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- [00:00]
A
This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes. That link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern, fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drives stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Cantor, visit try.kantar.com adage. Hi everyone, I'm Andrew Davidsberg, Contributing Editor at Ad Age and welcome to a custom episode of the Marketer's Brief Podcast. Today we are talking about how the best brands ensure their content works with Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of the Americas at Kantar. Kantar is the world's leading marketing data and analytics company. Jeff came up on the agency side and now sits at the intersection of data, AI and brand strategy, helping the world's leading brands stay ahead of the curve. Jeff, thanks so much for being here.
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B
Thanks for having me, Andrew. Excited to have a chat about brands and how we build them in a modern world.
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A
Amazing. We are as well. Let's, let's get into it. So this is an interesting time for marketing. Building brands and campaigns is more fragmented and even more complex than ever before. You came into Kantar from the agency side. From that vantage point, what's actually broken and how do marketing decisions get made today?
- [01:31]
B
So the world is changing. It's more fragmented than ever before. Consumers are inundated with choice. They're going to all different places to find out new information, new ways of buying and that has just made it more complex than ever before. And it's interesting coming from the agency side, you used to see that at like the highest levels of a marketing organization, the CMO probably might make just a handful of big bets a quarter. But now if you look at even in the last six to eight months, what has changed is really two things like the speed at which consumers make decisions, but also the speed at which the market is changing is forcing a whole bunch of new decisions. And so the volume of both decisions being made, but also signals in the market and ultimately can campaigns or touch points or brand experiences that have to go into the market are just more than ever before. So today this modern CMO is making hundreds of decisions a week with their team. Right? And that's the same team with a lot more risk but a lot more opportunity that we need to as an industry think about how we get ahead of how we don't only use our gut and Our instinct, but more importantly, we. We find a competitive edge. And I think the brands that are winning are the ones who have replaced A, big. We're only gonna do a few big things with really understanding how to win the moment when they need to win the moment, but also connecting those moments into something bigger. And then B, the ones that are thinking about how they arm themselves with the right signals, that they can see things happening, they can make decisions quickly, and ultimately those decisions ladder up into a bigger strategy that not fragmented. We've been thinking a lot about that and how we take all the data points that we've collected over many, many years that, candidly, I wish I had in my toolbox when I was on the agency side to find the linkage between the actions that a brand takes with the brand value that they build and ultimately what that does for the business. And so I think the real story is there's a gap between knowing and acting, and those that are able to bridge that gap are gonna be the ones that win. And we saw it before when I was on the agency side, and I'm seeing it even more now being at Kantara.
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A
Okay.
- [03:56]
B
Wow.
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A
It is amazing how quickly things are changing. You know, there's always been a tension between performance marketing and brand building. Does AI accelerate it? Does these. These new technologies, does that accelerate the tension or does it help to relieve it?
- [04:09]
B
Well, I think it's a little bit of both. Like, first and foremost, if you look back at some of the brand Z data that we have, brands that have strong equity but that also activate really well, are going to grow at about two and a half times the rate of brands that have weaker activation. And so finding the balance of both is really important. AI or no AI. And so then it depends on what brands point their AI at. Right. Right now, most AI deployment is probably still sitting in the performance lane. How do we generate more variants, optimize more touch points, attribute more clicks? And candidly, it's probably been pointed a little bit too much at efficiency rather than effectiveness. I'll come back to that in a second. And I think that's actually accelerating the tension because it's making the performance machine faster while brand building is still staying a little bit slower. And so the resolution in my mind and our mind comes when you point the AI not only at the performance side, but also at the brand side of the equation too, using it to predict the whether a piece of creative, let's just say, will actually build memory structures before you spend even $1, let alone $30 million against that, that piece of creative in the market. And that's what starts to close the loop. AI doesn't have to take a side in the debate. And like I said, oftentimes it's more focused on the efficiency side. It can start to think about, well, what's going to be more effective at building my brand. And then ultimately its job is to amplify whatever discipline you put behind it. Right. And I think something, some of our blueprint for brand growth data is pretty striking on this. Like brands that predispose people through creativity or through advertising or through the experiences that they have will drive nine times higher volume share. Right. They'll drive two times higher the average selling price and even like four times the likelihood to grow share in the future. Like that's the prize, not brand or performance. Right. So AI just pointed out performance optimization can't deliver that, just pointed at brand can't deliver that. But I pointed at predicting and protecting what we call meaningful difference. Are you meaningful to consumers? Do they think that you're different before your activation, before the media buyer, before the event or the sponsorship happens? That's where the magic, that's where the
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A
magic really becomes amazing. So the CMOs that are doing it, right, what are they doing?
- [06:33]
B
Yeah. So I think first and foremost there's a recognition that the definition of creative effectiveness in the CMO's mind is changing. It's pretty different. Like think back five years, most creative work and just to be really tactical or traditional about it, like creative testing tended to be a bit of a backward looking question in two ways. We've shot this commercial, let's just say now you know, is it good, is it bad? What should we expect out of it? Well, you've already created the content, so there's not a lot of ways to then manipulate that content. But also a lot of the effectiveness work was backward looking that it would be be testing its effectiveness after it ran. Did the ad work or did the sponsorship deliver? Right, you ran it, you measured it and maybe you adjusted for next time and today it's way too slow. And so the brands and the CMOs that are getting ahead are asking the questions, will it work? How can we make it better and why before it goes to market? And they're using AI based pre testing to make creative calls in like hours, not weeks. We're integrating some of our creative norms even into the AI workflows of some really interesting modern marketers where any time they generate something, be it a very big offline or TV or traditional Ad quote unquote, or AI generated real time performance advertising. It's checking to see the likelihood of performance, but not only conversion, also brand building. And so that bar has shifted too. It's no longer just about recall, which was kind of a bit of a proxy. It's about how reliable are you in being distinctive. Does the creative carry the brand's coded assets, we call them, in a way that registers, builds memory structures, thinks about the long term equity and the short term implications. And so to your question, like the CMOs that are getting ahead are the ones who have stopped treating creative effectiveness as like, we just gotta check the box to make sure we test it before we go to market to really think about it as a predictive output of both brand equity building and also performance. And we think about like the back to what I mentioned earlier about meaningful difference. If a brand and the work that you put into market is meaningfully different to more people, you're gonna see about five times the market penetration of the brands that are five times. Right. So that's the prize in creative effectiveness. And the CMOs that are getting ahead are really thinking about what is it gonna do to my brand and how am I gonna drive more penetration in the future.
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A
Amazing. So what does that look like in practice? You know, iterating on creative, getting the feedback before it goes wide. You're obviously not shooting a 30 second commercial, getting the feedback and then going and reshooting it.
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B
Right.
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A
How does that look in practice?
- [09:23]
B
Yeah, so in practice we're working with clients a lot more upstream than we used to, all the way, candidly in some instances, back to the idea for the product or the service itself itself. In saying, like, where's the white space in the market and what do you have to say about this product or service to actually land? Then we start to look at, okay, what are the attributes that will drive meaning? So the more emotional, how will drive trust, how will drive meaning in their lives? And on the different side, is it innovative, is it, is it distinct? Does it move the category forward before even a brief is written? So, so you'll have a better brief because we've used some of These tools, these AI technologies that are trained on 20 plus years of data from real human interactions on different products, different categories, different solutions in the market. Then you write a great brief and you say, okay, this is the story that we want to tell. This is how we think we can better connect with consumers. And then through that entire process we'll test those ideas, we'll be able to Test more ideas faster. Then our clients can get into production mode and start creating content, both big hero assets. But also as those hero assets become tens of thousands of pieces of micro content or experiences or personalization at scale that happen through say generative AI as those are being produced, like I said earlier, our clients workflows can ping that same database to say are we delivering back on the same meaning and the same, same difference that we talked about all the way at the earlier stages to make sure that actually what goes to market is what we believe would drive real enterprise growth for that client. And so it's not just about testing a piece of creative or understanding what it's going to do in market. It's looking at the entire end to end both content, product, service, supply chain or value chain and then the media value chain. On what do you need to say in the right format, in the right channel to deliver on the value proposition you wanted to bring to market all the way at the beginning?
- [11:29]
A
And what sort of success have you seen in this? Are the numbers showing?
- [11:32]
B
Yeah, massive amounts of success we can show at each stage of that journey, from early idea development through to understanding the value proposition through to creative ideation through to scaling through to media performance through brand equity. There's what we call a multiplier effect. They kind of compound on top of each other that the more you get ahead of the the actual work itself or what to your original question, what creative effectiveness may or may not be, it's just a compounding effect all the way through to building better, stronger brands that deliver better equity.
- [12:08]
A
Okay, so we're going to take a quick break here and then we're going to jump back into it. This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes. That link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drive stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Kantar, visit try.kantar.comadage and we're back. Thanks everyone for sticking around. We've got Jeff Greenspoon here from Kantar, excited to talk more about content. Let's jump into specifically creator marketing. It's become a major force. You get some tension though, giving creative control to a creator marketer. How, how do you balance the authenticity and brand discipline in what they're creating?
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B
Yeah, it's a, it's a question that's coming up every single day with our clients. And I think actually the framing of that tension is the trap that I think a lot of marketers fall into right now. Right. Authenticity and discipline aren't opposites. Right. Discipline is actually what lets the authenticity scale. And the brands that are getting this right, they're not really choosing between creator freedom and brand control. They're building briefs that are tighter on the strategic message, but a little bit looser in the execution of how the creator does that. So the creator's voice is the variable, the brand's distinctive assets are the core message and those are the constants. So I think critically they're measuring how does it make the brand look and feel and do we get across what we want to say, not just the engagement and the reach that a post can deliver. And so that can be told in the creator's voice with authenticity, but also have some of the brilliant basics of what we all know from about brand building. So whether the content, you know as an example, like is the content building the right brand memory structure, are we talking about things in the right order as maybe a brand led creative is just to use as an example. So if a creator posts lifts engagement but doesn't lift brand attribution, then it becomes a content cost, right? Not a brand investment. And just as an example, we, we have our creative database and how we used to test, call it like traditional creatives, as we were talking about earlier. We've now trained with tens of thousands of creator led ads across every single channel. So we can understand performance and short term objectives, long term objectives, brand building objectives, performance objectives, and we can do that at scale. And so for one client we tested like 5,000 pieces of creator led content and brand led content on the same platform. So we're able to look at like where and how does each drive a different type of either engagement or long term equity outcome or short term sales outcome. And not surprisingly, the brand recognitions and brand linkage scores were far lower than we saw obviously in the brand created ads. But they scored way higher in some of both the short term and the long term outcomes goals. And so that fundamentally changed how that marketer was going to brief their creators done how they executed. But in what needed to be true about the brand asset, what needed to be true about distinctiveness. And we showed them that if you just got the brand linkage score up by X amount of points, the return on investment that you make in this content would be 10, 20, 30 fold because you've taken the brilliant basics of what we all know about brand marketing with this authenticity, with the scale, with the brilliance of what creator marketing can do. And so if we start to think about our same framework of meaningful difference salient, what we call the MBS framework, which is accredited to be linked to the commercial outcome, then we can start to say with our clients, well, actually the discipline isn't a constraint on the creator, it's a test of whether the content is building brand, is building meaningful difference or, or it's just renting attention because we know that marketers don't want to just rent attention. And so if a creator post drives engagement, but doesn't move the brand attribution and distinctive asset linkage, then we can say, clearly, you've just bought reach, you haven't built the brand. How do we find a way to build the brand while using authentic voices at the same time?
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A
So when a company is truly getting it right, what tells you that they're ahead of the curve? And if a CMO took one thing from this conversation into Monday morning, what should it be?
- [16:57]
B
Yeah, so a few things I would look for. I think first, the marketing team and the insights or analytics team are not on different floors anymore. They're in the same meetings looking at the same data sets. The analytics is democratized across the organization. And oftentimes in companies that are not getting ahead, they're not talking about the same things or they're focused more on measurement than on analytics feeding strategy. I think that's really important and that starts to manifest itself in, well, maybe we're looking at these metrics for creative and these metrics for media and these metrics for experiences, rather than looking at a more modern playbook where we're looking at the brand and the performance more holistically and more upstream. I think the second is that creative or content, media, experiences and CRM are all getting the same amount of rigor and that those data sets are integrated, integrated with one another. I think for years there was a lot of math and rigor in media where creative was more about the art of it. But I think a lot of leaders now have closed that gap and are making much more connected and integrated decisions in what and how they want to go to market. And then probably third, that really, probably separates the best are the CMOs that can really answer the so what the why and what next for every dollar in the room. So not just about what was spent or what we got and how we got here, but here's what we learned. Here's what we want to do differently tomorrow, next week, next quarter, next year. Because I think modern marketing isn't a budget right? It's a learning system that consistently evolves. Look at the Brand Z 2026 rankings that we just published as an example. So the top 100 most valuable global brands in the world are now worth a combined $13.1 trillion. And that's up 22% year on year. Three additional brands have broken into the trillion dollar threshold simultaneously for the first time ever. And so if you look at the Brand Z data over time, actually the brands with the strongest equity have actually outperformed both the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index growing 504% since 2026. So that means that strong brands have actually grown their share prices 53% more than the S&P 500 over that same period of time. What does that mean? Obviously it means that modern marketing done well. It's not a cost center, it's not an expense item or an expense line. It's actually the single most valuable asset on the corporate balance sheet today. And I think the most modern CMOs, their CEOs, their CFOs and their boards know that and are investing into their brand power, investing into the future, while also thinking about how they think about short term performance and hitting their goals today.
- [19:55]
A
Jeff, thank you so much for your time today. Anything else you'd like to add?
- [19:59]
B
No, it's been great conversation. Thanks for having me and happy to come back anytime.
- [20:04]
A
Amazing. Thank you so much and thanks to everyone for listening. Be sure to subscribe to Marketer's Brief podcast on your favorite platform. We'll keep it brief, or at least brief brief enough for you to finish before your next meeting. Thanks for tuning in.