Marketing Communications

212 CHAPTER 7 ADVERTISING

Measuring the return on investment of advertising campaigns is a long-standing issue with marketing professionals.

A clear link between advertising expenditures and financial performance is often difficult to establish. Taking it one

step further, although there is a common belief that advertising creativity is an essential element of advertising

success, the link between creativity in advertising and advertising effectiveness is not an obvious one. The

evidence of an impact of creative advertising on the bottom line of companies is anecdotal at best. In the USA,

the Clio Awards recognise advertising excellence worldwide in mass media, integrated media, design and on the

Internet. The campaigns are judged by a jury of industry experts. Many thousands of campaigns are submitted

each year. The winners are made public during an awards ceremony lasting three days. It can be assumed that

winning a Clio signals a firm’s quality, effectiveness and innovativeness in advertising, and that this information

reaches all the stakeholders quickly. In a study of 126 Clio Award-winning companies that were also traded on the

New York Stock Exchange, the relationship between winning Clio Awards and the evolution of stock price was

examined. The general conclusion of the study was that, in terms of adding value to the winning firms, Clio Awards

did not seem to generate any substantial attention from the investment community. The only exception was the

group of 16 food advertisers for which a cumulative excess return of 2% was measured. Surprisingly, some of

the results seem to indicate that winning an award affects stock prices negatively, for instance for retailers and

manufacturers. This may reflect the financial market’s bias against perceived overspending on advertising, or

even the prejudice that spending too much on advertising is wasteful. The study illustrates that establishing a

relationship between advertising efforts, let alone creative ones, and financial results is not obvious.^28

RESEARCH INSIGHT

The relationship between winning a Clio Award and firm profitability

Creative appeals

P&G had a hit in 2010 with its award-winning Old Spice ad ‘ The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’, generating almost

42 million views (so far). Who does not remember the atypical ad language ‘Hello ladies. Look at your man. Now

back to me. Now back at your man. Now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady scented body

wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he is me’ going on, showing that anything is possible when a

man smells like Old Spice and not a lady.

The success of the first commercial was followed by a successful second ad, and another successful ad, etc. The

ads quickly went viral and the brand surprised everybody by posting dozens of improvised scenes of the main actor

giving personal responses to everyone who had commented on the Old Spice ads via social networks. All this led

to a sales increase in Old Spice products of 170%.

Building on what the public came to expect from Old Spice, P&G’s 2012 ad again excels in creativity and originality

while keeping on stressing the power of Old Spice. This time, the Old Spice man takes over ads for other P&G

products such as Bounce and Charmin. The Charmin ad, for example, features the Old Spice man’s head bursting

BUSINESS INSIGHT

Too powerful to stay in its own commercial

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