I once worked for the CEO of a very large American retailer. I did various things for him and his team for years. And he was just about the best leader I ever saw. He had all the EQ, modesty and empathy traits they bang on about on LinkedIn. But he also had all the other, darker talents like being an occasional motherfucker, brutally single-minded and always right, which are usually absent from those kinds of posts.

But he was lousy at speeches. I must have watched him a dozen times over a 10-year period across at least three continents. And every time he talked to the troops he pretty much said the exact same thing. Zero variety. By the end, I could skulk around the back of the group being addressed and mouth exactly what he said and when he said it. It was a weird Achilles heel for a man of such gifts. I put it down to being stretched or selfish and moved on.

Then I read a great article in the Harvard Business Review about leadership essentially being repetition. Two researchers had shadowed a bunch of senior managers and found that the ones who said the same thing over and over had way more impact and ultimate success than those who changed their messages. I emailed my old boss the link and he sent a one-line response: “They are correct.”

I feel very much the same way about this week’s Grand Prix-winning IPA case study from McCain. I have competed against McCain before. I’ve uttered the immortal words “Jesus these fuckers are good!” and seen only sombre head nodding from McCain’s unfortunate rival. This week’s champion IPA case provides 10 years of evidence of why they are so good. It’s an incredibly impressive body of work.

But you also learn nothing new. There is a total absence of new thinking, introduced acronyms, innovative approaches or anything else even faintly unfamiliar. In the 39 pages it takes McCain and its peerless agency adam&eveDDB to explain how they held off private labels and German discounters, you encounter precisely nothing that has not been said and proven before. And it’s a masterpiece of effectiveness because of – not despite – this fact.

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No new thinking needed

We have lived through an astonishing period of advertising effectiveness over the past 15 years. Ever since Byron Sharp decided he was going for red for his book cover, marketing thinkers have assembled a quite extraordinary disciplinary playbook. And it’s one that looks nothing like the existing stuff that it replaced.

Of course, the majority of marketers know nothing about any of it. They inhabit the murkier corners of marketing, where training is rejected because change is held up as a circuit-breaker for learning anything from the past. AI and the ‘new consumer’ mean everything we once knew is pointless now. Better to be ignorant and untrained than waste time on irrelevant historical stuff.

But for those who know that is bullshit, who study, who respect marketing knowledge, who know the foundations do not change, the McCain case is a jewel sparkling with everything we have learned in these very fruitful 15 years.

People have said it could be the best single submission ever sent to the IPA. A Grand-Grand Prix winner, if you will. And it does all of this with not a shred of new thinking. And I adore it all the more for that single repetitive reason. It is a masterpiece painted from the most common-coloured paints.

We know, for example, that discounting is a fool’s game and ends badly almost every time. And we also know that brand building is its de facto opposite – a harder, better alternative that takes time and skill, but which always ends up being the better path than 20% off. The IPA case begins with McCain making this hard choice and committing to brand building after an extensive diagnosis of its perilous situation. It commits to its strategy for the long term.

In 39 pages, you encounter precisely nothing that has not been said and proven before. And it’s a masterpiece of effectiveness because of – not despite – this fact.

We also know that a handful of clear objectives are essential to strategic success. Most big brands ignore this step. They set annual market share or revenue targets, but don’t go to the trouble of articulating the key objectives that will drive the brand to these outcomes. In the IPA case, we see McCain develop a handful of ambitious new objectives that will drive their approach for years to come.

We know that pricing is an essential P, the more important analogue to the promotional P. Because if you intend to be successful with communications and brand, you’d best be ready to harvest that success with pricing at the other end. If you want to drive profits you need to master price. And know that brand equity is the greatest way to do that. McCain realised that even tiny increases in price can drive gigantic improvements in profitability. And, again, we see McCain start advertising and gradually increase its average price from £2 to £3 – with no detrimental impact on unit sales.

We know that the game of marketing is not about volumes but profitability. Those who look only to revenue usually go wrong. They build too many brands, run too many sales promotions and are too quick to do things in the short term because all these things increase revenues (but do so while hurting unseen profitability). Again, we see McCain recognise this and commit to brand investments to drive demand and lower price elasticity. We watch as McCain uses its campaign to reduce price sensitivity by a whopping 47% and eventually enjoy almost £40m a year in extra profit. Same potatoes, same chips, just better marketing.

We also know about emotion. That it’s the ultimate carrier drug for branding messages. Too often the ‘E word’ is assumed to mean mawkish fare – the orphan and the puppy find their way home, together, in the rain. In reality, marketers have a giant wheel of emotions at their disposal. From fear to humour to power to surprise. The way to achieve lower price elasticities is brand equity and the best route to get that brand equity is by telling emotional stories. Not the false ‘purpose’ piss. Genuine, British emotion that captures and builds from a pre-existing cultural truth. We learn how McCain worked out that the way that UK culture showed eating was a long way from how it really happened in most homes. We watch as they work out the collective emotional charge of chips. Yes, chips.

We know about positioning too. That most marketers have forgotten it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We have too many concepts. Too many words. And those words are totally full of marketing bullshit. We know that positioning has to be done within one page. Ideally half a page. And it needs to be what the customer wants, what the brand can deliver on in a way that is relatively different from competitors. And it’s probably going to be just one thing because customers, unlike brand managers, don’t have the time or mental space or involvement for more than one association for something as unimportant as chips. And we see McCain reject triangles and circles and articulate everything in a single sentence: ‘The joyful reality of family teatime.’ And we see the power of relative differentiation, as McCain moves from 28% agreement that it is the brand that brings people together to 61%, as advertising makes the tight positioning come true.

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Media and creative combined

We also know from multiple studies running back a decade or more that – despite what countless reports have claimed – there is no superior advertising medium. That media diversity always works better than the communications apartheid of one major channel. That digital and traditional work better together than apart. That digital-first is the dumbest idea in marketing. That TV is not dead, and remains the great integrator. That a campaign that stays consistent across diverse media channels works best. And we see McCain do just that, with outdoor, social, radio and TV all doing their part.

But we also know that the advertising spend has to be right. And then the allocation of that spend between brand and activation must also be right. And we see McCain’s media agency PHD getting all that perfectly. How the campaign pushes 60% of that spend into long-form, long-term brand-building efforts. Not neglecting the shorter activations for the remaining 40% of the investment.

We also know that media is not the answer on its own. That without world-class creative execution all will be lost. That shit creative will kill the best media planning. And we see Adam&eveDDB at their very best, taking McCain’s clear positioning and objectives and turning them into advertising magic. We witness the reason that in-house agencies and AI generators will never beat two incredibly unreliable humans who work late and use naughty words. We see all the careful executional choices in these ads that consumers always miss. The perfect editing. Casting. Music. Voiceover. Slogan.

We also see a focus on mass marketing. In yesteryear, we would have seen some over-clever bit of segmentation for the brand campaign. Pictures of six or seven different types of chip buyer. That’s all gone. McCain’s media and message is aimed at every British person because the sophisticated mass market for chips is about as unsophisticated as it gets. We all eat chips. There is a slight skew to mums in the media buying. But ultimately this is mass marketing for brand building exemplified.

And we know that all these preceding aspects of advertising work best over time. System1’s Andrew Tindall is all over this at the moment and is calling it “creative consistency”. Keep doing what you do and don’t change it. Keep the team. The agency. The position. The codes. The strategy. And. Just. Keep. Doing. It. We see that with McCain, which has spent the last decade essentially saying the same thing to the same people about the same thing. And we see McCain’s impact and results growing incrementally over time as more spend and more reinforcement of the same message layers on top of itself.

Everything done perfectly

It takes a decade to do anything properly effective in brand management. McCain is one of the few brands that got the memo and have the patience to see it through. And which have absolutely no need to change anything for at least another 30 years from here. They will just have to master the challenge of new people, new agencies and new ideas getting in the way.

I learned not a single new thing from the IPA Grand Prix winner this week. Like a bowl of perfectly cooked chips, this was just what I wanted and just what I expected. But the joy of seeing everything done perfectly made this a salutary lesson in how to do advertising.

Do yourself a favour: go onto the IPA website, pay the 50 quid for the case, and learn nothing new with me. Better still, join the IPA and learn nothing new for only £25 as a member. We live in amazing effectiveness times and McCain is a brilliant exemplar of what all brands could, and should, do.

Mark Ritson teaches advertising effectiveness as part of his acclaimed Mini MBA in Marketing. That section is only one 10th of the total content. The course runs again in April 2025 and places are already filling. Both for individual marketers and organisations.