Kristal Knight.
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
Kristal Knight, ECD, Ogilvy NZ
2024 has been a tricky one. With a global cost of living crisis and a recession biting in Aotearoa, there’s a feeling we’re all in survival mode, living quarter to quarter, ‘surviving til 25’.
Unsurprisingly, and understandably, ROI has become a huge driver for businesses. As budgets shrink, being able to justify every cent spent as contributing towards growth becomes more and more vital. But that growth becomes more and more incremental.
2024 has also been marked out as the year AI finally pulled up a chair in business.
As a tool for delivering ROI, AI is incredibly exciting. It can deliver relevant, targeted content for very little investment in money, time or effort. It can optimise messaging, tap into things our audience are already interested in, and hone into what works. AI can quickly and easily deliver ‘good’.
And that frightens me. Not because I fear for the future of creative professions, but because I fear for my own human experience. Because ‘good’ doesn’t move people. Doesn’t make them feel anything. Doesn’t colour their lives in any way. In ‘The Extrodinary Cost of Dull’ – a white paper colloboration between eatbigfish, Peter Field, Jon Evans and System One – they found the biggest risk to marketers investment is evoking no emotion in their audience.
As David Ogilvy himself once said “Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night”. Well the internet has become the Suez Canal. Focussing on ROI sends more vessels into that crowded channel.
But there’s a new acronym echoing round the Ogilvy offices across Australia and Aotearoa. It’s something our Chief Creative officer Toby Talbot and Chief Strategy Officer Fran Clayton have been championing. It’s a takedown of that influential acronym and flipping it into something far more powerful. Turning ROI into ROC.
Return on Creativity.
The argument is that if ROI points us in the direction of short-term gains and cost minimisation, ROC blows the roof off what marketing can achieve, shaking up categories, creating new revenue streams, shifting shareholder sentiment, influencing policy, and triggering social change.
It’s about creating growth through impact, investing in longer term plays without the safety net of an immediate, predictable, quantifiable outcome, but with the potential to enlist customers as allies, create whole new revenue streams and shape the entire market.
There are plenty of great examples to illustrate the point. Instead of running a cost-effective, highly-targeted b2b direct marketing campaign, American Express created a ‘Shop Small’ day to grow their customers’ businesses, so they were better able to help grow theirs. And Corona invested in the lime-growing industry in China to not only increase desire for Corona beer, but to also strengthen the very local economy they’re selling into.
It’s about backing humanity, and our need to feel something in these austere times. ROC gets audiences in the feels, as well as in the prefrontal cortex. Dove’s brand platform isn’t about smoother skin or sweeter-smelling armpits, it’s a platform for creating social change by shaking up the way the beauty industry talks to women - making them feel seen and valued for the way they are.
One of our own local clients, Breast Cancer Foundation NZ have had far higher engagement and traffic to the educational sections of their website from this year’s awareness campaign than any previous campaign. The difference? They backed using surreal humour, instead of the usual frightening educational facts.
ROC is the stuff AI can’t do. And the way to keep brands from swirling down the cost-efficiency plughole into that overcrowded shipping lane.
Throughout history, we humans have always had our greatest leaps of creativity in the face of adversity. With the head winds looking unlikely to ease up any time soon, there is so much potential to unlock fresher, bigger and more sustainable sources of growth for brands who are brave enough to look past ROI and invest in creativity.
As a creative, but most importantly as a human being, I’m hoping to see ROC become the new popular acronym of boardroom bingo in 2025.
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