How brands grow by holding on to what works
If you work in marketing today, chances are you’re being asked to do more with less. Less budget. Less time. Fewer people. And somehow: more channels. In a world obsessed with efficiency, long-term effectiveness is more important than ever. At the UBA Media Date, Andrew Tindall shared new research on Compound Creativity. Evidence showing how the most effective brands achieve long-term growth by doing something seemingly simple: sticking to what works.
The central idea
Creativity doesn’t just drive effectiveness, it compounds over time when you build on ideas consistently. And we now have robust data to prove it.
At System1, we’ve tested and tracked the emotional impact of over 150.000 ads globally, using our Star Rating to predict real-world business outcomes. This year, we dug deep into five years of UK and US ad performance to identify what separates the consistently great from the forgettable. Matching these to IPA and Effie business and brand outcomes. The results are both reassuring and provocative.
What we found:
- Across every sector and size of brand, ads with high creative consistency outperform those that chase novelty.
- We’ve actually defined consistency in three different ways. Foundations, culture and execution. All matter, but all do different things.
- The most consistent brands report dramatically more very large brand effects, including 7x more differentiation.
- Familiarity breeds contentment. Advertising from the most consistent brands becomes more liked over time, and more distinctive. Whereas ads from inconsistent brands see less and less emotion.
- This compound business results. We see the more consistent a brand is, they exponentially report more business effects (like profit, ROI and share gain).
We found this held true regardless of category. Whether beer or banking, tech or toilet paper, consistency compounds creativity.
Counterculture in today’s marketing climate
This may sound obvious. But look around. In today’s marketing culture, consistency is countercultural. We’re hooked on rebrands, restructuring, and resets. Every 18 months, a new CMO arrives to change the strategy. Agencies get changed. Brand guidelines are rewritten. Fluent devices quietly disappear. But the research is clear: every time we hit reset, we wipe out compound growth.
There’s a better way. And we’ve seen it work. In our research, we identified brands like Compare the Market, McDonald’s, and Geico in the US that have used the same brand characters for over a decade. Each new campaign doesn’t just work on its own: it builds on all the memory structures of the last. And when brands do change things up, the most successful do it fluently. Guinness’ most recent work is a perfect example. Visually fresh, but rooted in the same platform and feeling they’ve built for years.
A real business imperative
Consistent creative isn’t just creatively effective, it’s efficient. These brands don’t need to pay for consumers to “get” the campaign every time. They’re building with memory, not against it.
This isn’t about doing the same thing forever.It’s about building smart, distinctive memory structures and then evolving them with creativity and meaning. We call it Fluent Familiarity: change 20%, but keep 80% the same. Think of it like a pop song remix. The beat is familiar, but the energy is new.
Why it matters now
As attention gets scarcer and media gets noisier, we can’t afford to throw everything at the wall. Creative consistency isn’t old-fashioned. It’s a competitive advantage. In fact, in today’s fragmented landscape, it might be the only thing cutting through.
