Your Team Are Out of Ideas. Bring Back Advertising Creativity in the Time of Data

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” - David Ogilvy

Advertising is increasingly homogenous. Every brand wants to appear to be diverse and inclusive, sustainable and accessible, cool and popular yet authentic and personalised. Most recent ad campaigns are stamped all over with bland groupthink, leaving the fundamental principles of advertising ignored at brands’ peril.

The best CMOs are striving to put the ‘market’ back into ‘marketing’: appealing to the company’s target market, directly adding value to their lives and helping them solve their problems/achieve their goals. Sell to your consumer base, and don’t worry about anyone else - it’s that simple. So why are marketing teams - who should be the beating heart of every company’s creativity and innovation - blending in with the crowd instead of prioritising the customer?

Why are Marketing Teams Struggling With Advertising Creativity?

The plethora of pressures and expectations on teams responsible for creativity are attacking from multiple sources:

• Budget and Resources - Gartner reports that only 1 in 4 CMOs have sufficient budget to execute their 2024 strategy. Global financial difficulties and industry response to economic headwinds have set caution as the default for anxious CFOs and C-Suite leaders. The average marketing budget dropped from 9.1% of company revenue in 2023 to 7.7% of company revenue in 2024, a fall of 15% year-on-year.

• Fear of Brand Damage - More than 2 in 5 UK marketers ‘fear becoming the next victim of global cancel culture’. Chartered Institute of Marketing CEO Chris Daly warns: ‘Consumers are becoming more vocal in calling out companies when they put a foot wrong, making sure they’re held accountable for their actions. Yet this behavior shouldn’t mean marketers shy away from being ambitious, scaling up campaigns and chasing global opportunities.’

• Technology Overwhelm - With the average martech stack containing over 90 different tools, it’s no wonder that Gartner reports marketers utilise just over 40% of the breadth of their martech capabilities overall. From business CRM, CMS and web analytics to email automation, ecommerce, customer apps and portals, marketers are not only tasked with battling data silos across their organisation but also integrating scores of data sources to actually make sense of it.

• Lack of Upskilling - Whereas many believe creativity can’t be taught, the vital skills marketers need to generate ideas, experiment and improve creative campaigns can be. Critical thinking, problem-solving, analysing data and collaborative brainstorming are the cornerstones of innovation. But with upskilling opportunities not even offered to half of all marketers, tight budgets and short-term pressures are preventing CMOs from empowering teams to their full potential. 

• Customer Expectations - Marketers are grappling to balance ever-growing demand for personalisation with heightened suspicion of personal data usage and online privacy concerns. With 32% of customers reporting that they will leave a brand altogether after only one negative experience, insights and content teams alike are trying to establish the ‘right’ amount of data-led advertising that makes customers feel understood and served as individuals, without coming across as ‘creepy’, invasive or pushing sales at the expense of experience.

• Short-Term Focus - Most day-to-day marketing completely disregards Binet and Field’s ‘The Long and Short of It’, to its own detriment. Current obsessions with short-term ‘lead’ generation and sales activation are understandable given the C-Suite pressures to deliver fast results. However, short-term KPIs cause long-term business revenue to suffer: most teams are failing to allocate sufficient spend at the top of the funnel to deliver truly interesting and eye-catching awareness content and comms. Blind focus on BOFU advertising at the expense of brand building leaves no room for marketers to experiment and learn from wider, riskier and more unique approaches. 

Data strategies (or lack thereof) are also responsible for the death of creative advertising:

• Insufficient Data Usage - Media planners rank understanding their audience’s most visited platforms, and analysing content effectiveness on these platforms, as their greatest current challenge. So why do 87% of marketers report that data is their organisation’s most under-utilised asset? The abundance of information sources and operation of data silos are partly to blame for the failure to fully leverage analysis capabilities.

• Misinterpreting Data - Lack of time, resource and budget minimise opportunities to investigate new insights and encourage teams to fall back on long-held (and often inaccurate) assumptions. If existing data is biased, incomplete, or irrelevant, any campaign informed by this data will also follow suit. Many ‘insights’ don’t add real value for the consumer because they don’t ask the right questions in the first place. Simply surveying customers on how they act and what they think they want (which is often vastly different to how they actually act and what they actually do want) can skew research findings and send marketers off in entirely the wrong direction.

• Over Reliance on Gathering & Analysing Data - Focus on quantifying and measuring information and activities is seeing Effectiveness Leads and their teams live almost entirely inside their tech stacks. 67% of marketers report ‘prioritising technology over creativity’, with the majority stating that their organisation encourages martech use to focus on frequent volume of campaign execution. Marketers are not regularly stepping outside of day-to-day granular analytics to pursue greater customer knowledge and direct connection, and then use these customer engagement insights to better inform strategy and experimentation. 

• Security & Privacy - Particularly concerning CPG marketers working for large global brands in varied international marketplaces, compliance with data regulations is already complex and time-consuming, without the tightening of third-party data restrictions. Consumers are increasingly wary of how they share their data and more individuals are opting to browse privately, alter their default app and browser tracking settings, and directly challenge retailers on the gathering and use of data - even when it directly benefits their buying experience. Advertising creativity is drowning under the weight of internal and external stakeholder requirements, with diminishing freedom to explore new ways to connect with consumers, and increased legal and financial penalties for brand mis-steps.

• Customer Journey Tracking - Data fragmentation across organic, paid and owned channels, and digital vs TV/OOH sources means the purchase funnel is harder to fathom than ever before. All CMOs realise this; but marketing attribution models are lulling teams into a false sense of understanding, with last-touch attribution in particular generating wildly inaccurate insights. Google reports that today’s consumer journey can span between 20 and 500 touchpoints, depending on purchase complexity. 

Want to visualise your real customer journey? Single-Source data tracks every individual customer, across offline and online channels, to reveal the true impact and ROI of your advertising campaigns. Uncover which advertising is actually converting - and why. 

The average individual can see hundreds of advertising campaigns every day, but recalls close to zero. Data and creativity are intrinsically intertwined in advertising success - but they must both be leveraged better, separately and together.

Data isn’t the end goal for marketing teams - it’s the fuel that should power creative campaign ideas and implementation, resulting in brand growth and customer acquisition. Data must serve as a starting point for the creative messaging and storytelling that will emotionally engage and differentiate brands, especially through advertising.

Don’t Despair: 10 Pieces of Advice from Leading Creatives

1. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” – Steve Jobs

2. “An ad should be like one end of an interesting conversation.” - Howard Luck Gossage

3. “Brands should think of themselves not as storytellers but story builders. We plant seeds of content and let our community build on it.” – Amy Pascal

4. “A company in which anyone is afraid to speak up, to differ, to be daring and original, is closing the coffin door on itself.” - Leo Burnett 

5. “Creativity is absolutely part of the success formula for effective advertising. But one in which it is measured properly, against and with the other factors of influence, which are generally seen as equally important.” - Mark Ritson

6. “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.” - David Ogilvy

7. “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis

8. “Because advertising and marketing is an art, the solution to each new problem or challenge should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not with the nervous borrowings of other people’s mediocrities. That’s precisely what ‘trends’ are – a search for something ‘safe’ – and why a reliance on them leads to oblivion.” – George Lois

9. “Liberate your creativity by recognising that most people's truth is just an opinion, don't wall yourself in and let curiosity guide you.” - Keith Weed

10. “Campaigns that consciously aim to make the brand and its marketing famous are much, much better at reducing price sensitivity and supporting premium prices than any other kind of marketing. Highly creative advertising is much better at getting an emotional response and is much more likely to generate fame.” - Les Binet

How Your Advertising Teams Can Become Both Creative AND Data-Driven for Maximum Marketing ROI

1. Learn From The Best

Branding fails and advertising mis-steps occur so regularly that FMCG marketers have a wealth of negative examples to learn from, but the reverse is also true. The most innovative of CPG advertisers are looking beyond the traditional playbooks to seek out their own first-party data and combine it with market insights to test out innovative ideas that are more likely to resonate with customers.

E.l.f. Skin’s 2024 ‘Divine Skintervention’ campaign married data with creativity by harnessing consumer insights to lead its boldest advertising yet. The beauty brand utilised survey insights to understand that whilst its target audience of Generation Z shoppers uses more skincare products than any other age demographic, these consumers also report ‘skin sins’ such as sleeping in make-up, using too much hot water or too many products, and over-exfoliating causing irritation. 

The beauty category leader created an original character in the form of the ‘Sinfluencer’, Hacks actor and comedian Megan Stalter, who encourages consumers to commit skincare ‘sins’. E.l.f. Skin combined humour and a unique narrative to target consumers across social media, OOH and streaming platforms including Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Netflix. In addition to harnessing new and meaningful data insights, advertising effectiveness was also driven by the humorous ads’ consistency with E.l.f’s positioning as an entertainment brand, distributing comms across the channels most popular with and most likely to engage its target audience, and interactive content underpinning the campaign that generates personalised product recommendations according to consumer behaviour data.

Data-driven creativity has paid off in abundance for E.l.f., with advertising ROI through the roof: one of its numerous 2024 campaigns generated $1 billion organic media impressions alone. The beauty brand increased marketing spending from 7% to 25% of net sales in fiscal year 2024, and has since reported 50% net sales growth in Q1 2025. 

2. Build a Culture of Bravery that Leads Real Innovation

David Ogilvy himself operated with the ethos of bravery as the foundation of creativity. Ogilvy advises, ‘Fear is a demon that devours the soul of an agency: it diminishes the quality of our imagination, it dulls our appetite for adventure, it sucks away our youth.’

The current challenges facing advertising teams are particularly discouraging for younger and more junior advertising effectiveness team members, who are more worried about and less incentivised to share their creative ideas. Creativity requires honesty, confidence and courage, which can only be demonstrated inside a culture where these attributes are genuinely valued. CMOs must lead by example to foster the right environment for their teams to flourish.

CMO bravery means first standing up for their strategies and their teams in the face of C-Suite opposition. More than a quarter of all marketing analytics teams report that decision-makers do not even look at the information that they provide, and 24% report that decision-makers outright reject informed recommendations or rely on gut instincts to make decisions. CMOs’ own fraught relationships with CFOs and other Board members also stand to be dramatically improved by better C-suite understanding of marketing insights.

CMOs know the importance of creative experimentation without commitment to tangible results, but the Finance Chiefs holding the purse strings are too focused on guaranteed revenue return to enthuse about long-term testing and learning. CFO misunderstanding of marketing value can be proactively addressed by putting ROI at the core of conversation. CMOs can champion their analytics’ teams recommendations by anticipating their Board’s objections to advertising investment and counteracting them effectively to create room for discussion on marketing value.

Marketing leaders can build greater trust with their C-Suite by involving them in advertising budget and reporting from the very beginning, working directly with different departments to access and harness data, and holding themselves accountable for Board reporting on test and learn campaigns and the return delivered.

Don’t think you can get more advertising budget? Here’s how other Chief Marketing Officers are ramping up CPG marketing spend - and delivering and demonstrating their advertising ROI.

3. Kill Products, Activities & Channels to Keep Customers

Legendary brand strategist to world-leading FMCG brands Mark Ritson advises, ‘The focus is always on launching, on scaling up and growth hacking. We should match that with more focus on killing. More marketers should think about death.

‘We represent the market; the reality that happens once the fever dream of innovation ends. Customers change. Competitors innovate. Cost structures alter. Marketers can and should be able to use the marketing process to test a product with the target customer it is meant to delight and against the competitors that it is meant to smash.’

Killing products that won’t appeal or solve problems, killing activities that don’t add value, and killing channels where target audiences don’t exist or engage help to refocus on what really matters: the customer. The best marketers are able to make space in their minds, budgets and working days for creativity by cutting back on anything that doesn’t serve the customer. Instead of mindlessly acquiring more data, more tools and more tasks, marketing teams can pare everything back to the basics to better use existing data, gather data of genuine value, and leverage unique insights that drive original campaign messaging and narratives.

Ask yourselves and your team: what are you assuming from your data, but not really challenging? Are you gathering data from the most direct or accurate sources? Are your suppliers and partners provisioning the best insights, or could you better serve your customers by speaking with them yourselves?

Be creative in your own acquisition and usage of data to drive creativity through this data. Rather than relying solely on the walled gardens of social media channels and retail media networks, build and optimise quantitative and qualitative first-party data sources in more inventive ways. Harness conversational data from tracked sales team calls and CRM notes, pay attention to external social monitoring and speak in person with customers and target audiences at events, through distribution channels and across networks. Truly involve your consumer groups in improving their content, products and experiences, to leverage unprecedented insights that tell their own creative stories.

4. Work with the Best Creative Data Partners

In a time where partnerships are crucial to gathering the right data and deriving the right insights that empower creativity, over 70% of senior marketers are struggling to find agency partners that truly deliver on their expectations. ViewersLogic is different - we’ll provide the data and insights that you’ve never been able to access before:

• Real Consumer Behaviour Understanding - Track every customer touchpoint and intent signal across channels, with the only media measurement tool to use Single-Source data, to see which content and comms are really converting and which aren’t

• True Share of Voice - Break down walled gardens to accurately track your SOV across any social channel. See the difference in SOV across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn and get SOV data on your competition

• Customer Conversion - Realise the long-term impact of advertising on customer acquisition. Enhance campaigns in-flight to increase purchases immediately and long-term

• Advertising ROI - Uncover insights from a unique data set to prove and improve how advertising campaigns are directly influencing sales, increasing success and gaining more budget to innovate further.

  
  

Mars, Ryvita and Etsy are improving campaign effectiveness and ROI with Single-Source data - find out how your marketing team can access new consumer insights. 

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