Ad Resonance in Focus: Balancing Creativity With Consistency for Brand Impact

Ad resonance is more than just another marketing metric; it’s a vital driver of crucial outcomes. An Advertising Week New York 2024 panel featuring experts from MarketCast, the Nissan Motor Company, Priceline and KnotSimpler dived into making marketing that really sticks with people.

Memorable advertising is the goal for any marketer – but if your ad sticks in people’s mind but people can’t remember your brand, has it had the desired impact?

MarketCast defines advertising resonance as whether the audience remembers your ad and can link it to your brand correctly. Recent research using MarketCast’s Brand Effect in-market measurement solution underscores its importance, showing highly resonant ads can drive improved consumer outcomes, including retail visits and sales, by nearly 5% (or several million dollars).

Amy Fenton, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at MarketCast, shared these results at Advertising Week New York 2024 and stressed: “We can directly link ad resonance to sales, to web visits – that’s how important it is.”

The good news for marketers is that a large part of achieving high ad resonance with your audience is within your power. The same MarketCast research also identified the key drivers of ad memorability, with ad creative quality accounting for nearly 42%.

“Creative quality is the number one driver of advertising breakthrough and proper brand attribution,” said Fenton. “Advertising resonance is all about the upper funnel. Audiences have to remember your ads, remember which brand is featured, and link it together.”

Fenton was joined on stage at Advertising Week by Josh Chasin, Principal at KnotSimpler, Paloma Stephens, Manager, Market Intelligence at Nissan Motor Company, Creative Director Perry Essig, and Lianne Sheffy, Senior Director, Brand Strategy and Consumer Insights at Priceline.

Branding in every moment

In a world where consumers are bombarded with countless messages, it’s easy for brands to get lost in the clutter. The solution? Make sure your branding cues in your ads are unmistakable and reinforce it at every touchpoint.

Nissan’s Paloma Stephens explained: “Ads in the Super Bowl must be innovative and very creative, but sometimes they don’t link to the brand or the message enough. You must be very careful with balancing creativity and the overall intention of the ad.

“It’s more than just having an impactful ad, because in a year’s time you may remember the ad, but you may not recall the brand or the message,” she concluded.

“It’s the one time of year where everyone’s paying attention to the creative,” agreed Perry Essig. “But for the rest of the year, there are other factors we have to consider – when the spotlight is off, people don’t pay as much attention to ensuring creative resonance.”

By contrast, Priceline’s Lianne Sheffy argued that creativity is a focus throughout the industry all year-long, but it’s rarely linked to ad resonance and the impact on the business that the specific creative execution creates.

She said: “It needs to be creativity and craft towards an end. That’s the part that sometimes gets lost.”

Consistency is key – but don’t forget novelty

One resounding message was clear: Consistency is vital for brand recognition and memorability with advertising.

As Fenton from MarketCast put it: “You need to have consistency in the branding and messaging, and sometimes you need creative cues to spark that – whether it’s the brand’s colors, a jingle or a spokesperson you’re using consistently.”

Fenton continues to emphasize that when it comes to celebrity spokespeople, brands need to ensure it’s not a “one and done” deal.

She said: “You need to be consistent for a period of time to really drive memorability and the part of the brand proposition the celebrity is representing as well.”

“You have to have common elements you follow through on again and again, but then you need to layer on something novel that shows you how well you know your audience,” said Essig. “The more specificity you can bring to things, the better chance you have of creating something with real resonance.”

Essig points to Skittles’ “Taste the Rainbow” campaign as an example that’s consistent year-over-year, but finds opportunities to add something new and fun to every iteration.

He added: “It’s highly branded, highly memorable, but fresh and novel every time. That’s the balance you’re going for.”

Don’t underestimate the role of the platform

In today’s fragmented media landscape, advertisers face the challenge of reaching consumers across multiple platforms — each with its own audience preferences, content formats, and engagement styles.

As Josh Chasin of KnotSimpler explained, understanding how to leverage these platforms is essential for driving ad resonance.

Chasin said: “There’s a lot of research that shows that the same piece of creative, the same consumer and different content environments all have an impact on the resonance of the ad.”

He continues to discuss how all three factors need to complement each other for maximum ad resonance, explaining how even the most creative ad will resonate better with someone who would potentially purchase the product than someone unrelated. “What you need is an alignment in resonance between the content, the creative and the consumer,” he adds.

Sheffy from Priceline expanded on this idea: “We know our Gen Z and Millennial travelers really gravitate towards undiscovered, hidden gem experiences. So, when we show up on platforms like social media, we make sure we are contextualizing Priceline in that environment.”

Measuring success throughout any marketing activity

Measuring ad resonance is not just about tracking immediate engagement, but also understanding how the ad resonates with its target audience over time.

As Stephens from Nissan Motor Company said, this is an ongoing process: “We work with MarketCast to define which creative elements are working in our campaigns, and they’ve helped us discover things like when our memorability is increasing, or learning to put branding cues every three seconds instead of five to improve recall.”

Sheffy added: “We leverage MarketCast to look at our creative performance over time to ensure that not only is ad resonance there, but it’s also building over time.”

“We’ve learned there are a few key levers that we can pull to make sure memorability shines for us, such as humor or making sure the brand is the hero of the story. It might sound obvious, but sometimes that can get clouded during the development process,” she said.

This approach stresses how successful advertising is often iterative. Brands must continually refine their strategies to increase resonance, memorability, and ultimately, their impact on consumers.

Ad resonance equals balancing consistency and relevance

In the end, ad resonance is about striking the delicate balance between creative consistency, innovation, and relevance.

From ensuring that every creative detail ties back to the brand, to leveraging platform-specific strategies that speak to diverse audiences, these experts have laid out a clear roadmap to ad resonance that any marketer can follow.

As the panel emphasized, it’s not just about being seen, it’s about being remembered and driving real-world outcomes.