Keep this essay by Mark Ritson in your back pocket.

For context: Sales Activations evoke an immediate response from the market. And Brand Building builds enduring change in human behavior.

TLATSOI showed that campaigns that build brands also perform better at driving sales. And campaigns that are great at driving sales (activation campaigns) aren’t as effective at building brands.

The data provided in this essay makes the case even stronger.

These are the most important points from the essay that I want to remember:

• The lines between brand and activation campaigns are blurry and one knows for sure where the boundary is. So we oversimplify.
• The Long and The Short term effects of advertising are media agnostic. Do not oversimplify channel planning and separate channels into The Long and The Short buckets.

The essay provides empirical evidence that ads that score high on driving immediate sales response are less likely to strengthen long-term market share growth.

But ads that score fairly high in predicting long-term growth (ads that build brands) also score high in driving immediate sales response.

This is empirical data gathered through a panel where the ad sets (however large) are still limited. And out in the real world, most brands aren’t producing great advertising. So, you might say that your experience of running a brand-building campaign doesn’t match this data.

Well, that’s a good thing.

Because now we have a benchmark of what good looks like.

Let’s start using these improved criteria for evaluating how well our creatives are at driving short-term and long-term effects.