Ads falling short of expectations? The real ROI is hiding in plain sound: creative. New analysis from Cumulus Media Chief Insights Officer Pierre Bouvard proves that the story, not the spreadsheet, drives sales, and for radio, emotion outperforms all algorithms.
Nielsen’s Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness studied 450 campaigns across TV and digital to show creative drove 49% of sales impact, while brand strength contributed 21%, reach 14%, targeting 11%, and recency just 5%. Yet marketers don’t seem to believe it.
According to Advertiser Perceptions, most think targeting drives 25% of sales lift and creative only 21%. The truth is the opposite: data precision helps, but emotion and storytelling are what make ads stick.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis found that emotional campaigns outperform rational, message-heavy ones across every brand metric: awareness, trust, differentiation, and image. Emotional campaigns generated major brand awareness gains 37% of the time, compared to just 8% for rational ones. For sales and market share, emotional creative more than doubled the impact.
That’s backed by The Creative Dividend from Effie Worldwide and System1, which examined 1,200 campaigns across the US and Europe. Emotional, broadly targeted storytelling consistently drove greater profits than narrowly targeted campaigns.
Humor plays a major role, too. System1’s Test Your Ad Pro found that funny ads create up to five times more market share growth than serious ones. The more amusement an ad delivers, the more effective it becomes.
In audio, creative discipline is measurable. Nielsen’s Podcast Brand Effect Study found that recall jumped from 59% to 77% when a brand was mentioned five or more times during a spot. Early branding within the first two seconds was especially effective. System1 and TikTok’s The Long and Short (Form) of It showed a similar effect: when a sonic logo or jingle appeared in the first two seconds, brand awareness rose 191%. Visual identifiers alone lifted awareness by just 10–30%.
Kantar Millward Brown data shows that the fewer the messages, the higher the recall. Ads with four points had less than half the recall of single-message creative. Simplicity clarifies the story and strengthens memory, especially in short-form radio.
In short, when creative is emotional, human, and distinctive, it builds brands. When it isn’t, it just fills airtime. The fix for radio ads isn’t better targeting; it’s better storytelling.
The full report is available via the Audio Active Group.
Ohhh if we only had Dick Orkin back.
Comments are closed.