Media landscape shifts pose fresh advertising challenges

The Dove example was cited recently by Arnaud Debia, global director for creative excellence at the research and consulting firm Ipsos. Switzerland-based Debia was in India last week to meet clients, bursting with queries on brand building and effectiveness of creative advertising in a changing media landscape

Earlier this year in the US, Dove, the hair and skin care brand from Unilever, put its hair repair mask to the test of reviews on the country’s predominant social media platform Reddit. It used the first 50 flattering as well as unflattering Reddit reviews on outdoor billboards and digital displays, allowing consumers to read the unedited, unfiltered comments about its product. The reviews were also made into videos, generating millions of views and buzz around the product and lifting the sales of Unilever’s hair care category. The United States is Reddit’s single largest market accounting for 43% of the global traffic.

Media landscape shifts pose fresh advertising challenges

The Dove example was cited recently by Arnaud Debia, global director for creative excellence at the research and consulting firm Ipsos. Switzerland-based Debia was in India last week to meet clients, bursting with queries on brand building and effectiveness of creative advertising in a changing media landscape.

Debia, a regular at Cannes Lions, said Unilever chose honest comments as billboard advertising because consumers now know that social media influencers get paid by brands for their posts. “Putting out both positive and negative reviews was a way of saying ‘we are transparent and authentic’, which isn’t the case when brands are pushing a line which is too good to be true,” he said.

Audiences can recognize transactional endorsements very quickly, agreed Ambika Sharma, founder of digital marketing agency Pulp Strategy. “Social needs a strategy, not just a creators list,” she said.

In India, digital has emerged as the largest media for ad spends, estimated to reach ₹85,000 crore this year, according to Dentsu-e4m report. But with so many brands releasing hundreds of digital ads and posts in a month, doesn’t creative effectiveness get diluted?

“In the race to produce content at lightning speed, many advertisers overlook the essentials of impactful storytelling. In doing so brands are limiting their creative effectiveness and ROI (return on investment),” said an Ipsos study titled ‘Misfits’. First launched in 2022, ‘Misfits’ explores how unconventional creativity drives business growth. It analysed 15,000 ads to discover that nearly 50% of them don’t tell a story at all, focusing instead on predictable product features. This year, it added a new chapter to ‘Misfits’ on the lost art of storytelling.

Arnaud Debia said that ads breaking the conventional category rules are more effective in driving memorability. And ads telling relatable stories are more effective in changing consumer behaviour and driving short-term sales for brands. “There are two drivers to being effective. First, grabbing attention and giving a distinctive creative experience to people through unique and entertaining ads. Second, leading with empathy, that is, touching something that people care about and ensuring that your brand is giving a meaningful answer to that.”

Pulp Strategy’s Sharma noted that executions can change by audience, context, format, and moment, “but the brand idea must remain recognizable. Otherwise, you are producing hundreds of ads and building very little memory.”

Another pertinent question is if brands must make bold ads or stand up for issues. “There are 50 shades of bold. In the Indian cultural context, an adult daughter confronting her father for not splitting the weight of household chores with her exhausted mother is considered ‘bold’ as in P&G’s detergent ad series ‘Share the Load’,” said Debia. “So, the starting point should be what do you want to achieve,” he said.

However, taking a stand is harder to manage, he said. Sometimes it can backfire, like it did for beer brand Bud Light in the US when it used a transgender social media influencer for promotion. “The brand was boycotted by conservative Americans in 2023 and its sales dipped. It took two years for sales to climb back. Sometimes taking a stand is not worth the risk. You need to understand what your key users are thinking and how taking a stand may benefit you,” Debia said.

Speaking to HT earlier, Ashish Mishra, Interbrand CEO for India and South Asia, said “radical ideology is the new currency of identity, and brands can no longer afford to be politically correct fence-sitters.” He was speaking in reference to the recent Gen Z protests in New Delhi. “Brands can build a strong ideology by examining their core, finding their authenticity, and using it to resolve relevant, simmering socio-cultural tensions,” Mishra said.

For two consecutive years, Cannes Lions has discussed the role and impact of AI in advertising. Ipsos, too, conducted a study with Syracuse University to compare and analyse AI-generated and human-made ads. The two sets of ads were shown to 3,000 respondents in the US who could barely distinguish between the two. Yet on ‘effectiveness’, the human ads performed better in driving short term sales. The AI ads performed well when they were product-driven but struggled with storytelling and emotion. “The ads made by people were disruptive and strong on empathy,” Debia said.

An effective ad still needs a strong human insight, a clear brand idea, and a reason for someone to care, Ambika Sharma said. “We now have seconds, sometimes less, to earn attention. The best advertising understands the audience and the platform, but does not allow the platform to become the idea,” she said.