In a typical situation, the marketing leader addresses a board meeting, where he is trying to defend the company's creative media expenditures, whereas the finance team demands that these marketing expenditures yield immediate financial returns.
This blueprint provides you with precise campaign structure and established metrics so that you can prove and demonstrate how well-designed creative media has the potential to drive closed-won deals.
The Reality of Creative Media Metrics
To see the actual results of marketing creative media campaigns, one must look at real-time data and brand advertising examples, which show that most marketing lists provide examples of successful video advertisements, but little or no guidance on the metrics to verify their success.
As you present to the CFO about the merits of the various media and the value of creating a culture of creativity, you will continue to encounter individuals who take a superficial view of your work. Instead of viewing creative media as part of your marketing portfolio, most people simply view it as an extension of their brand.
Therefore, while awards are wonderful and help to generate visibility, they will not pay your bills. Instead, the real-time metrics surrounding currently functioning marketing campaign examples link specific brand assets to specific behavioral changes and measurable shifts in customer behaviors. When trying to enhance future campaign performance, it is critical that you evaluate very carefully how the specific marketing channels used and how emotion-evoking mechanisms were employed to produce business success.
Why Is Creative Branding Important?
These brand advertising examples generate pipeline results. A good business marketing campaign does not have to be complicated, nor does it have to result in creating a boring white paper. In the examples below, we will show you how to effectively perform branded bursts into specific market segments that work.
1. Goldcast: LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads
If you look at your buyer persona, you will see that buyers disregard large corporate pages and instead place trust in small, individual human beings. This is what Goldcast identified. They found four real live users who used Goldcast and posted on their own behalf, describing their experience with the product.
The marketing team subsequently took these organic posts and used them to create LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads. The result was that Goldcast reached a highly targeted list of specific named accounts, while still providing an authentic voice to the original authors of the posts.
The numbers speak for themselves. With an investment of $8,000, the company created a pipeline of $700,000 and closed $400,000 in revenue.
2. The Surround Sound Strategy From Vector
When you place an advertisement on one platform, it doesn't have a sufficient memory structure to create desired impressions.
Vector targeted the same audience across connected television (i.e., CTV), YouTube, and LinkedIn with a highly coordinated effort in how they presented their creative message to that audience. With the ability to reach that audience through their living room on a CTV and through their professional feeds on LinkedIn simultaneously, they increased the perception of how vast their reach was to those specific buyers.
By increasing the number of impressions and frequency to those buyers, they experienced a significant increase of 41% in their pipeline month-over-month, a 22% increase in requests for demos, and a 34% increase in net new website visitors.
3. Gong: Super Bowl Commercials in Specific Regions
Unless you're running a nationwide ad for your business system, it is not worth your time to buy a Super Bowl ad. However, with Gong, they wanted the fame and recognition that comes with the Super Bowl without the unnecessary expense.
They only purchased television commercials during the game in three regional markets: Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City. Gong had pinpointed the exact location of all their buyers. This strategy gave Gong the immediate credibility that comes with regional recognition.
Their sales representatives had reported more than 400 direct references of their ad during sales calls in the first week after the game, which led to a record number of inbound inquiries.
4. Ramp's Glass Box Stunt
Explainer videos are boring to watch. The absurd visual representation that Ramp put together was a great way to leverage their brand. Ramp hired an actor, placed him in a glass box, and had him manually input via handwriting corporate expenses.
In the box beside him, there was a digital screen that tracked how quickly Ramp's software was automating that exact same business process. They transformed tedious, laborious office activities into a lively performance.
This stunt reached over 112 million views on various social networks.
5. Snowflake: AI-Generated Ad Copy
Snowflake created AI-based ad copy from its AI processor, which normally is used for speed improvements on content. The writing from AI is usually of poor quality.
Snowflake's Cortex AI was adjusted by incorporating their corporate guidelines and audience data, and this was used to produce variations for account-based marketing. The process utilized strict operating guidelines for the AI, and all generated copy was evaluated against human-generated copy.
Utilizing the targeted AI copy produced a 54% increased click-through rate.
6. Adobe: Demand Generation Based on LinkedIn
Searching for a particular brand in response to a need and raising awareness of that brand are part of the same action.
Adobe implemented a multi-channel LinkedIn program for their Experience Cloud product. They made the effort to build a unique and identifiable creative identity for their LinkedIn page and promoted that page through a consistent presence during a 90-day period. They recognized that as brand favorability increases, so does the likelihood to purchase.
The results of the campaign were 25 million impressions and a 2.7 times uplift in engagement. More significantly, the campaign created a growth of 14% in brand favorability, a staggering 180% increase in searches year over year, and a 33% increase in sales inquiries.
7. SAP: The "Inspire the Future" Podcast Series
Long-form content created by subject matter experts is invaluable when positioned in tandem with the sales process.
SAP developed an industry-specific podcast series to market itself through social media and video clips. The team working on the podcast did not view this project as an ancillary initiative. They approached it as a media property of high importance to reach the specific conversations from potential customers that they want to be included in.
This programme generated a 48% higher level of user engagement compared to their regular social media campaigns. In addition, there were more than 22,000 users who listened, which allowed them to generate a pipeline of over EUR 924.4 million with a ROI of EUR 266.15 million.
New Campaigns Solving Annoyances for Consumers
The current trend is avoiding the polished video approach, but smart companies are currently creating physical products to address small pain points.
1. Corona: Laser-Etched Limes
A huge brand asset for Corona is placing a lime into a Corona beer.
However, bartenders often cut limes poorly or use another citrus fruit. To solve this problem, Corona implemented a process that laser-etched their actual logo directly onto the skin of the lime. This has effectively turned what was once a bar garnish into an unscrollable, out-of-home advertising medium.
This has not required any additional advertising expense for the bars but rather has used the current product experience to create enormous visibility.
2. Heinz: KegChup
Many restaurants refill their Heinz ketchup bottles with less expensive versions or generic brands when they run out of a bottle to cut down costs.
This has negatively impacted brand perception and put a damper on customers' enjoyment. To resolve this problem, Heinz created a large ketchup keg system for restaurants to use. This resolved a major operational issue for back-of-house staff and provided restaurant owners with the ability to prominently promote the correct brand name.
By capitalising on consumers' current frustrations, Heinz was able to provide an effective campaign that their customers wanted to share.
Award-Winning Creative Activations Supported by Strong Numbers
Most award programmes provide business results of the programmes, while the examples below show how deep creativity can drive a business.
1. Specsavers: The Misheard Song
Specsavers created a very simple yet very effective marketing campaign.
Specsavers took one of Rick Astley's 80's songs and recorded a new version of it but changed all the lyrics. They played this on the radio as if it was Rick Astley's song (without telling anyone) and the people who heard it thought they were going nuts!
When people who were confused about the song looked for it, Specsavers would send them a message telling them to check their ears because they were hearing the song incorrectly! Specsavers had a 1,220% increase in appointments to book hearing tests over their target and achieved a 66% increase in the number of hearing test appointments in the week they launched their campaign.
2. Pop-Tarts: The Edible Mascot
A very noisy, chaotic environment and many sponsoring companies mean college sports events have many decisions to make. Pop-Tarts decided to create an edible mascot.
After the game was over, the huge mascot was lowered into a giant toaster and the winning team received the Pop-Tarts mascot as a snack to eat. It was funny and strange and specifically designed for Facebook and Twitter. They created an event, not just a video, and it was a great success.
The event created over 4 billion impressions for Pop-Tarts and generated a total of 21 million sales of Pop-Tarts in just over 8 weeks.
3. Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die
Most safety videos you see are bland and most people ignore them.
Metro Trains needed to get people to change their behaviour, not just make them watch a good video. They made a very catchy song using dark humour to highlight the many stupid ways that people can die and the final line was the message to "stay safe" around trains. They paired the song with mobile games and created strong character assets.
It achieved over 127 million safety pledges in addition to a decrease of rail incidents of 10-20% following its initial launch.
4. Wisła Kraków: Lucky Fan Index
The way sports franchises treat their fans (merchandise and ticket sales) should be similar to how they treat fans as corporate clients in terms of lifetime value.
The team has implemented technologies to enable them to measure fan engagement and link it directly to commerce-related rewards. This has transcended beyond a marketing effort intended solely to make recipients feel good. The architecture of how fans interact with a franchise is a complete channel that bridges pure emotion with the ability to create both direct and repeat purchase.
This was the basis for winning the Cannes Creative Commerce Grand Prix, as evidenced by the data demonstrating a viable financial model.
5. Squarespace: Super Bowl Setup
Website-building software is very hard to excite a general audience. Squarespace enlisted the services of leading film directors and well-known actors to develop quirky and fabulously beautiful narratives that keep the product at the heart of the story. If the website software is extracted from the story, the humour gets lost entirely.
This will be the ultimate test of narrative integration - can you convince the audience to remember your product, rather than simply the famous actors?
The Four Effectiveness Patterns of Modern Campaigns
There are four repeatable patterns that top sources have identified as being common behind an effective media spend. Use these as a scoring checklist for your team's project.
Distinctive Assets
You have to be able to be identified independently of your brand name. You will always associate any given logo, shape, character, or sonic audio mark with that particular franchise. Customers should be able to identify who produced the advertisement based on the logos, even if they were hidden by the consumer.
Creating an Emotional Connection in the First 2 Seconds
To stop the viewer from scrolling past the ad, it is important to establish an emotional connection with the viewer quickly.
You literally only have two seconds or less to establish an emotional response to the ad (Awe or Tension or Humor or Relief). Kantar's research shows that brands that evoke strong emotional responses are 4 times more likely to establish long-term brand equity than brands that do not evoke strong emotions.
Rule-of-3 Mental Processing
Utilizing three points of reference helps ease the cognitive burden on the brain.
For example, "Automate. Optimize. Scale." or the classical narrative structure of "Before, Struggle, & After." Both formats are easier for the brain to encode and retell. Structures based on three points of reference make the central concepts easier to share.
Brand Integration Into the Story Structure
The central storyline problem must have a solution or resolution that is tied to the product.
Research performed over the past decade on the branding of branded video content has proven that there is a high correlation between brand integration within the content and successful outcomes for the brand. If the brand were removed from the video, and the storyline still made sense, the level of brand integration is very low. The product should be positioned to be the hero or solution of the central storyline issue.
The Roots of Differentiation and Memory
If the marketing strategy is limited to only color and tagline, that brand is using the most ineffective levers in marketing.
A Cross-Industry Baseline for Association
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is the best source of tangible data to measure brand memorability.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has provided aggregate data on dozens of producers and products, through analysis of hundreds of assets across multi-categories of brands; the average level of fame of distinctive assets is approximately 26%. This indicates that 25% of consumers associate a specific asset with that brand; and with the level of uniqueness of all assets, it is at approximately 54%.
The Distinctiveness of Software Brands
Most software companies appear and sound the same.
In an audit of 100 B2B software brands, only 1% were found to be truly "owning" the distinctiveness of their brand. 78% of brands had completely generic sound and music. None had a recognizable sonic asset.
The highest scoring companies such as Wiz and Mutiny have invested heavily in using recurring cartoon characters, mascots, and a strict set of visual devices, instead of just a good font.
Measurement: KPI Chain for Creative Spend
Most strategy pages will tell you that "the video went viral" and leave it at that. You will want an actual verified measurement chain so that your creative marketing department can prove itself to operate like an operator.
Awareness and Consideration
Start taking measurements by measuring the mental availability of the branded search volume, year on year, quarter on quarter, as well as measuring the share of voice of your brand on social media and news coverage. A successful campaign will result in more people actively typing your company's name into a search engine.
You can measure how engaged people are with their brand, and how much they care, by measuring favorability of the brand, and comparing engagement with your content compared to others in your category. When a buyer receives a high preference rating, they are much more likely to take the call of that vendor over a competitor's.
Behavior and Pipeline
This part of the process represents the change in brand recognition to conversion.
Measuring the increase in demo requests, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) will help you identify how effective of a job your brand did at generating pipeline influence through your marketing campaign. A strong brand presence in the B2B environment will increase the speed at which you close sales, as well as your win ratio, due to already having established trust.
Business Outcomes
Ultimately, you must prove revenue.
Track the closed-won revenue generated from users who engaged in campaigns. Determine the impact of each individual category. For example, if a safety campaign results in a 20% reduction in rail incidents or a LinkedIn campaign generates $400,000 in sales, those creative assets have produced a return on investment (ROI) that has fully paid for itself.
When Clever Creative Goes Bad
This is where the majority of traditional marketing fails. Successes are too often duplicated from a "famous" campaign without a true understanding of the client's own limitations.
Debranding Without Fame
Minimalism only works if you are already famous.
Fortune 500 companies have the ability to take their logos and colour schemes off of advertisements, because the actual shapes are imprinted in the minds of consumers across the globe. If a lesser-known company attempts to do the same to appear "cool", they simply become unrecognizable.
Sound Without a Distribution Plan
The power of audio marks is great; the key is the amount of times they are introduced.
Spending money on developing a custom audio mark is meaningless if the only place it will be played is at the beginning of one webinar once a month. You need to expose your sonic assets frequently and through multiple channels to build value and equity in them.
Stunts Without a Social Engine
An event in the physical world has ZERO value unless it is recorded and shared.
If you create a huge installation or a huge event, there has to be a way for your attendees to benefit from filming it. If the event you created was not easily shareable via a smartphone and did not translate well into mobile video, then your stunt was not viral, and therefore, it did not exist.
The Celebrity Shadow
Famous people can destroy your messaging around a purchase.
If someone watches your high-end commercial and afterwards, they can say, "I remember that actor," but they cannot remember the actual problem you are solving with your company or product, the celebrity failed to integrate with your product. When reviewing successful brand advertising examples, the celebrity must serve the role of the character within the advertisement, as opposed to being a distraction from it.
Final Call on Creative Strategy
Brand marketing does not operate as a separate department from sales and has failed to demonstrate that in the past.
The best campaigns take a "crazy idea" that evokes a very emotional response and connect those ideas with a specific business goal. They use distinct brand assets so that you can clearly identify the originator of the message within the first few seconds of hearing it. They create tools for sharing socially and incorporate hard measurement from the very beginning.
Ensure that your next campaign has some connection to a change in behaviour or some clear measurement of the associated metric(s) such as branded search return. If not, return to the drawing board. Stop buying attention if you do not have an established system in place to transform that attention into revenue.