Field (independent marketing consultant, co-author of "The Long and the Short of It" 2013 and "Media in Focus" 2017) partnered with James Hurman (founder of the Previously Unavailable brand strategy consultancy and former chief strategy officer at Colenso BBDO Auckland) and the IPA and the Cannes Lions to run the largest study to date comparing creative excellence and business effectiveness. The study analyzed roughly 5,000 award-winning campaigns: the world's most creatively-awarded campaigns (Cannes Gold and Grand Prix winners) and the world's most effectiveness-awarded campaigns (Effie winners, IPA Effectiveness Awards). The study answered a question that had haunted advertising for decades: does creative excellence actually drive business results, or are awards a self-licking ice cream cone? The answer is clear and statistically robust. Highly creative campaigns are up to twelve times more effective than non-creative campaigns at driving business results. The premium for creativity is not marginal; it is multiplicative. For a marketing operator forced to choose between "safe" creative and "ambitious" creative, this is the most-cited evidence-base for making the ambitious choice. The book is required reading for any operator who has been told that creativity is a nice-to-have and effectiveness is a science.
Core frameworks
1. The creative effectiveness multiplier
Campaigns rated as highly creative (defined by Cannes Lions Gold and Grand Prix awards) produce business effects (market share gain, profit, pricing power) at roughly 12 times the rate of non-creative campaigns at the same spend level. The multiplier holds across categories, regions, and time periods.
The headline 12x finding deserves careful unpacking. The study measured creative campaigns at the highest award tier (Cannes Gold and Grand Prix) against campaigns at lower award tiers and against unawarded campaigns. The business effects measured included market share gain, profit growth, pricing power, brand-equity lift, and customer acquisition cost reduction over comparable measurement windows. The 12x multiplier represents the average business-effect difference between the highest creative tier and the unawarded baseline. The multiplier is smaller (closer to 4x to 6x) between the highest creative tier and the moderately-awarded tier, suggesting that the multiplier accelerates as creative quality rises rather than scaling linearly.
The mechanism: highly creative campaigns produce three compounding effects that lower-tier campaigns do not. Memorability: the campaign is remembered by viewers, which extends mental availability into future buying moments. Earned media: the campaign produces conversation, parody, news coverage, and social sharing that multiplies paid reach. Cultural footprint: the campaign enters the cultural vocabulary, which produces ongoing brand presence long after the paid window ends. Each effect compounds; the multiplicative combination produces the 12x business effect difference.
Three canonical examples from the dataset. Cadbury's "Gorilla" (2007): a wordless advertisement showing a gorilla playing the drum solo from Phil Collins's "In the Air Tonight" with a brief Cadbury Dairy Milk logo at the end. The campaign produced substantial UK market share growth and brand-equity lift; the cumulative earned media (YouTube views, news coverage, parodies, the campaign entering the cultural vocabulary) exceeded the paid media spend by multiples. Volvo Trucks "Epic Split" (2013): Jean-Claude Van Damme performing the splits between two reversing Volvo trucks to demonstrate the trucks' precision steering. The campaign drove dramatic improvements in Volvo Trucks' brand consideration and sales among the construction and logistics buyers it targeted. Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (2010): Isaiah Mustafa delivering absurd monologues that subverted traditional masculine product advertising. The campaign produced category-leading sales lifts and continued generating cultural references for nearly a decade.
How to operate: treat creative ambition as a strategic investment with positive expected value, not a risk. The multiplier evidence justifies the bets. The CFO who treats creative ambition as marketing risk is mis-calculating the expected value; the data says ambitious creative is the higher-EV bet at the portfolio level.
If you only remember one thing: highly creative campaigns produce 12x the business effects of safe campaigns at the same spend. The multiplier is not marginal.
2. The fame multiplier
Campaigns that achieved "fame" (cultural conversation, earned media, social sharing) produced effectiveness premiums even larger than the base creative multiplier. The mechanism: fame extends the campaign's reach beyond paid media, multiplying the effective spend.
The fame metric in the study was measured through multiple indicators: cultural references in non-marketing contexts, earned-media reach, brand-search lifts during the campaign period, and qualitative survey items about whether the campaign was being talked about. Campaigns that scored high on fame produced disproportionately strong long-term business outcomes, controlling for spend and creative quality. The fame premium operated on top of the base creative multiplier; the most effective campaigns achieved both high creative quality and high fame.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (2014) is the dataset's example of the fame multiplier at the ceiling. The campaign cost the ALS Association near-zero in paid media; the organization simply launched the challenge concept and let participants drive the spread. Within eight weeks, the campaign generated 17 million participant videos on Facebook alone, raised over $115 million for ALS research (up from approximately $2 million in the comparable prior year), and produced cultural penetration that reached over 50 percent of the global English-speaking population. The earned media value, calculated at standard advertising rates, exceeded $50 million. The campaign demonstrated the ceiling of the fame multiplier: where paid spend was near-zero and earned media was the multiplier, the effective campaign reach exceeded what any realistic paid campaign could have achieved.
The lower bound of the fame multiplier is more typical. The dataset showed that high-fame campaigns averaged 2x to 4x the earned media value of comparable low-fame campaigns at the same paid spend. The multiplier varies by category, by campaign creative, and by cultural moment, but the directional finding (fame multiplies effectiveness) is robust across the sample.
How to operate: brief for fame, not just for "effectiveness." Cultural conversation extends paid spend by multiples. The brief that asks "how do we get our message across" produces forgettable creative; the brief that asks "what would make this campaign culturally noticeable" produces the rare hits that achieve the multiplier.
If you only remember one thing: fame extends paid spend through earned media. Brief for fame, not just for message clarity.
3. The brand-building bias in creative awards
Creative awards skew heavily toward brand-building campaigns rather than activation campaigns. The Effectiveness Code argues this is not a bias of the awards; it reflects the reality that brand-building creative produces the long-term effects worth recognizing.
The dataset analysis showed that the most-awarded campaigns over the last decade were almost all brand-building works, not direct-response works. Cannes Gold and Grand Prix winners overwhelmingly came from categories where brand-building was the dominant marketing approach (FMCG, automotive, premium consumer goods, B2B with long buying cycles). Direct-response campaigns (paid search, retargeting, performance influencer marketing) rarely won the highest creative awards, even when they produced strong short-term sales lifts.
The argument is not that direct-response work is inferior. The argument is that direct-response work and brand-building work have different purposes, and the highest creative awards measure the kind of cultural and emotional impact that brand-building work produces. A direct-response ad that produces a 30 percent CTR improvement is doing its job; it is not the kind of work that wins Cannes Gold because Cannes Gold rewards cultural impact rather than conversion-rate optimization. The two are not competing; they are different categories.
The implication for marketing teams: defending the brand-building budget requires understanding that brand-building work produces effects that activation work does not. The activation work produces immediate measurable lift; the brand-building work produces the cultural and emotional impact that compounds over years. Both are valuable; neither substitutes for the other. The teams that achieve the strongest long-term effects allocate budget to both, with the 60/40 split that "The Long and the Short of It" and "Media in Focus" identified.
How to operate: defend the brand-building budget in any conversation with finance. The dataset shows that brand-building creative drives the long-term effects that compound. The brand budget is not discretionary; it is the foundation of the long-term effects that activation can subsequently convert.
If you only remember one thing: brand-building creative produces compounding effects. Activation creative produces immediate effects. Both are necessary.
4. The risk profile of creative investment
Field and Hurman document that ambitious creative carries higher variance than safe creative. Most ambitious campaigns fail. The few that succeed generate the multiplier effects that produce the average.
The mathematics of creative variance, illustrated. A brand running ten ambitious campaigns over five years might see seven campaigns underperform expectations (because ambitious creative is risky), and three campaigns produce break-out success that captures the 12x multiplier. The cumulative effect across the ten campaigns: the three break-outs produce business effects that exceed the combined effects of the seven underperformers, often by substantial margins. The portfolio approach pays even though most individual campaigns fail.
The contrast: a brand running ten safe campaigns over the same period might see all ten campaigns produce modest, predictable results. None fail dramatically. None succeed dramatically. The cumulative effect across the ten campaigns: modest, predictable returns that aggregate to substantially less than the ambitious portfolio's combined effects. The safety produced predictable mediocrity rather than occasional excellence.
The strategic implication: marketing investment in creative ambition is like venture capital. Both face high variance, both produce portfolios where most bets underperform and a few hit dramatically, and both reward the portfolio approach over individual bet selection. The CFO who refuses to fund individual ambitious bets because the bets might fail is missing the portfolio logic; the portfolio of ambitious bets outperforms the portfolio of safe bets in expected value despite the higher individual variance.
How to operate: run a portfolio of creative bets, not a single safe campaign. Variance is the cost of multiplication. The portfolio approach pays even when individual bets fail; the safe approach produces predictable mediocrity.
If you only remember one thing: ambitious creative is high variance. The portfolio of ambitious bets outperforms the portfolio of safe bets.
5. The decline of creative effectiveness in the digital era
The book documents a worrying trend: from 2010 to 2020, the average creative quality of awarded campaigns declined as media fragmentation and performance-marketing pressure shifted budgets away from brand-building.
The data showed that the average creative quality of Cannes-winning campaigns peaked in roughly 2010 to 2013, then declined steadily through 2020. The decline was not in the creative judging standards (which remained consistent); it was in the underlying campaigns being submitted. As marketing teams shifted budgets toward performance marketing and as procurement pressures favored measurable spend over creative ambition, the creative work entering the award circuits became less ambitious on average. The handful of break-out creative campaigns each year continued to capture the multiplier; the average level of creative ambition declined.
The opportunity in the decline: the multiplier still applies. Fewer campaigns are achieving it because fewer are trying. The marketing teams that maintain creative ambition through the period have less competition for the multiplier and can produce the break-out results that the multiplier rewards. The opportunity has widened, not narrowed, even as the average creative quality has declined.
The post-2020 context (which the book did not fully cover but which the IPA's subsequent research has explored): the AI image generation and short-form video tools have lowered the production cost of creative work, which has produced more creative volume without raising the creative ambition. The creative-effectiveness multiplier still rewards the ambitious work; the high-volume low-ambition work produces incremental effects but does not achieve the multiplier.
How to operate: audit your past five years of campaigns for creative ambition. If every campaign looks like the last, you are buying safety and paying for it in foregone multipliers. The brief that asks for creative ambition has to be backed by the willingness to accept variance; the brief that asks for safety produces safety and the corresponding modest returns.
If you only remember one thing: average creative ambition has declined. The multiplier opportunity has widened for the teams that maintain ambition.
Actionable takeaways
- Treat creative ambition as a strategic investment with positive expected value, not a risk. The multiplier evidence justifies the bets.
- Brief for fame, not just for "effectiveness." Cultural conversation extends paid spend by multiples.
- Run a portfolio of creative bets, not a single safe campaign. Variance is the cost of multiplication.
- Defend the brand-building budget in any conversation with finance. The dataset shows that brand-building creative drives the long-term effects that compound.
- Audit your past five years of campaigns for creative ambition. If every campaign looks like the last, you are buying safety and paying for it in foregone multipliers.
What this book is NOT about
This book is not a creative manual. It does not teach you how to make great work. It is a strategic-evidence document for defending the budget and the risk profile that great work requires. The case for creativity here is econometric, not aesthetic. If you want guidance on the craft of creative work, read Steel ("Truth, Lies and Advertising"), Bierut ("How to"), or Ogilvy ("Confessions of an Advertising Man").
Two specific misreads to avoid. First, "highly creative campaigns produce 12x the effects" is a portfolio statement, not a guarantee. The 12x represents the average effect of the highest creative tier against the unawarded baseline; specific campaigns at the highest tier can produce 30x or can produce 2x. The multiplier is the portfolio average, not the guaranteed individual outcome. Second, "creative awards predict business effects" overstates the framework. The correlation between creative awards and business effects is strong but not deterministic. Operators should hold the multiplier as directional, not as a prediction for any specific campaign.
Field updates since publication: the IPA's subsequent research has continued to test and refine the findings. The most credible contemporary critique: the study correlates creative awards and business effects but does not establish strict causation. It is possible that ambitious creative tends to be developed for brands with sufficient budget and strategic patience to also execute well across the rest of the marketing mix; the multiplier might partly reflect that selection effect rather than purely the creative work. The directional argument (ambitious creative is associated with substantially better business outcomes) survives the methodological caveat; the precise multiplier should be treated as approximate.
The Effectiveness Code is the evidence base behind the case for that craft.
Want more?
Read the full IPA EffWorks reports: https://ipa.co.uk/initiatives/effworks/effworks-ft-reports/
The full reports include the original data, methodology, and case studies. The summary above captures the operator-relevant findings. Read the full reports if you need to cite specific numbers in a budget defense, if you are taking on a senior marketing role and need the foundational evidence, or if you want the case studies (Cadbury Gorilla, Volvo Epic Split, Snickers Hungry) in their full form. Pair with "The Long and the Short of It" (2013) and "Media in Focus" (2017) for the complete Field and Binet trilogy.