You can’t afford to have boring creative

 A Brand Service Announcement from your friends at Pollinate. 

 At Pollinate, we love growing things — especially for our clients. We want to grow their brands, their bottom line, and their chance at helping their customers solve problems. 

We’re from Oregon, after all. There’s really good soil here. 

That’s why we’re here, delivering this Brand Service Announcement. There’s a very real, very obvious tactic that a ton of brands are ignoring — even though it could lead to exponentially more revenue. It’s the most underrated marketing success strategy you have at your disposal, and it’s a shift you can make right now. 

It’s high-quality creative.

Consider this. “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy famously wrote, “You can’t bore people into buying your product.” That was in 1963. The man didn’t know TikTok from a watch on his wrist — but his point is infinitely more salient today. 

Because good, smart creative works. 

In fact, the higher the quality of creative, the more the sales lift. According to a 2023 study by Kantar and WARC, inventive and effective ads generate more than four times the profit than low-quality ads. And a Nielsen Catalina analysis of 500 CPG campaigns found that 49% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising can be attributed to the quality of the creative.

Nearly half. 

We’re living in an attention economy. Where eyeballs go, money flows. And in this economy, the story that you tell to get attention — the ad and brand creative — is your capital. 

It’s a numbers game: the average human sees thousands of ads per day, filtered through the lens of an ever-evolving, always targeting algorithm. Before you can capture minds, hearts and market share, you have got to break through the noise. And you’re not just competing with your competitors. You are up against every influencer, every friend they follow, and every celebration or indignation of the day. 

Let’s say you spend half a million dollars on media for an ad campaign. You’ve spent hours sweating over the strategy of it all — the media plan, the audience targeting and the buying. 

Ideally, you’ve also invested as much time, strategy and energy in your campaign creative. You’re launching something distinctive, that tells a clear and cohesive story about your brand’s character, evokes emotion, challenges assumptions and builds connection with the human beings on the other side of the screen. 

“You can’t bore people into buying your product.” – David Ogilvy, 1963

But if your design is dull, the copy flat, and the idea unoriginal, it’s the creative equivalent of racing a golf cart in the Indy 500. Your consumer will scroll on by, skip the ad, and mute the TV during commercial breaks. No eyeballs for you. You’re not engaging your audience, you’re not driving future demand, and you’re left circling the track, alone, with four times the profit sitting on the table and about 495 miles to go. Uh-oh. 

That’s an expensive uh-oh. How expensive? 

$189 billion. Ouch!

You read that right — roughly the GDP of Greece. Let’s break it down:

eatbigfish, a UK-based ad agency, worked with a data set of 55,000 ads from System1 to calculate the cost of dull advertising to the US ad industry as a whole. Using media spend estimates from 2022, they measured the amount the 75% dullest ads would have to commit in increased media spend to equal the commercial impact of the 25% most engaging ads. Which comes to $189 billion.

Let’s just pause and let that sink in. 

The good news? You have the power to change that. According to “Drivers of Advertising Profitability,” a 2023 paper by WARC and Paul Dyson, creativity is the biggest multiplier of ad profitability within our control, by a multiplication of 12. In comparison, it blows audience targeting and budget setting across geographies right out of the water.

Quality creative doesn’t just work — it works harder. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but you’ve got to have the talent and expertise to wield its strength. 

At Pollinate, we believe every brand deserves creative that is just as valuable as the attention you seek. We’re over here fighting the good fight against boring creative, and we’re looking for brands to join the cause.

Ready to tackle the attention economy with stellar creative? Reach out!