Retaining viewers and gaining emotional connection with viewers in advertising is important. But delivering engaging content is not the end game – it gives us the opportunity to impact brand predisposition, so what we then say to our viewers matters. Kantar's BrandZ data shows that those brands that can use their communications to amplify a message of meaningful difference grow faster and at the right price. A brand's advertising builds mental connections with consumers – delivering Meaningful Difference alongside other factors such as customer experience or brand architecture. These connections, when strong and consistent, predispose more people to buy the brand more often, in more places, and for a higher price.
Our 2024 North America Creative Effectiveness Awards winners illustrate a breadth of messaging that drives Meaningful Difference, resulting in very high predisposition for the brand in both the short and long term.
Making a brand meaningful in content
By creating impressions that boost brand affinity or by demonstrating that we can meet consumer needs with a relevant product or service. The latter embraces all consumer needs – the physical, emotional, functional, social, and other ways that brands work in consumers' lives.
Content that builds clear, consistent, and strong connections to emotional needs succeeds in going beyond features and benefits to touch the soul and tap into underlying aspirations, desires, and dreams.
Meaningfulness can also be demonstrated through creative expression of functional needs, superior qualities, benefits, and features that set the brand apart from others. These qualities may be practical and pragmatic, but truly great creative can succeed by enhancing and enriching the practical through storytelling and engagement.
The keys to creating brand difference
Being different is about being unique in comparison to other brands in some way. Here, difference is not a definition of simple product differentiation. Rather, it defines how successful brands create memories that separate the brand from others and set themselves apart.
Difference in communication can come from content that establishes distinctive memories, creative which delivers a highly original look and feel, which only the brand in question might be expected to deliver.
Difference can also be expressed through content that reveals category leadership, setting the trends, challenging the status quo, and expressing a confident point of view.
The critical role of intrinsic branding
And we must not forget that whatever our message, branding intrinsically will always ensure truly effective creative is memorable in the most relevant way. Branding is the best single predictor of in-market effects – ads that have higher branding see stronger sales effects. However we build for retaining attention, creating emotional engagement, and delivering meaningfully different messages, we must always do so in support of the brand. This means we must brand intrinsically – we must integrate the brand into the most meaningful and memorable elements of our content, or we risk diluting the impact.
These insights have been informed by Kantar's 2024 North America Creative Effectiveness Awards. Award winners were evaluated based on their ability to drive brand predisposition both in the short and long term, using Kantar's independently validated LINK+ ad testing solution.
To access the full learnings from Kantar's 2024 North America Creative Effectiveness analysis and the 2024 North American winners, click here.