“I could have the Rolling Stones playing in my backyard…”

“But if nobody knows, then it’s an absolute disaster.”

Wise words spoken to me by a venue operator many years, and an entirely different career ago. And yet, while he was talking bums on seats, it’s the same for every brand, every awareness campaign, every product, service or offer. Inventing sliced bread is just the first problem solved.

Why I bring this up is that at the start of Mark Ritson’s recent Cannes talk, he name-drops a bunch of marketers and their theories. As a creative, not a marketer, I knew a few (Binet & Field and Kevin Keller) and a bit of their work, but not all and not enough. But I want to, because these are the people behind the research that explains why some brilliant creative drives business results and other brilliant creative just...doesn't.

So, I looked them up (well, I used Claude AI to), to summarise and to highlight their thinking to help prove (and understand) what makes creativity effective, not just beautiful. Because for any creative who really loves what we do, an Effie beats a Lion every time.

Lesson 1 - John Philip Jones figured out why do some brilliant campaigns fail while mediocre ones succeed?

Often, it's not the creative, it's the maths.

Jones talks about share of voice. If you want your brand to grow, you need to spend more on advertising relative to your size than your competitors do. What that means is:

• Large brands can spend less on advertising relative to their market share (because they’ve spent a lot already to get there).

• Small brands must overspend to be heard and recognised.

• There's a predictable relationship between how much you spend (share of voice) and how much you sell (share of market).

The best insights always seem obvious once someone points them out, which is exactly why it took decades for anyone to see it.But that's precisely what made Jones' work revolutionary, he saw the pattern that was hiding in plain sight.

Why this matters to us as creatives: The best campaign in the world won't work if it doesn't get enough media behind it. We can create something amazing, but if the budget isn't there to support it properly, we're setting ourselves up to fail.

Or as someone once told me back in my festival and event days, “I could have the Rolling Stones in my backyard, but if nobody knows…”

It's not about making the work smaller or safer. It's about understanding the reality of what we're working with and making creative that can punch above its weight when it needs to.

For the Pitch Collective: We partner with media experts because media strategy is just as important as creative strategy, because brilliant work needs the right support to actually be effective.

And with our model, you’ll always have more to spend on media.

#ShareOfVoice #CreativeReality #ThePitchCollective