In "Deja Vu" we follow a man's journey through exotic nightclubs around the world and see a new Heineken bottle--the first redesign since 1946. It's the latest in a successful series of executions around #ArriveBIG.
The ad is directed by Snow White and the Huntsman's Rupert Sanders. The lead actor you may have seen in James Bond's Quantum of Solace. The costumes are courtesy of three-time Oscar Winner Colleen Atwood (Memoirs of a Geisha) and the music is from a 1971 Indian film by RD Burman. Indeed, it's a "very exotic commercial" as one YouTube commenter put it. Brands of mass scale can do this.
That's quite a production."While it may seem counter intuitive for agencies and clients alike to deliver and demand more audacious and potent creativity when there is an air of pessimism and caution, it is precisely what is needed. For the confidence that high altitude creativity builds around a brand whether with colleagues, the trade, opinion formers or customers is capable of kick starting growth and a powerful virtuous circle of activity."
There's some evidence to back this thought up.
A bankable way for a brand to grow is to spend ahead of its market share. IPA Databank and Nielsen compiled a study which Martin Weigel so effectively captured--as he often does--in this presentation.
According to that study, increases in share-of-voice spending can lead to market share growth of .5 percent per every 10 percentage point of excess share-of-voice spent. But whenever a creatively-awarded campaign was evaluated against the same metric it generated 11 times more share of growth per every 10 points of excess share-of-voice.
The IPA/Nielsen findings align with what Leo Burnett sees every year when they evaluate whether Cannes Lion winners also achieved their intended business success. The agency cites an 86 percent correlation between award-winning work and its effectiveness. (This is up from 78 percent in 1997.)
And both of these findings relate to a new University of Cologne study that compared 347 campaigns from 90 brands assessed by their levels of originality, elaboration and artistic value. The University found that a 1 percent increase in adspend translated into a .2 percent increase in purchases. But when the more creative ads were analyzed the increase bumped up to .3 percent.
All of this works together, of course--to grow more share and sell more stuff. That's what good creativity can do. For Heineken and others.