Don’t forget to watch the ads – Inspiration from a True Celebration of Creativity in B2B

Every year, we bring together client-side marketers to review and debate the best B2B creativity of the year.  The breakthrough campaigns and the bold strategic thinking – presented by the brand leaders who made them.

This year we were delighted to welcome :

•  • Tracy Smithers (former GM Marketing at Xero) sharing the background to the IPA Effectiveness Award winning case study – How a healthy brand created a healthy business
•  • Measuring creative effectiveness with System1 analysis – the science behind what makes a brilliant B2B ad
•  • Panel discussion: Building a culture of effectiveness – featuring Tracy Smithers, Ed Birth, and Jennifer Carey (Director of Media and Effectiveness at Channel 4), led by True's Head of Effectiveness, Cos Mingides

 For me, there were two key themes that stood out in the presentations and in the drinks and discussion afterwards.

• 1. Outsmart over outspend
• Even the biggest brands are working with financial constraints – and even if they weren’t this isn’t a time for waste – it’s a time for clever thinking.  Great, stand-out creative makes your media work harder, and we saw some great examples of that.  Great media choices can also play a part, with clever buys achieving earned coverage too.

• Ed Birth shared how Hiscox approached this with their 'Most Disastrous Campaign Ever' – by making the case that standing out was the only way to win in their market.
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• And Xero wasn’t a big brand before the campaign – they needed to do something that would help them stand out against competitors that everyone had heard of. A predictable campaign that fitted the category wasn’t going to leapfrog the competition in terms of awareness.
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• Another strand of the outsmart debate was how consistent investment is, in fact, another way to be clever with the budget. Ed shared a brilliant metaphor for brand investment: the glider.

A glider can soar for miles once it's up in the air. But the moment you stop investing - the moment you stop giving it lift - it starts to descend.  Brand building is the same. Consistency and sustained investment are what keep you aloft.

2. 2. How to get buy-in for creativity

After the event, the conversations continued over drinks. And one theme dominated: how do we get buy-in for standout creativity?

Senior marketers from some of the biggest brands in B2B were swapping strategies, sharing what's worked, commiserating about what hasn't.

The challenge is universal. Even with IPA award-winning case studies, System1 data, and all the evidence in the world, making the case for creativity still requires courage, persistence, and the right framing.

But one thing was clear: the marketers who are winning are the ones who aren't giving up on that fight.

Ed from Hiscox shared that it’s about finding the right stats and telling the right story. Showing stakeholders what they're losing by playing it safe. 

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and this event is all about taking a step back and spending time with ads to understand what works.  As Karen Martin, President of the IPA, asked earlier this year – why don’t ad people spend time watching ads?

The celebration of creativity is a chance to do just that – to take time, and to celebrate great creativity in action.  This year we also wanted to give people the tools to continue the conversation – which is why we introduced the True Creative Scale for B2B - A shared standard for judging creativity, raising creative ambition, and driving creative effectiveness in B2B.  We use this in all our briefing and creative review sessions - and once a week we pick and judge a new B2B campaign against the scale to understand what’s happening in the wider industry.

‘I like it’ isn’t an objective creative judgement – it’s a step in the direction of comfort bias – or the fastest route to standard instead of stand out work.

To find out more about the True Creative Scale and get your hands on a copy for your wall get in touch.

The insights from our True Celebration of Creativity – on outsmarting competition, earning attention, building the business case, and sustaining investment – are available to anyone ready to act on them.

If you want to explore how these principles apply to your brand, let's talk.

Or if you’d like to hear about the event next year, sign up to our mailing list.