Festival of Marketing 2024: Insights from our partners

Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing is an unmissable event in the industry calendar, an unrivalled source of knowledge to help marketers grow their skills and impact, and build better brands. This year’s Festival in October didn’t disappoint, with content sessions and exhibitors delivering inspiration, fresh perspectives and hands-on learning opportunities.

Below, we’ve gathered together some of the key insights from the Festival of Marketing 2024’s partners.

1. Earning attention across the full media mix

Brands should take a holistic approach to attention in marketing and balance the use of high- and low-attention channels, rather than solely pursuing high-attention formats. Data presented by Kantar at the Festival shows that campaigns using five or more channels score more than three times higher on a brand impact index than those using just one or two channels. The Festival session highlighted HSBC’s success in effectively blending lower-attention channels like out-of-home and digital into their campaigns by customising the creative execution to each channel and telling bold, connected stories across them.

“We really took the channel seriously. We thought about where things were in the customer journey… and really honed that across each and every site,” said HSBC UK’s director of brand marketing, Sarah Mayall, speaking about its ‘We are not an island’ outdoor ads. “We went from something that wasn’t really landing… to something that really took off.”

Overall, the audience heard, a balanced, creative and brand-centric approach beats focusing on just one or two big, attention-grabbing formats.

2. AI’s double-edged sword

AI is seen as both the top priority and the top challenge for marketers in 2024, according to Salesforce’s ninth State of Marketing survey, which gathers insights from nearly 5,000 marketers across 29 countries each year. Only 41% of respondents classed as ‘high-performing’ marketers are fully satisfied with their current AI strategy, the Festival of Marketing audience heard. The top concerns marketers name around AI are data exposure, a lack of data, a lack of use cases, inaccurate outputs and issues around intellectual property.

“What we found in the report is there’s massive headroom for growth,” said Salesforce strategic digital account executive Bhavesh Pau, presenting the findings. “I found this quite staggering, because whenever I talk to any marketing function or even IT function, they [say AI is] great to have from a market perspective, but actually, we’re not really adopting it at the moment.”

The search for a unified analytics approach is also high on marketers’ agenda, with respondents naming an average of nine different data collection touchpoints for their brands.

3. What it means to be a ‘generous’ brand

‘Brand generosity’ increases purchase intent by 50% and preference by 54%, according to new research by agency Fold7, the results of which it presented at the Festival. Fold7’s Generosity Impact Report, which surveyed 2,000 consumers in partnership with YouGov, found that the top three definitions of brand generosity are being honest with customers, treating employees well, and rewarding customer loyalty.

Using principles from psychology and behavioural economics, Fold7 chief strategy officer Yelena Gaufman explained the consumer insight behind the findings and how brands can harness them to convey generosity. For example, with honesty being key, admitting flaws can boost brand credibility thanks to the ‘stolen thunder’ effect, she said – an example being when Carlsberg changed the recipe of its beer and admitted it was ‘Probably not the best beer in the world’, contrary to its famous advertising slogan.

Gaufman also highlighted how important internal practices are to brands being seen as generous: since these take time, money and effort to instil in an organisation, consumers see them as valuable signifiers. She noted that employees are brand ambassadors, so if they don’t feel the brand’s values, customers won’t either. “Walk the walk. Preach what you preach but practice it first. It starts from the inside.”

4. Steps to creating the ‘perfect poster’

Interflora’s out-of-home advertising was underperforming, according to campaign manager James Arbuckle, until it began applying creative best-practice principles that helped transform its approach, driving 72% growth in attention, double the brand attention and a jump in effectiveness ratings during creative testing.

Arbuckle appeared at the Festival of Marketing alongside JCDecaux marketing director Rajvi Kantaria and System1 SVP Andrew Tindall, in a session that presented nine guidelines for the “perfect poster”, backed by data on attention, brand recall and emotional impact from JCDecaux, System1 and Lumen. The advice included being ‘brand-bold’, using simple colours and ‘fluent devices’, showcasing large product shots, and optimising copy length and call-to-action size.

For Interflora, the key learnings were to experiment, avoid category conventions, and ruthlessly edit creative to maximise impact in the two-second OOH exposure window. “You get two seconds of attention, if you’re lucky,” said Arbuckle. “I’d encourage you to flash it up for two seconds and ask a colleague to comment on it, because by having that discipline, you’ll force yourself to be more creative.”

5. How to create growth through simplification

Suresh Balaji is known fondly by colleagues as the “kitten killer of Gresham Street”. The Lloyds Banking Group CMO has earned a reputation at headquarters for closing down unnecessary pet projects as he pursues simplicity in the bank’s marketing transformation, focusing on experience and brands, commercialisation and capability building. “Simplicity, from a transformation perspective, is to have absolute clarity,” Balaji told fellow panellists at a Festival session hosted by agency Siegel+Gale. “Simplicity is also sacrificing a lot.”

Ericsson CMO Stella Medlicott described her company’s shift from a consumer brand to a business-to-business offering, emphasising the need to make its technology “meaningful” through simplified messaging to C-level executives in a variety of industries, as well as to governments. “A lot of the time, marketers will just talk about what they want to talk about,” she said, arguing the necessity of “spinning that around” to communicate what customers care about.

Ultimately, as Siegel+Gale’s head of strategy Rishi Dhir summarised, in the midst of technological complexity “simplicity emerges as a powerful tool that can drive growth for businesses and clarity for consumers”.

6. Earning ‘quality’ attention by combining physical and digital

Attention is a crucial marketing metric, as it drives brand awareness and consideration among consumers. Meanwhile, a deluge of content and advertising is making it challenging for brands to stand out. Against this backdrop, Marketreach convened a panel at the Festival to highlight the importance of cutting through consumer inertia and capturing attention, by thoughtfully blending digital touchpoints with physical – particularly mail.

When the creative approach is authentic and appropriate for the brand and customer journey, mail can drive trust, the panel noted, while its tactility can evoke powerful memories as well as long-term engagement. “It’s also about the quality of attention. It’s not just spending time looking at something, it’s also about how it makes you feel,” said panellist Nishma Patel Robb, founder and CEO of Glittersphere and former senior brand director of Google UK.

Mail can be effectively integrated with digital channels through the use of technology, allowing brands to bridge online and offline experiences, the panel pointed out. They also explored the creative potential of mail, sharing examples of campaigns that made use of personalisation, augmented reality and community-building to create memorable experiences.

7. Brands’ wasteful approach to marketing assets

Almost half of all marketing assets are wasted. That was the contention of Henry Locatelli, business development director, enterprise, for Extreme Reach (XR), who revealed that 48% of assets delivered through XR’s global distribution platform never get used. As well as the wasted production costs this entails, marketers’ inefficiency is also leading to unnecessary impacts on the environment from the processes involved in making unused assets.

XR monitors the use of around 600 million unique marketing, advertising and creative assets in a year, and also found only 17% of assets are accessible, which means it’s unlikely that people with vision or hearing impairment will be able to engage with them. “It’s probably the lowest-cost opportunity for any brand to increase the ROI of a campaign,” Locatelli told the Festival of Marketing audience. “You’re literally gaining access to a larger audience without any additional media spend.”

Locatelli pointed out there are financial risks if brands aren’t keeping a close eye on where assets are used or ensuring talent licences are valid for the markets and advertising formats where brand ambassadors are appearing in campaigns. Brands can also make best use of their relationships with talent by monitoring where and when particular creatives are over- and under-performing, and the markets where they are being under-utilised.

8. An introduction to ‘Brand Momentum’

Research and insight agency Vision One took to the Festival of Marketing to advocate for ‘Brand Momentum’ as a key concept for brands and boardrooms in driving growth. Rooted in new research, it aims to quantify the ‘energy’ created by a business through its people, innovation and marketing.

In summary, the momentum theory suggests brands that are seen as growing attract consumers like a magnet, while those that appear stagnant or declining repel them. Using Brand Velocity Score (BVS), marketers can track and predict consumers’ perceptions of the trajectory a brand is on, thus enabling them to shape their organisation’s outlook and future direction.

The theory and BVS metric are outlined in a new book called Brand Momentum, written by Vision One CEO Tony Lewis, which was launched at the Festival of Marketing. The book also cautions marketers against obsession with short-termism, recommending instead that they focus on building and reinforcing brand perceptions.