My observation is that Advertising has developed a peculiar institutional habit. We speak enthusiastically about building brands over decades, yet much of the machinery through which we build them continues to operate in quarters, campaigns, launches, festivals, bursts and fiscal calendars. The ambition is longitudinal. The operating model is episodic.
There is now persuasive evidence that this discontinuity carries a commercial consequence. System1 and the IPA’s Compound Creativity research examined more than 4,000 advertisements from 56 brands across 44 categories over five years, representing £3.3 billion in television advertising spend. The most creatively consistent brands generated 27% more Very Large Brand Effects and 28% more Very Large Business Effects than less consistent counterparts. The research also found that consistent brands improved creative quality over time, while inconsistent brands showed no average annual improvement. That last finding deserves considerably more attention than it receives.
The implication is larger than ‘consistency works.’ It suggests that advertising itself can possess a compounding function. And I believe this is where our industry needs a more consequential conversation.
The advertising industry does not need to abandon campaigns. Campaigns provide focus, cultural momentum and market relevance. They create deadlines that concentrate creative energy and moments around which organizations can mobilize. What must change is the habit of treating every campaign as an isolated creative episode, complete with a new proposition, new visual grammar, new tonality, new mnemonic architecture and, occasionally, an entirely new interpretation of what the brand supposedly stands for.
I’d say a brand cannot compound if we keep resetting the principal. For agency leaders, CMOs and custodians of significant brands, I see three shifts becoming particularly important.
- Stop Managing Campaign Assets. Start Managing Memory Capital.
One of advertising’s enduring conceits is that consumers are waiting for our next idea with roughly the same enthusiasm with which agencies await the presentation of it. They are not. Consumers encounter brands amid an extraordinary profusion of stimuli, while thinking about work, money, family, entertainment, relationships, politics, dinner and perhaps seventeen other things. Advertising occupies a considerably smaller acreage of human consciousness than our industry sometimes permits itself to believe.
This makes memory, rather than novelty alone, one of branding’s most consequential currencies. Yet look at how frequently brands discard accumulated memory structures in pursuit of creative rejuvenation. A new CMO arrives. An agency changes. A positioning exercise commences. The visual language changes, the sonic identity disappears, the familiar mnemonic is deemed dated, the brand voice is modernized, and an entirely new creative platform arrives with considerable internal excitement.
Everyone inside the organization experiences renewal. The consumer experiences discontinuity. Think of a brand as a city rather than a billboard. Great cities evolve constantly, but they rarely demolish their entire architectural inheritance every three years. Paris can accommodate contemporary architecture without ceasing to feel Parisian. London can absorb successive epochs while retaining unmistakable codes of recognition. Their distinctiveness resides partly in accumulated memory.
Brands should behave similarly. This requires distinguishing creative consistency from creative repetition. Repetition mechanically reproduces yesterday. Consistency gives tomorrow a recognizable ancestry. A compounding brand system therefore asks a different question at the beginning of every campaign. Instead of asking only, “What is the new idea?”, it asks, “What existing memory structure are we strengthening, and what new memory are we adding?” That seemingly modest alteration changes the creative brief profoundly.
Distinctive assets cease to be decorative brand-guideline furniture and become intellectual property. Characters, colours, sonic cues, linguistic cadences, visual structures, recurring rituals and narrative territories acquire cumulative value. The task of creativity becomes more demanding, not less, because the agency must produce novelty without destroying recognition.
Since I happen to know some Jazz pals closely, I can safely say that the finest jazz musicians understand this paradox. Improvisation becomes meaningful because a musical structure exists beneath it. Without structure, improvisation eventually becomes noise. Brands require the same discipline.
- The Campaign Should Produce Intellectual Capital, Not Merely Communication Outputs.
There is another form of wastage that receives surprisingly little boardroom attention. Every significant campaign generates knowledge.
It reveals which emotional territories resonate. Which audiences respond disproportionately. Which cultural tensions create conversation. Which creative cues accelerate recognition. Which messages survive compression across formats. Which media environments improve receptivity. Which search behaviours emerge after exposure. Which consumer language appears organically in comments, reviews and communities.
Then the campaign ends.
A presentation is produced. A post-campaign report circulates. Some learnings enter a spreadsheet. The organization moves to the next brief.
This is equivalent to conducting an expensive scientific experiment, recording the results and then leaving the laboratory notebook in a drawer. A genuine compounding brand system requires what I would call institutionalized brand memory. Every campaign should leave the organization more intelligent than it found it. This is where the conversation moves beyond marcom and enters enterprise capability. Creative, media, performance, commerce, CRM, search, social listening and customer experience are frequently measured through their respective dashboards. A compounding system asks how intelligence from each domain alters the next expression of the brand.
The metaphor here is a coral reef. A reef does not rebuild itself from the seabed every season. Each generation deposits something upon the architecture created before it. Over time, thousands of apparently small accumulations create an ecosystem of extraordinary scale and resilience.
Campaigns should leave similar deposits. A successful campaign should therefore produce two returns: an immediate market return and an intellectual residue. The first may be sales, leads, penetration, consideration or salience. The second is knowledge that makes subsequent marketing more intelligent. This also changes how agencies should think about their own value. The agency of the future cannot merely be the supplier of successive creative products. It must increasingly become the custodian of accumulated brand intelligence. That demands institutional memory on the agency side too. Constant team churn, indiscriminate account rotation and the fetishization of “fresh eyes” can inadvertently destroy precisely the contextual intelligence that takes years to acquire.
Fresh eyes are useful. Amnesia is expensive. Isn’t it?
- Consistency Is Ultimately a Governance Decision, Not a Creative Decision.
Perhaps the least discussed obstacle to compounding brands is organizational rather than creative. Most companies are structurally better equipped to initiate than to inherit.
A new leader understandably wants to make an imprint. A new marketing head wants to establish a strategic signature. A new agency wants to demonstrate difference from its predecessor. Each decision may appear entirely rational in isolation. Collectively, they can create what I would describe as institutionalized discontinuity.
The irony is uncomfortable. Senior leaders frequently demand compounding financial returns while tolerating continual depreciation of brand capital. No CFO would casually discard an appreciating asset merely because its current custodian had changed. Yet marketing organizations routinely retire distinctive creative properties because new leadership seeks visible evidence of change.
This is where brand stewardship requires courage. A mature CMO should occasionally inherit something excellent and resist the temptation to put fingerprints on it. A confident agency should sometimes recommend evolution when reinvention would generate a larger fee. A sophisticated CEO should ask whether a proposed rebrand represents strategic necessity or executive restlessness. And boards should increasingly recognize that brand memory is an enterprise asset whose destruction carries an opportunity cost, even when conventional accounting cannot place it neatly on the balance sheet.
Consider the difference between a relay race and a succession of individual sprints. In the latter, every runner begins from zero. In the relay, accumulated momentum is transferred. The quality of the handover becomes as consequential as the speed of the runner. Our industry needs better batons.
This is why I believe the future agency-client relationship should be governed by a continuity thesis alongside the annual marketing plan. What must remain invariant? What can evolve? Which distinctive assets are accumulating recognition? Which strategic territories deserve another year rather than another workshop? What did last year’s investment teach us? What must the next campaign inherit? And, crucially, what are we building today that will make the brand easier to recognize, easier to retrieve and less expensive to grow three years from now?
These are C-suite questions because compounding is fundamentally an allocation-of-capital question.
The campaign calendar will remain. It should. Markets change, culture moves, competitors intervene and brands require fresh provocations. But the calendar should become the visible surface of a deeper system.
Every campaign should inherit something. Every campaign should contribute. Every campaign should leave behind stronger memory structures, richer customer intelligence, more distinctive brand codes and a clearer understanding of what the brand can credibly own.
The ultimate measure of an advertising organization, therefore, may need to evolve.
I did say shouldn’t we be asking, “What has this campaign made easier for the next one?”
Because when every new campaign requires the brand to re-acquire recognition, rediscover its voice and reconstruct consumer memory, we are not building brand equity. We are repeatedly paying the entrance fee. The most formidable brands of the next decade will still produce brilliant campaigns. They will simply refuse to let brilliance expire at the end of the media plan. And perhaps that is the question advertising and branding leaders should now take into their next boardroom: Are we managing a calendar of campaigns, or are we constructing an asset whose value compounds every time we communicate?
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