Living in an ad-heavy world can be exciting and exhausting in equal measure, with brands fighting to stimulate our imagination and evoke strong emotions and connections. But how can brands stand out without over-saturating their audience with just too much?
The answer is simple: creative advertising.
We’re going to walk you through why your creative agency must be, well, creative. Be it in London or elsewhere; innovation is the only way to get the right kind of attention from audiences looking for meaning, connections and a reason to hang around.
If you’re looking for the creative and what an advertising company can offer in London or elsewhere, keep reading.
What is Creative Advertising?
Every industry has its own language to define itself, and creative advertising is no different. Put simply, creative advertising is when a team of people puts together a campaign to tell a brand’s story.
Creative advertising incorporates the detail behind the end product: the ad. So it’s all the people who come up with the concept and bring that concept to life in different forms of advertising, including video, print, audio, etc. It’s not just a quick promo. Creative advertising is a broader reflection of what a brand stands for, its values, and how it allies with its target audience.
Take our visually stimulating ad work for Bloom. The aim? To attract women to Bloom Gin. It’s a category breaking gin made by women for women.
Why is Creative Advertising Important?
If brands want their ads to be creative, we suggest following these guiding principles:
Ads have to be Memorable and Meaningful
The statistics aren’t encouraging: only around 4% of advertising is remembered positively. This may in part be attributed to the high ad exposure many of us digital natives encounter daily.
While figures vary, this figure can be as high as 6,000-10,000 per person. Compare this to the 1970s when the estimates were around 500-1,600 per day.
The above stats bear out our argument. If you want to be remembered, your ads have to be too, and you only have a few seconds to grab your audience’s attention. In the case of millennials and Gen Z, that’s around 2.5 to 8 seconds max.
The ads that are liked, loved even and subsequently shared are those that are memorable because they’re creative and engaging because they are meaningful.
Create a Sense of Belonging
If you want your core audience to engage with your brand and its products, there’s no better way than creating an emotional sense of belonging or community. In addition, highly creative ads stand a much better chance of hitting the mark because they suggest the products they’re advertising are of high quality, aspirational and worthy of a consumer’s attention.
Brands that achieve success here are those whose creative ads demonstrate the brand’s sense of purpose, its values and promote positive values. Create brand love, and you have your audience’s attention.
Check out our Barbour Beacon retail creative ad campaign, a story of two friends from South Shields that combines community, belonging and independence.
Be Effective
If you want your creative ads to be effective, they have to give you a decent return on your investment. Otherwise, you’re just creating content that disappears into the digital ether.
Expect to see a 25-50% ROI or more. That’s a ballpark figure to work with as a marker that your creative ads are working. When your creative agency updates you, that’s the figure you need to see.
The Harvard Business Review got it right when it wrote that creative messages in ads receive more attention, leading to “positive attitudes about the products being marketed.” Moreover, that money invested in a clever ad campaign has almost twice the sales impact than a non-creative ad campaign.
Be Collaborative
Don’t make the mistake of leaving all the work to the so-called “creatives.” This entire process is a collaborative process that works towards making lovely, impactful ads that cut through the noise.
Are you interested in talking to a creative agency in London about advertising? Get in touch and say hello.
