Advertising is bouncing back with creative effectiveness set to outperform pre-pandemic levels, according to the recent State of Creative Effectiveness report.
Conducted by the market research platform Zappi – which looked at more than 2,300 ads and spoke to almost one million US consumers – the study examined advertising effectiveness throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
It found that empathy drove effectiveness in the ‘pandemic-era’, which led to ads with an emotional appeal scoring 17.5% better than pre-pandemic adverts. This led to a 32% boost to purchase uplift.
In addition, creative effectiveness is set to out-perform pre-pandemic averages as brand appeal has improved by 8% since 2022. Emotional intensity and purchase uplift have both also increased, by 7% and 5% respectively.
Other findings noted that inflation-era advertising was less effective with consumers, as July 2021 saw creative effectiveness decline by 2%. Purchase uplift also dropped by 7%, while emotional intensity fell by 4.5%.
Subscribe to Marketing Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest agency-related news sent straight to your inbox each morning
“As Cannes kicks off – one of the year’s most important gatherings of the creative community – we wanted to put the industry under the microscope to find out if advertising is getting any better,” said Zappi CEO Steve Philips.
While the data shows creative effectiveness is trending upward in 2023, Philips points out this positive momentum is merely offsetting the dip seen in 2022.
“Our data shows that while advertisers mobilized quickly to reach consumers with empathetic messages during the pandemic, they missed that same connection as inflation peaked,” he said.
“Effective advertising happens when advertisers understand their consumers and create work that connects the brand to their needs. Those don’t know their audience may just be wasting precious marketing budgets on ineffective advertising that misses the mark.”
