There is a crisis in creative effectiveness in advertising that stems from financial pressures on brands. This has led marketers to pursue short-term sales activation over long-term brand building, activities often focused on easy-to-measure, direct response marketing. Far from being an unmeasurable dark art, creativity can and should be measured in terms of its impact on advertising effectiveness.

The message about creative effectiveness is now starting to get through to many of the world’s biggest advertisers. The tools and techniques developed by marketing econometricians are today sufficiently robust and fine-grained that marketers can build cause-and effect models of the impact of their brands’ distinctive assets.

Advertising’s decade-long experiment with excessive short-termism needs to come to an end if creativity is to play its role once more in driving long term advertising effectiveness. This is particularly important for brands looking to sustain and grow share of voice and share of market during the coronavirus pandemic and the inevitable recession that follows it.

Brands that develop and support distinctive brand assets build memory structures that last longer and decay slower."