By Carl Sarney, head of strategy, TRA As a brand and comms strategist, I must be equal parts optimist and pessimist. When a tough brief lands on my desk, a bucketload of optimism is required to motivate all my collaborators to find an effective solution. A healthy dose of pessimism challenges everyone to sharpen that solution until we feel confident it will be as effective as possible.
The same double lens applies when I look at industry trends. Keeping an eye on Cannes Lions winners this year had me feeling optimistic that creative agencies can still create showmanship that sells. However, I remain pessimistic about the volume of creatively awarded ‘campaigns’ that seem to have been designed as a one-off flash in the pan rather than adding coals to a furnace built to power a brand ahead for the long-term.
It got me thinking about the tension between the perceived creative freedom of singular one-off storytelling, and the proven effectiveness of committing to a lasting creative idea over the long-term. This further made me think about Creative Commitment , a term coined by Peter Field and James Hurman in their report titled The Effectiveness Code , published a few years ago. With that in mind, let’s review the combination of the creativity and duration levers through the lens of Cannes 2024 winners.
The advertising industry, particularly creative departments, is incentivised to produce fresh executions for the best chance of winning lots of creative awards. Marketing sc.
