible to take your eyes from the visualization of a variety of art canvasses, but the iconic Coke bottle also remains front and center throughout, leaving no doubt which brand this stunning content is advertising. Truly distinctive and original.
Difference can also be expressed through content which reveals category leadership, setting the trends, challenging the status quo, and expressing a confident point of view.
Dove Men's ‘Touch of Care :30’ ad takes a bold and head-on approach to the perceived challenges of what it takes to be a man. The ad confidently asserts that there is no ‘right’ answer, but that Dove Men is a connecting element, however that plays out.
And... we must not forget that whatever our message, branding intrinsically will always ensure truly effective creative is memorable in the most relevant way.
Branding is the best single predictor of in-market effects – ads that have higher branding see stronger sales effects. However we build for retaining attention, creating emotional engagement and delivering meaningfully different messages, we must always do so in support of the brand. This means we must brand intrinsically – we must integrate the brand into the most meaningful and memorable elements of our content, or we risk diluting the impact.
Our last example, Tic Tac’s ‘Tic Tac 15s (Strawberries & Cream)’ digital creative, is a light and enjoyable flight of animated fancy, at the center of which, from start to finish, the brand is both physically represented and referenced throughout.
Our Other TV Winners
The Tim Hortons ad from Canada, ‘Coffee & Retro Donuts’ makes no bones about connecting to shared communal memories. The ad highlights “a taste of nostalgia” through retro donut flavors but succeeds especially because it does so through real people and their reactions to the sensory experience.
Discarding expectations that B2B content needs to be straightforward and, well, a little dull, Amazon Business’ ‘Rome in a Day’ ad delights in using a historical metaphor to showcase its business solutions, with wit, style and creative grandeur.
