How the building blocks of a creative effectiveness culture directly impact performance

New research from the ANA and WARC demonstrates that brands in possession of just one of the six building blocks essential to developing a culture of creative effectiveness outperform those with none – and the more building blocks in place, the better the performance.

Why a culture of creative effectiveness matters

Effectiveness is a team sport that extends beyond the marketing department. Last year’s festival saw the release of the first Culture of Creative Effectiveness report, which identified the barriers to effectiveness as a cultural problem. “What we found very early in our research was the problem really was a cultural issue,” explained Adi Kishore, insight director at WARC, introducing the latest research on the Creative Impact track at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Building blocks of creative effectiveness

The original research recommended an Align, Build, Embed (ABE) framework to support the development of cultures of effectiveness across brands. This breaks down into six blocks: vision and alignment; metrics and evidence; creative effectiveness systems and processes; establishing a common language; partner inclusion; and global diffusion.

The new research examines the aggregate effect of those building blocks in driving creative effectiveness by surveying hundreds of marketers. Each was asked questions around the building blocks they had established in their organisations against their effectiveness, as measured by certain criteria.

The positive criteria:

• The CEO publicly supports marketing’s role
• Marketing can justify creative investment even in downturns
• The C-Suite understands marketing KPIs
• The global marketing team is committed to creativity

The negative criteria:

• No creative agenda
• No means to measure creative quality
• Metrics don’t properly capture business impact of creative investment
• Creative measures are not trusted outside marketing.

The findings

• Having one of those building blocks made you perform better than if you didn’t, and that was across every single one of these criteria, explained Kishore.
• That begs the question “If having one helps, what if you have multiple blocks? And what we found was that, again, those with three plus building blocks outperformed those with less than three building blocks across every single one of the criteria we used.” (And going to three blocks is an important step in the framework, of course, as it means that the company has moved past the ‘Align’ stage of the creative effectiveness framework.
• Even on the negative criteria, having even just one building block – say, establishing a common language – saw a company yield better performance than those with none.

Bottom line

“The key thing is: the framework works,” said Latha Sarathy, chief research officer, Association of National Advertisers, speaking onstage.