Hot off judging the Effies, System1’s Andrew Tindall explores whether campaigns even really need an incisive insight at the core to be effective.
Mr Bean in the Snickers ad, You're Not You When You're Hungry, once of Andrew's fav insights
I helped judge the US Effie Awards earlier this week, and after perusing dozens of entries, I had a comforting thought: how bad marketers are at finding an insight should give us total faith that most marketing works in the total absence of one.
Alongside 100 extremely clever, experienced, and passionate CMOs, marketers, and planners from around the world, I reviewed the best cases that had made it through the first round of judging. No wonder it’s hard to win an Effie.
You’d be nervous pitching your campaign to just one of these people, never mind having crowds of them scrutinizing it. One thing’s for sure: an Effie stands for effectiveness. Winning even a bronze award is a stamp from the industry’s best, proving that your campaign created behavior change that delivered real results.
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But one thing really stood out to me.
Some of the most impressive cases increased sales, profit, price elasticity, and market share, but they did it all with zero insight.
Yes, there was something written in the “insight” section for these cases. But it was usually just an assumption about a category or a fact from research, not the grand, tension-unlocking revelation we’re told an insight needs to be.
Despite going to business school and studying for a master’s in marketing for years, the best training I ever got was through the internal training courses at the large FMCGs where I started my career. To be fair, Byron Sharp consulted on the one at Diageo, so you’d assume it’d be half-decent. It also would explain the judgmental tone on some of the slides…
There, you’re taught that a long-term brand positioning needs to have a real customer insight at the center; otherwise, the whole thing falls apart - like the thread holding a campaign together.
An insight is usually defined as something like “a penetrating discovery about consumers, their motivations, attitudes, or behaviors actioned to unlock growth.”
Similarly, Julian Cole describes an insight as “a revelation that gives us a new way to look at the problem.”
So, by this logic, insight needs to uncover a tension, a contradiction in consumer behavior, that your marketing can resolve. It must be useful, with a clear audience and context. If it doesn’t open the door to action, it’s just a fact, not an insight.
If we accept this definition, then how are so many long-term, high-performing campaigns delivering business results without one?
This question is as old as advertising itself. Account planning was formalized in the UK at Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP) and J. Walter Thompson (JWT) in the 1960s. The distinction between BMP’s approach and JWT’s approach explains exactly why insight-less campaigns still succeed.
JWT’s Stephen King wrote the famous 1974 Planning Guide, which drew a line between grand strategy and what he (somewhat dismissively) referred to as “ad tweakers.” He positioned JWT’s work as building a long-term strategy from insights, while BMP focused on changing execution details.
There are plenty of examples of this long-term grand strategy that we love championing, quite rightly too. We hear about Snickers’ penetrating global insight that ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ a lot but I have a soft spot for Bailey’s reframing from a drinks brand to an adult sweet treat.
Alternatively, Paul Feldwick rightly points out that BMP’s famous campaigns (like the Honey Monster) were horrendously successful. And consumers only ever see the ads so we should be proud ad tweakers. The same applies to other long-running creative devices: Jaffa Cakes’ Full Moon, Half Moon,’ Compare the Meerkat and Geico’s Gecko. None of these ideas started with grand consumer insights, but they worked.
You could frame this revelation as good execution eating bad strategy for breakfast. Or marketing purists might argue it reinforces Byron Sharp’s perspective, that advertising works by capturing attention, reinforcing category entry points, and building salience. That a “big insight” is just an agency’s internal process for billing clients more.
Whether an insight fuels a campaign or a strong creative execution takes on a life of its own, both approaches most likely work because they create consistency. When a brand commits to a big strategic insight, it forces it to repeat and build on the same memories, creating distinctive brand assets, reinforcing category entry points, and compounding effectiveness over time. Equally, when a campaign like Compare the Meerkat leans into a highly memorable creative device, it achieves the same compounding benefits.
It’s a refreshing thought.
In an industry full of certainty-preaching marketing gurus, we often hear rigid formulas about what makes marketing effective. But the truth is, there’s no one way.
Some campaigns work because they’re rooted in a deep, tension-releasing insight. Others work because the creative execution is brilliant and entertaining. Both can be effective and win Effies. Both can shift business results. Both can build brands. And that’s what makes marketing fascinating.
All marketers face unique challenges. Different industries, different budgets, different brand legacies. There’s no single playbook. And that’s OK.
So, instead of being dogmatic about insight-led planning versus creative-led execution, we should study what actually works. Whether it’s a deep human truth or a brilliantly ‘dumb’ idea that sticks, marketing is ultimately about effectiveness, not process purity.
Here’s to advertising that gets the job done, and to learning from what works, even if it doesn’t fit our textbooks.