Big consumer brands have always used ad creative to generate buzz in crowded markets. For proof, see everything ever written about Super Bowl advertising. The competition among brands to produce the most talked about game-time commercials has become a quintessential American marketing phenomenon.
Yet smart brands know creativity goes way beyond advertising. Apple—the world’s most valuable brand for three years running—is a prime example. The company’s devotion to design and creative innovation permeates its entire product line and customer experience, including distinctive store designs and sophisticated packaging. Apple even transformed a 2023 sustainability report into a humor-inflected video with an A-list actor, deploying production value reminiscent of a Super Bowl ad to deliver something a less design-conscious brand would have conveyed with a slide presentation or a static document.
Despite the unmistakable importance of creativity for brand development, the image of a Don Draper-style creative genius designing ads based on gut instinct has faded in the era of digital marketing. Instead, CMOs have become data-obsessed, especially when it comes to performance and growth marketing. The pendulum is just beginning to swing back toward the middle, with companies turning to strong, innovative, and sometimes back-to-basics approaches for ad creative, supported by state-of-the-art techniques for data analytics.
Executives from high-growth brands are more likely than peers at lower-performing organizations to view creativity as a fundamental catalyst for long-term success, according to a 2023 Deloitte study. In my role as Growth and Digital Marketing Practice Lead at Toptal, I hear from companies of all sizes that are looking for ways to make the most of their creative and unlock new growth opportunities.
Here, I offer five fresh marketing ideas that showcase how brands can combine the best of design thinking with today’s data-driven marketing capabilities to reach their target audiences more effectively. For forward-looking companies, creative and data don’t exist in silos; they reinforce each other to impressive effect, building brand awareness and driving demand.
Using Analog Ads for Digital Products
Generating awareness—let alone demand—in a competitive market is always challenging. That’s particularly true in today’s artificial intelligence (AI) frontier, where B2B SaaS players are clamoring for attention amid a rising wave of product innovation and competition. That’s one reason the team at Writer—a company delivering full-stack generative AI (Gen AI) solutions for businesses—supplemented their digital demand generation tactics with an out-of-home (OOH) marketing campaign: In 2024, Writer, based in Silicon Valley, began promoting its brand and services with prominent billboards in New York City and the Bay Area, including one on US Route 101 between downtown San Francisco and the airport.
“It turns out that the 101 is a prestige placement, and people notice,” says Andrew Racine, Writer’s VP of Demand Generation and Growth, whom I spoke with to learn about the campaign. “We get comments all the time at trade shows from customers and prospects that they’ve seen and like our billboards. The campaign has really allowed us to punch above our weight class,” he says.
Racine, a B2B marketing veteran, concedes that it’s hard to demonstrate clear attribution between such a campaign and closed deals. But Writer’s clients often nod to the OOH campaign as a factor in introducing (and re-introducing) them to the brand, including New American Funding CMO Andrew Strickman: “I was familiar with Writer in part because of the phenomenal job with outdoor advertising billboards along Highway 101 in the Bay Area, where I live,” he said in an interview with the company.
Writer is far from alone in embracing traditional media in a digital world. Billboards are having a moment, and for good reason, as are OOH campaigns more broadly. A 2023 report by Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) revealed that 76% of US adults had taken action on a mobile device (e.g., visiting the brand’s website, accessing a promotion code) after viewing an OOH advertisement, and an impressive 43% had made a mobile purchase. Moreover, a new AI company like Writer can more easily stand out from the competition on a billboard, since tech companies are less likely to invest in OOH ads than industries such as healthcare and consumer banking, according to the same OAAA report.
It’s also becoming easier to measure brand and conversion impact with OOH advertising. Geotargeting technology makes it possible to gauge the real-life number of daily impressions a given billboard receives. Marketers can also build trackable calls-to-action into the experience through QR codes, custom links, and other techniques. These data-driven measurement options are beginning to place old-school OOH marketing efforts squarely in the digital age.
Inspiring IRL Behavior Through Digital Experiences
While OOH brand activations use analog creative to inspire digital action, brands are also using digital experiences to inspire in real life (IRL) behaviors. Crypto company Coinbase’s 2022 Super Bowl ad is an excellent example. The concept was simple: The commercial consisted of a QR code bouncing across the screen for 60 seconds—long enough to interrupt viewing parties, prompting people to pull out their phones and engage with the QR code in real time. The ad drove more than 20 million visits to their site in one minute and propelled Coinbase’s app to the No. 2 position on the App Store. More importantly, it illustrated how a simple yet out-of-the-box marketing idea can inspire action, even during one of the biggest social events of the year.
Fusing the digital and physical worlds as Coinbase did is one approach brands can take. Another popular digital experience that can lead to IRL purchase behavior is the use of augmented reality (AR) for branded “try-ons.” Warby Parker is among the successful adopters of the tactic, enabling customers to try on glasses virtually through their app before requesting physical pairs to try on at home or making a purchase.
More recently, eyewear maker Marcolin launched a 3D and AR advertising campaign for its GUESS eyewear brand, enabling users to view 3D renderings of products and try on virtual pairs without downloading an app. The interactive call to action—Try On—prompted viewers to pause what they were doing to engage with the brand’s ad. The results of the creative campaign were impressive, with the virtual try-on engagement rate exceeding benchmarks by 44%, according to the digital advertising platform behind the ads, demonstrating the power of combining strong digital creative with interactive experiences.
Creating Shareable Content From First-party Data
Companies that build and own their software platforms have access to considerable amounts of data about their customers, enabling them to create new kinds of engaging digital experiences. Take Spotify and Pinterest, who use the first-party data generated on their platforms to wow existing users and attract new ones.
Most Spotify subscribers can remember the first time they received Spotify Wrapped—the entertaining and interactive end-of-year recap highlighting the artists and songs the subscriber listened to most. Spotify provides a personalized playlist along with graphics that users can easily share on social media, allowing friends to compare and talk about their top streams. Spotify also aggregates the top trends from around the music world into a substantial body of content that drives user growth through social shareability and a supporting OOH campaign.
Since its 2016 launch, Spotify Wrapped has swiftly gained traction. In 2017, 30 million Spotify users accessed the feature; four years later the overall engagement number had quadrupled, and users shared nearly 60 million Spotify Wrapped stories and images on social media. In 2023, more than 225 million users accessed the content. This kind of growth is a testament to how the company’s creative graphics and data visualizations continue to make the feature a phenomenon.
Where Spotify Wrapped reflects on the previous year, Pinterest uses its platform to look forward. The brand analyzes user data to offer a trends forecast for the upcoming year with a feature called Pinterest Predicts. Not only does the report endear Pinterest to its legions of users, but—with an accuracy rate of 80%, according to Pinterest—the predictions also offer ways for advertisers to engage deeply with Pinterest users by producing content tailored for emergent trends.
Many brands possess data that could be interesting or useful to their customer bases. If this is true for your company, remember that the data itself is only a starting point; the real value comes in creatively packaging the analysis with memorable visuals and an alluring platform to build engagement and demand.
Brands that build authentic community enjoy rewards in the form of customer loyalty and advocacy. Community engagement can also benefit brands in ways that support institutional creativity and innovation if they’re willing to deepen the relationship with customers and enthusiasts.
Toy giant LEGO, for one, consistently builds products and experiences that inspire ardent fandom. One way the company does this is by integrating customers into product development and marketing through its LEGO Ideas platform, a community where user-submitted designs are voted on for potential creation and distribution by the company. Where many brands struggle to engage with customers authentically, LEGO has embraced open innovation with this community platform, which it first launched as a crowdsourcing pilot in 2008.
By 2023, LEGO Ideas had grown into a community of more than 2.8 million customers who develop, share, and discuss concepts for new LEGO sets. If a citizen-designed set earns 10,000 votes from other community members, LEGO designers will review the concept and potentially select it for commercialization. When that happens, the original designer receives 1% of the top-line revenue for their product—a substantial payoff. But how LEGO treats participants whose ideas aren’t successfully commercialized is equally important: Those loyalists get a second chance to pursue development through a crowdfunding competition, simultaneously raising their profile in the community. Overall, LEGO Ideas invites users to participate in the creative success of a brand they love—a rewarding experience for fans and the company.
If your brand is looking for strategic business growth opportunities, you can explore a host of creative concepts that engage customer communities, simultaneously fostering loyalty and unlocking new revenue streams.
Doubling Down on Content Creation
In a world where content can be created cheaply and instantly by AI, quality content is still king. A notable if hard-to-replicate example is Netflix, a brand that evolved from a DVD distributor into one of the most prolific and highest-spending content creation companies on Earth, to the tune of $20 billion in 2024. Meanwhile, online-retailer-turned-content-juggernaut Amazon is projected to spend about $22 billion on content over the same period.
Of course, Amazon and Netflix are striving to produce award-winning entertainment, whereas companies in other sectors compete with reams of lower-quality content—and AI is poised to make the content clutter even worse. For companies willing to build a differentiated publishing operation, though, such digital clutter presents an opportunity. With an abundance of new tools available, brands of all sizes can invest in their content strategy. In the B2B sector, where content investments tend to be lower, Hubspot has achieved phenomenal success with its blogs, which generate millions of visits per month and serve as a primary lead generator for the company. This is thanks to a strong organic traffic strategy, freelance copywriters, and constant SEO vigilance.
The Collaborative Fund, an investment organization based in New York, offers another example of content marketing success. In 2016, the fund hired an investment journalist from the Motley Fool named Morgan Housel. His high-traffic blog posts for the Collaborative Fund helped to establish the organization’s reputation in the investing world, and when Housel published the bestselling book The Psychology of Money in 2020, both Housel and the Collaborative Fund became household names among investors. In July 2024, the book still ranked on Amazon Charts, the top 20 weekly sellers on the platform. While it’s impossible to quantify the deal flow generated through such content investments, the Collaborative Fund has experienced remarkable wins in recent years. In 2024, it raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund despite a flat VC market.
Another company that has committed meaningfully to content development is Patagonia. The company’s purpose-driven content strategy inspires environmental action through documentary video content. The cinematography is exceptional, often resonating with Patagonia’s target audience on an emotional level. These creative marketing efforts have garnered awards and accolades, along with vigorous brand advocacy that reinforces core business units, allowing the brand to donate more than $230 million to environmental causes as of January 2024. For a company devoted to a double bottom line, Patagonia’s content strategy generates demand that supports both its purpose and profit.
For other brands vying for attention in a crowded marketing landscape, producing unique, high-quality articles, videos, and other content is still immensely valuable. You don’t need to have a multimillion- or multibillion-dollar marketing budget to develop useful, meaningful content that builds affinity and drives demand for products and services.
Creative Marketing Demands Top-notch Talent
Many of the creative concepts outlined in this article demand experienced talent and niche skill sets that you may not have within your marketing team. That doesn’t mean you should dismiss any of these potential strategies out of hand. Finding talent that understands the balance between creative and data, and digital and analog execution, has become a strategic imperative, and the market is rising to meet demand.
There are a number of time-tested models to develop top-notch creative executions, and agencies have long filled that need. Talent from some of the best agencies in the world now works on a freelance basis, making it possible to implement industry-changing creative ideas without a long-term retainer with a big agency.
As you envision the future of your brand and business, remember that successful marketing strategies require more than just data analysis and audience number-crunching. Branding success requires a dose of timeless creativity that goes beyond advertising.
Have a question for Jeff or his team? Get in touch.
