Deconstructing Effectiveness (And How To Achieve It)

Sit a bunch of strategists down to talk about effectiveness, and you can be sure the conversation is going to roam across some of the most important touch-points for modern brand-building.

So come with us now to eavesdrop in on this conflab between the three chief strategists at adam&eveDDB: Les Binet, Martin Beverley and Will Grundy, group head of effectiveness, chief strategy officer and head of planning respectively at the agency.

The trio rarely speak publicly together, so this was a unique opportunity to listen to them discuss several of the ad industry's key trends and issues including the growing recognition of the value of measuring campaign effectiveness.

We join the conversation just as talk turns to what effectiveness actually means today…..

Les Binet: Should I kick off with my view? I think different clients probably have different views. For me, effectiveness has always been about shareholder value—long-term sales, cash flow, and profit for commercial businesses.

As you probably know, I’ve been at [adam&eve DDB’s headquarters] Bishops Bridge Road for 37 years. I’ve always believed that effectiveness is about selling things, not just brand awareness or recall. There are people in the industry who see it differently, but we’ve always been clear: if it’s a commercial business, our job is to sell things and increase the long-term flow of cash and profit. All other metrics are just a means to an end. Now, if we’re talking about government advertising, a charity, or a campaigning organisation, the goal is often behaviour change. In some cases there are attitudinal goals, but the idea that it’s all about fluffy metrics has always been wrong. Not all clients see it that way, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed in 37 years.

But when you two talk to clients, what do you hear? Do they even care?

Martin Beverley: Actually, I think effectiveness is a key reason clients come to adam&eveDDB in the first place. It’s always been part of our DNA. Even in our credentials, we show case studies with proper effectiveness metrics - demonstrating how much money we’ve returned to clients. I think that’s been ingrained here since Les started. Right, Les?

Les: Even before me, actually.

Martin: Clients are increasingly concerned with showing that the work they’re doing is working. There’s more evidence out there now, and it’s becoming more prevalent. People have read the literature - things like [Les Binet’s and Peter Field’s book] 'The Long and the Short of It' - and they’re more aware of this stuff. Also, clients need to justify their roles, so they need to prove that what they’re doing is effective if they’re going to stay longer than 18 months.

Will Grundy: And money isn’t cheap anymore either. The landscape has changed dramatically for our clients’ businesses.

Martin: Exactly. Yesterday, I judged the final round of the Effies and I couldn’t believe the scale of it. WPP sponsored the whole thing, and there were about 100 judges, many of them clients. The conversation felt much stronger, in terms of people really beginning to understand what they were looking for. Clients are really starting to push for effectiveness, even more than some ad agencies. That strengthens things. Media agencies are also big on it now since they tend to spend the money and are close to the econometrics. I think Laurence Green [IPA director of effectiveness] said this was why we’ve seen a rise in IPA entries. There were loads of media agency people at the Effies judging, and on LinkedIn they were bragging about how many awards they were going to win. So, it feels like everyone is getting more clued up on effectiveness and it’s becoming more competitive.

Will: Unlike Les, I haven’t been at the agency for 37 years, I joined adam&eveDDB just over 13 years ago. The reason I mention that is not to emphasise my youth compared to Les, but to point out that I joined right before advertising and marketing became almost neurotically obsessed with “purpose”. Businesses and agencies felt they needed to have a benevolent reason for existing. What’s interesting in the last year and a half, especially during the last IPA cycle, is how the emphasis on effectiveness has become more rigorous and robust.

Marketing budgets are more scrutinised than ever, and there’s just not as much cash in client businesses. At the same time, there’s been an increase in evidence indicating effectiveness, but it doesn’t always go as far as it could in proving it in the boardroom. One of the interesting changes in the last four or five years is the rise of tools like System1. This has been incredibly influential for many client organisations in understanding what effective creative work can and should do. It definitely has its limits, but it’s made the language of effectiveness much more commercial and rigorous than it was five years ago, when marketers and agencies were more interested in the “good” we were doing in the world. Back then, people assumed that doing good would predispose consumers to buy from us, but that link was never fully proven.

Les: Well, disproven. I think Will raised an important point when he said, "Money’s not free anymore." You get these pendulum swings. In the early days of the internet and online marketing, we got distracted by clicks. That was the big thing—everyone focused on clicks. Then, we shifted to being distracted by likes. And in that era, after the financial crisis, when interest rates were low and money was cheap, businesses weren't under intense pressure to make profits, so they could pursue other goals. That’s when we got distracted by “purpose.” But now, we’re back to an era where clicks and likes aren’t enough. Doing good isn’t enough. We need to focus on cash and profit again, which is basically where we were when I first joined the industry.

Les: One big issue is that demonstrating effectiveness is like painting the Forth Bridge—it never ends. You publish a case study, but as soon as it’s out, people say, “Yeah, but that was last year, and the world has changed”. New people come into the industry who haven’t read the work or just don’t believe it, dismissing it as old news. We also have a measurement problem. Most businesses don’t measure everything they need to in order to capture the full payback from marketing, which makes it hard for them to justify spending. Too many businesses still measure success based on clicks or short-term metrics, which doesn’t capture the true value of what we do. We’re constantly having to learn, make the case, and convince people. Another big issue is the business model—billing for hours, etc. We’re in a bit of a hole there as an industry.

Will: I agree, Les. On an industry level, I think we suffer from a big "brand problem”. Too many decision-makers see marketing, and - by extension - creative agencies, as a cost rather than an investment. There’s been some shift in that thinking, but research from the IPA shows it’s still an overwhelming perception. We’ve yet to fully prove our value as a long-term investment rather than just a cost to be cut when times get tough. It’s easy to celebrate the amazing value we generate, especially when looking at IPA Effectiveness Awards. But the reality is, those awards represent the exception rather than the norm. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when those awards aren’t needed as a signal of value anymore. There’s a long tail of clients, agencies, and marketing departments that are far from where we are in terms of effectiveness. There’s still a lot of work to do.

Les: Yeah, I think there’s this idea, as you said, that we should be seen as an investment, not a cost. And that’s really difficult to achieve. You might get some clients to buy into that emotionally, but you’ll never get finance directors to see it that way in their accounting because accounting standards just don’t allow it. We’re also seen by too many people as a commodity. It’s like, “How many hours of this person can I get for this rate?” as if we’re buying sugar or pork bellies. But what we want to be is more like, well, Taylor Swift—there’s only one, and you pay any price for her. That’s my personal view, obviously.

Martin: I have so much to say about this. If you tried to write an IPA Effectiveness Award for advertising agencies, you couldn’t do it—we’re making less money, as Les said, because the model is antiquated and puts a ceiling on what we do. You can only ever make your day rate, and that gets cut anyway. We need to shift from charging based on the time it takes to create advertising - which is getting faster with AI - to charging based on the value we add. That’s the shift that needs to happen. It’s easier said than done, but if we start charging for outputs and outcomes, it would be more efficient than timesheets. The value we add should be rewarded.

Advertising agencies also have a branding problem. We’re often seen as the people who do the "colouring in" instead of being recognised as creative consultants for the brand itself. People in advertising are smart and creative, but they’re often stuck in a narrow box. The industry could do a much better job selling itself and adding value, but many agencies are stuck in a race to the bottom and don’t have the confidence to break out of it.

Les: I think reframing it like that—saying, “Hire us and we’ll increase your profits by 10 per cent”—does change what a company should be willing to pay. But actually doing that is hard. When I sell research services, I sometimes get pushback on the cost. I say, “This research should easily save you 10 per cent of your media budget, so it’s worth up to 10 per cent of your media spend”. In reality, it’s only 0.1 per cent of their media budget, so it’s clearly great value. But as an industry, we’re not good at framing things this way. We’re stuck in a silly cost-plus accounting model.

Martin: You're restricted in terms of your ability to be creative with your commercial model, and everyone else is playing the same game, right? It’s strange in pitches where it all comes down to day rates, and everyone’s just competing to be the cheapest.

Les: It was much nicer when it was full service and commission. But the other issue is that the industry, the wider marketing industry, has become far more competitive. When I started, there were four TV channels and a handful of radio stations. Now, we have countless TV channels, and the internet is basically an infinite number of channels. So, no matter what we do, it’s always going to be harder in a world of almost perfect competition.

Martin: Historically, research has had a fundamental flaw: it asks people how they feel, rather than actually measuring how they feel. People’s responses can differ from what they truly feel. Over time, we’ll have better ways to measure actual feelings—heart rate, brain scans, and so on. Eventually, that technology will become less intrusive and more natural to use.

Some clients are already using neuro-testing. Mars does it, Dr. Oetker does it, and McDonald's as well. System 1 is trying to understand how people feel, though they still rely on asking. In the future, if we can link those emotions to purchasing behaviour, we'll see a clear link between emotional engagement and profit. That’s the potential, but the technology isn't quite there yet.

Les: Yeah, the technology’s not quite there. I’m quite sceptical about most neuroscience approaches. I know a bit about this stuff—I’ve got a master’s in cognitive science—and a lot of it is so crude. It doesn’t do nearly as much as it claims. The most sophisticated technology we have for understanding human emotions is still people themselves. We’re really good at understanding each other. I’m a huge fan of artificial intelligence (AI), but one of the greatest advantages is hiring people who are truly in tune with others. That’s true of all our planners—they’re not just sitting there reading statistics or semiotics books. They’re people who are genuinely interested in other people and have a natural intuition for it.

Will: That’s a great point. The risk with technology is that you mechanise something that is an intensely human skill. I think I sit somewhere between Martin and Les on this. The tools that help us make better, more effective work are worth experimenting with, but they can never replace the need for brilliantly empathetic people who can understand why someone chooses cornflakes over Rice Krispies. These tools can never replace the importance of actually measuring the real-world impact on the other side.

Martin: I really like what you’re saying about empathy, intuition, and gut feel because that's what "Feeling First" is. It’s system one thinking—it’s that instinctive sense of, "I feel like people think or feel this way, and this brand needs to be positioned here”. That still has a massive role to play. That's what I really love about our "Feeling First" approach. It's grounded in the truth of how humans behave.

Les: Exactly. We've always said that the best planners are those who can think in both ways. We used to say it's the physicist who plays the violin or the English graduate with a quirky interest in maths. You need both kinds of thinking. For instance, AI can speed up many parts of the process, freeing you up to do the things only a human can do. It’s great for research—if you need to find out about an issue, you can do it quickly and easily. But as Martin said, you still need to get into people's living rooms, talk to ordinary members of the public, and understand them on that level.

Les: Another thing I’d like to mention is the supposed tension between creativity and effectiveness. Some people see effectiveness as their primary goal, while others focus on awards or doing great creative work. I believe those two things go together perfectly. In fact, that’s the core of what has always been great about Bishopsbridge Road—whether it was BMP, DDB, or adam&eve. As Martin Boase said when he set up BMP in 1968, "Good advertising doesn’t have to be bad”. Meaning advertising that is effective doesn’t have to be subpar. Great advertising makes more money.

That’s the foundation of what we call "feeling first”. If you have truly great creative work that touches people emotionally and is well-disciplined and relevant to the purchase decision, you get work that wins awards, is loved by everyone, and generates a lot of revenue. Effectiveness and creativity go hand in hand. It’s not about just being counted; it’s about impact.

Martin: It’s hard for me to say how it works in other agencies, but one thing that works really well at adam&eveDDB is how closely creative and strategy work together. Rick [Brim, chief creative officer] and I, for example, work as a team—almost like a couple!

I’ve noticed others in the agency trying to mimic that - not necessarily wanting to be like us, but because it just works. When we’re working on a new brief, we always encourage the planners to talk to the creatives early, even before there’s an official brief. And vice versa. We want creatives to know if their work is effective. In new business meetings, Rick always says that effectiveness awards are more important. I know he loves his Cannes Lions, but he always wants to know if the work is selling, which is really important. And working together makes it more fun. He doesn’t mind if I suggest creative ideas or lines, and I don’t mind if he says, "that brief is boring, by the way”.

Will: I think you’re underselling it a bit. It goes further than that. The best creatives here want to help shape the brief, and the best planners want to shape the ideas. That’s a key part of the culture at adam&eveDDB - creative and planning don’t sit in opposition or tension. We recognise that the two disciplines make each other better. We strategists can help creatives make work that’s more insightful, impactful, and effective, while they bring strategies to life in ways we could only dream of. Their lateral thinking turns rational ideas into something magical. It’s not just about Rick saying a brief is boring, though that happens sometimes. It’s about how the culture allows creatives to help shape briefs, and us planners to help shape the work in turn. There’s no ego about it.

Martin Someone told me many other agencies have shifted completely from retained to project-based work in the last five years. Most of our clients, though, are still retained. We also talk a lot with our clients about long-term platforms—about creating something that works and sticking with it. I was just talking to a potential client about what I call "compound interest”. If you pick something and stick with it, you build over time. I told them, "You’ve been a bit all over the place, so it doesn’t really add up. What we’d like to do is pick something, keep it fresh yet familiar—same but different—and you’ll see results over time”. The smart clients like that. They’re looking for a long-term partner. It also shows that we care about the long term; we’re not just trying to do a shiny project.

Will: The way we’ve been able to prove and validate that has become more convincing. If you look at something like McCain, for instance, which has been shortlisted for effectiveness awards this year—that’s an eight-year story. But the most interesting part isn’t just the incremental sales we’ve generated. It’s the way we’ve enabled McCain to charge more for their products by reducing price elasticity significantly. We’re able to have conversations with marketing teams about consistency over time and how that drives awareness and recognition. Now we can back that up with some really solid evidence on why it pays off at the bottom line, which makes the adam&eveDDB proposition even more compelling.

Martin That’s a great point. You could define the power of a brand by asking, "Would you be willing to pay more for it?" It’s odd that the industry hasn’t spoken more about price. The McCain paper shows that you can effectively create margin.

Les But you can only do that as a long-term job. It’s not something you can achieve with just a single ad. It’s like turning a supertanker around. That ties back to the conversation about consistency and freshness. That’s what you should aim for—a long-term strategy with a consistent set of properties, ideas, and feelings, but with variations to keep it fresh. Specsavers, at its best, nailed that. It had a long-running gag it could play around with. When I first joined the industry, there was a lot more of that, but I think it fell out of favour. We got into the whole "disruption" mantra from tech, which carried over into advertising - everything had to be completely new. But I wonder, do you feel that the pendulum is swinging back?

Martin I think so. With a greater body of evidence around effectiveness, so many of the most effective campaigns are genuinely long-term. System1 and others are saying, "Bring back characters. Bring back devices". They’re talking about recognisable, repeatable assets. So, yes, I think the pendulum is swinging back as the evidence base grows.

Les It feels like the right move.

Martin I had a chat with the global CMO of McDonald’s recently, and we were discussing the concept of "fresh yet familiar”. It’s about creating something fresh that captures attention, but is also familiar enough that people know exactly where it’s from and who it is. There’s a sweet spot where it gets attention, but also builds recognition.

Will It’s also where I think "Feeling First" really helps us as an agency. It allows us to think about what that enduring feeling for a brand should be, and then it helps with keeping things fresh yet familiar. A great example of this is the "Love it or Hate it" Marmite campaign. We’ve always understood it’s about being divisive and very British, and we’ve found new and interesting ways to tell that story.

Les It’s a wonderful example. We’ve been working on that brand since 1993, haven’t we? The idea has been the same since then.

Martin I thought it was 1996. Has it really been that long?

Les I think it might go even earlier than that.

Martin: It’s the ultimate feeling—love or hate. That’s the emotional extreme. I think something Les and I have talked about is how, after the success of the slightly weepy John Lewis ads, everyone thought that emotion in advertising meant heart-warming, long-form stories. But that’s just one of many types of emotion. If you look at our work, we cover a full spectrum. It might be nostalgia and adventure for Great Wester Railways, family togetherness for McCain, or disgust for Pot Noodle. It could be humour, it could be anything. We’ve got a whole suite of emotions in our work, and we just pick the right one for the right brand.

Les: Going back to the changing definition of effectiveness, what’s changed is our understanding of it and what drives it. The work I've done with Peter [Field], and insights from System1, Orlando Wood, Byron Sharp, and others, has advanced our thinking. When I joined the industry, the belief was that advertising worked by transmitting messages about products, which would make people buy. Emotions and feelings were seen as the sugar coating on the pill—to get people to pay attention and remember the ads. We talked about "rational messages in emotional envelopes." The big revolution has been the understanding that a lot of advertising doesn’t work that way at all. The feelings themselves are what sell; you don’t necessarily have to say anything.

My personal revelation came when Peter and I wrote our first book and looked at the data. We expected to see that the sweet spot was a balance of messages and emotions. But what we found was that if you put feelings first—if you make emotions the primary driver—you get the biggest effects. That was an intellectual revolution for us. John Lewis exemplified this. That campaign showed the power of pure emotion to generate huge piles of cash, with a payback of 11-to-1 in profit, just by featuring a penguin. It was a revolution, and not everyone has caught up with that yet. But that’s a big part of why clients come to us.

When I first joined BMP [which later became DDB London then adam&eveDDB] we wouldn’t have made a John Lewis ad, because we were very focused on having a clear message. We made great ads, but there were certain kinds of ads we would never have done—pure entertainment, pure storytelling, or pure emotion. While those ads were great, I now realise it was quite limiting. These days, the team here can do things we wouldn’t have made back then.

Will: Exactly. This might sound overly simplistic, but "Feeling First" gives us the freedom of a clear brief. I don’t think it’s changed how we do things, but it has helped us make our work even more impactful. When we’re looking at briefs or work, we’re simply looking for the feeling that excites us. It can be for a big, pure storytelling piece like PlayStation or John Lewis, or it could be something that behaves more like earned media. Take the work we’ve done for CALM, for example—it behaves more like a PR campaign than a traditional piece of advertising. But at its heart, it’s all about "Feelings First"—understanding how we need to make people feel, how to make them respond to an issue, behave in a certain way, donate, or sign up for an event. So, to answer your question, it hasn’t changed our approach, but it’s allowed us to make every brief the most interesting and effective version of itself by focusing on the feeling first.

Martin: I agree with Will, but I think it’s sharpened how we do things. You know how people joke about creative agencies being terrible at branding themselves? Well, we’re always telling clients, “Your brand needs to be distinctive—what do you stand for?” But agencies are often quite poor at defining themselves. Some agencies, like Gut and Uncommon, have done a great job of branding themselves. "Feeling First" has helped us sharpen our identity. Now, when we talk to new business prospects, they’re clear on what they’re getting from us. We’ve also started asking clients, “How do you feel about this?” It’s part of everything now—like a thread running through everything we do. We even have internal surveys to track how people feel about their work. It helps us stay true to this ethos across the board.

Also, when we first started thinking about having a clearer ethos, we didn’t want to be like other agencies that had buzzwords. We wanted something universal, something timeless. So, when DDB asked Rick and me what DDB should stand for, we suggested "feelings". There are so many wonderful Bill Bernbach [co-founder of DDB] quotes about the power of feelings. He talked about getting people to feel it in their gut, the core idea is timeless: humans are driven by emotion. Even as technology evolves, feelings and motivations will always matter. So, we liked the idea of "Feeling First" as a timeless concept; it’s broad enough to apply to everything we do, without being limiting.

Will: Exactly. I’d add that while we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the "feeling" part of "Feeling First," the "first" part is just as important. It’s not just about feelings. On average, 40 per cent of the work still has to be rational and direct. It can’t all be about brand-building and beautiful creative. So, both parts of "Feeling First" hold each other accountable, and that’s where it connects back to the work Les and Peter have done around "The Long and the Short of It”. It’s about thinking of brand and activation, emotion and rational information together, but in the right order.

Martin: We’re increasingly doing experience mapping for clients, looking at how people feel at every stage of the journey. It’s simple—how do you feel at each point? From there, we can smooth out the low points and amplify the highs. It helps us apply "Feeling First" throughout the customer journey and ensures we start every brand project by asking, "How do people feel about this brand? The category? The shopping experience?" It’s fundamental and sets us on the right path.

Les: Will, you stole my line about the "first"! But yes, absolutely. For instance, when we talk to people about John Lewis in credentials, they’re familiar with the big, emotional TV ads, but we also remind them of the 24/7 work we’ve done - online marketing, product marketing, new store openings - all functional and rational. But it’s all grounded in the emotional power of the brand. I think that’s key to our agency’s approach. We combine art and science. "Feelings" hook people in, but when clients come to us, I hope they’re pleasantly surprised by how much we can also deliver on the functional, rational, and analytical side, with the help of teams like adam&eveDDB Studios, covering everything under the hood.