Marketers today face a dilemma. They’re caught between two apparently conflicting demands: what the evidence says their brands need to thrive versus what platforms such as Meta, Google and TikTok tell them they need. Consistency and repetition or a continual stream of fresh content.
We now have a tonne of evidence for how effective brand-building communication works, which is essentially via the frequent repetition of consistently distinctive creative. But in apparent opposition to that, the platforms demand brands make a vast quantity of fresh, varied content to keep their audiences glued to their screens.
The backdrop to all this is the media fragmentation that’s been happening for decades. WARC lists hundreds of articles on it. Magic Numbers founder Grace Kite recently moved the topic on when she wrote about the future of brand building consisting of “lots of littles”, and about the importance of collecting up and co-ordinating them to create valuable synergies: “Data shows effectiveness builds as more channels and touchpoints are layered in but brands and their agencies need to ensure everything is served up in a co-ordinated way.”
The media multiplier effect is a long-established principle and this is a great modern take on it. But you can only benefit from the full potential of this effect if everything’s working collectively, which doesn’t just mean having a well-orchestrated media plan, it’s about what you fill it with too.
You need to be conscious of the limited, more fleeting attention many of these channels and ad formats usually get (as Karen Nelson-Field’s work warns), which could limit their ability to create or refresh the longer-lasting brand memories that can influence future sales. Attention measurement company Lumen recently introduced the concept of ‘aggregated attention’, which means thinking about the total amount of attention your campaigns are achieving.
And using a larger number of channels, platforms and formats gives you a problem when it comes to the creative you need, given that the standard view on advertising effectiveness is that ideally you’d make a small number of big things and run them repeatedly for a long time.
System1’s latest analysis provides even more evidence for the value of creative consistency, and will become a go-to resource for anyone trying to persuade a client or agency to stick not twist.
Need for more content
But in stark contrast to this, many of the practical, real-world forces on the ground are pushing brands into making thousands or even millions of potentially inconsistent pieces of creative content, across and within all the platforms they’re using. The platforms tell brands, agencies and creators that their content ‘fatigues’ very quickly, often in a matter of days, and that you need to keep producing more and more of it to feed their algorithms’ and audiences’ desire for fresh new stuff.
This may explain why there’s a never-ending debate in marketing today that goes round and round and doesn’t seem to make any sense: effectiveness people saying advertising wear-out doesn’t exist, the platforms saying ad fatigue is endemic.
So what we have now is not just a media fragmentation problem, but also a creative fragmentation problem. But search for that on WARC and you currently get zero results.
A common solution to this is for brands to create a small number of hero assets and some cut-downs to run in digital and social channels. It’s a pragmatic compromise but it means actively choosing to make things that won’t work as well on an individual basis as they would if they were made from scratch from a platform-first perspective.
Whenever I hear the phrase ‘cut-downs for social’ now, I have to bite my tongue as it means creating things that probably won’t do the job they’re being asked to do as well as more bespoke creative. They probably won’t get you anything more than a fleeting bit of attention to top up brand salience, which may be fine if that’s your objective, although it usually isn’t. And creating a small handful of cut-downs often won’t even provide the volume of assets the platforms say are needed to avoid ad fatigue in any case.
From https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-building-adapt-creative-fragmentation/