New year, new me, says System1’s Andrew Tindall. He’s dumped his vices for January [RIP Guinness] - now it’s time for the marketing industry to do the very same.
We’re barely a week into 2025, and against all the odds, I’m already more of an insufferable wanker than I was in 2024 because I swapped four vices out for a daily run and gym. And naturally, I need to tell everyone.
Part of my “new year, new me” BS is doubling down on this column, Tindall on Effectiveness, as part of my mission to make marketing effectiveness research interesting and enjoyable for all.
I’ve read every Marketing Wrapped 2024 piece that I could get my hands on and can confirm most leave me feeling the same way. Bored, confused and yearning for a vape (vice one). Or with a headache, like the current one in my Guinness-deprived brain (and vice two).
One piece passes muster. Mark Ritson’s top 2024 marketing moments is as entertaining as it is factual. So, I will channel my best Ritson here instead of looking forward to what habits we shouldn’t bring into 2025.
I’ve identified 10 ‘vices’ over my career. For example, when I worked brand-side at Diageo and Bacardi, a lot of my time was spent on tasks that didn’t really contribute to marketing goals like admin, spreadsheets, fixing digital assets, reporting, not vaping in the bathrooms, building decks, pitches or visiting a customer to flog something personally. These were all noble tasks, but the moments that really made the difference were when the team put time aside to chew over an effectiveness question.
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I remember the difference “attention-based planning” had. After reading a few reports, we were left staring at our media plan with new (worried) eyes. That so-called worry is what I aim to inspire in you every week. But I also want to introduce new ways of approaching and thinking about marketing, whether you’ve been at it for 20 years or 20 months.
If you’re trying to swap doomscrolling (vice three) for longer, more educational content, then I recorded a 50-minute video with Mike from the Six Sell podcast sharing these top 10 in a non-text format. You can watch or listen to that here, maybe while wearing activewear in a Starbucks, telling everyone how active you are this year…
Anyway, here are the 10 vices. Good luck dropping them.
Fresh out of the Christmas madness, where everyone and their dog wants to know which ads worked the best, this year we saw the usual happen: a couple of campaigns got negative heat online, then ended up in the Daily Mail. Some marketers are happy to declare this as a failure; surely, such a ‘reputable’ title reporting on an online ‘backlash’ represents how the customer feels...
Well, what a load of cock that is.
Remember the article claiming that sandwich fillings were becoming too woke, citing several posts as evidence. Does this have any bearing on how the masses feel about sandwiches? I don’t think so. Are the woke-sandwich haters secretly munching egg, turmeric, and quinoa pittas anyway? Probably.
The issue with planning marketing based on “social listening” is that it’s all post-rationalized. It has no bearing on how brands or advertising are actually consumed. From the Ipsos data below, you can see Boots, one of the campaigns sniped by the Daily Mail, peaked at 3.5k social mentions. Meanwhile, millions saw the TV ad multiple times at Christmas. How those millions will feel is how you should judge advertising, not how a couple hundred keyboard klout chasers pretend to think.
Coke’s new Christmas ad made with gen AI was the talk of the town in December.
I spoke about it in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Ad Week, Fast Company, and Campaign. AI is something super close to marketers’ hearts and day jobs, but pretending it hasn’t already changed the game is madness.
A perfect storm of people now seeing LLMs as useful and friendly, and Gen AI is getting better. In System1’s testing (with thousands of normal people – not marketers), people either didn’t notice or care that it was made with AI. Giving it a huge 5.9 Stars in our fame-predicting star score.
Sure, this doesn’t mean AI will replace us all.
The work was based on an asset that already looked a little uncanny, like the Polar Express movie. Plus, this work was just an AI treatment of 30 years of human creativity. What is clear is that AI is here to stay and has a role to play in our work as marketers.
I rarely do this, but there’s a perfect example I always think of to illustrate this point.
KIND has this brilliant campaign that works so well on the tube platform and in print. It’s a wordy one, and it somehow managed to find its way on to a roadside D6 in London.
This media format gets an average of two seconds attention. When this ad is thrown into that channel, the customer has to make a choice. Zoom by it or hammer on the brakes to read it, endangering everyone.
I spent about two years working closely with JCDecaux, uncovering OOH creative principles. If there’s one thing you do in 2025, read, ‘7 out of 10 OOH ads don’t work. Here’s why and how to fix them’ and ‘OOH best practice is so simple, it forces you to get creative’ and start making your OOH media spend work.
It’s the simple contexts like the KIND example where the gains are made.
If you’ve had the misfortune of going to any of our industry’s finest marketing panels recently, you’ll probably have noticed one thing: they are a waste of time.
I wrote about this last year. They exist simply to plump up the attendee list. The crowd doomscrolls while panelists engage in an unusual form of aggressive agreement. In 2025, if you see three people walk on to the stage heading for some chairs stand up and get yourself a decaf coffee instead (vice four).
I live above an F45 with a huge David Beckham working out in the window. I’ve also seen him recently touting the benefits of AliExpress, Stella Artois, Walkers and Nespresso. And in multiple Christmas ads. This is the perfect hyperbolic example of why celebrities are an issue in modern advertising.
Celebs, in general, aren’t terrible; it’s the fact that marketers seem to use them instead of a creative idea or long-term brand strategy. I spend 2% of my working year in a bunker analyzing thousands of consumer feelings toward Superbowl ads, and it’s sadly full of this misuse. It’s “that ad with that celebrity,” not “*brand*’s ad with *insert creative idea*.”
It isn’t all doom and gloom. Using celebrities for what they are known for and good at to heighten the creative idea over many campaigns leads to effectiveness gold. See T-Mobile’s US work with Zack Braff and Donald Faison and M&S’s UK Christmas work with Dawn French.
Why are marketers set on handing their cash over to David Beckham?
In 2025, brands should build their own celebrities instead of polishing the golden balls.
Where are all the ads and content with Moo Deng this week?
Oh yeah, Moo Deng is dead. Well, not dead, thankfully, but irrelevant. This concept is similar to using a celebrity to plaster up the cracks in your creative strategy, chasing trends like a greasy hippo (Moo Deng) around the internet is just as bad of an idea.
You could argue that this can be integrated into your annual plan. Jumping on a few trends to seem more relevant. But any social content I saw with Moo Deng in it had zero to do with the brand in question. And, importantly, it’s opportunity loss. Stealing time from your actual job – building your brand.
See the trend data below. Celebs and trends will die – your brand needs to be immortal.
During six years of working on FMCG brands and now a couple of years advising marketers working on the world’s largest brands, I’ve seen a media plan with radio on it literally a handful of times. It’s bonkers.
When you consider that 70% of TV ads don’t get full visual attention any more, and you’re 20% more likely to recall audio from TV ads v visual. And that radio is 1/6th of the price of TV. And all research agrees it’s just as good at creating emotion and landing attention. The only reason radio isn’t on your plan is because of the biases you personally hold.
Watch me share one of the first research publications I wrote with Radiocentre a couple of months ago: Why radio is so damn powerful, and how to make more effective audio ads. Or get the full book free here. Seriously, this is a gift. Everyone is overlooking audio advertising, and those who use it have some pretty terrible rational ads in the channel. This is a rare chance to dive into radio, make great emotional ads, and gobble up market share.
My favorite bit of Christmas backlash was the adorable crowd screaming about John Lewis’s ad only having female characters in it. How can men relate to this ad?! What is this dystopian female-only universe?! Not once did we hear these concerns when the ad featured a boy and his penguin.
It points to how we should approach representation in advertising in 2025. It’s not about putting everyone in every ad. It’s about telling authentic stories about anyone. We looked at the System1 metrics for male and female viewers of the John Lewis ad, no difference.
And I’ve researched ads with LGBTQ+ representation as part of my role as co-director of intelligence at Outvertising. There’s no general change in effectiveness for “queer ads” v non-queer ads. It’s the same generally for advertising; single stories beat vignettes on any day of the week.
I spent most of last year crafting our new research, Compound Creativity, with the fantastic marketing science and research teams at System1 and the IPA, showing how consistency compounds creativity. We’ve simply never had clearer proof that change, for change’s sake, is detrimental to effectiveness.
We defined 13 different facets of creative consistency and showed that consistent brands make ads that work twice as hard; create 27% more brand effects, and double the reported huge profit gain.
In 2025, don’t let your ‘new year, new you’ seep into your brands. Instead, ask, “What should I keep the same?”.
Grab the full research and watch me under some very hot lights in a studio in Thinkbox’s basement, giving a 20-minute masterclass here.
The other blockbuster research we launched at Cannes last year was total gold, made by Peter Field, Adam Morgan and Jon Evans. The Cost of Dull.
To double down on my 2025 insufferable personality traits, I’ll reveal that a heavy mix of imposter syndrome and ADHD means I feel like I’m going to implode if I ‘switch off.’ So, I’m either working, reading or listening.
I have an annual tradition (3rd year now) where I listen to Paul Feldwick’s ‘Why Does The Pedlar Sing?’. If you haven’t read it and work in marketing – you simply have to.
It reframes what advertising is all about. And why energy, the show and emotion are key advertising inputs because fame is the desired output. A brand being thought of, shared and talked about. How energy is more important than “brand essence.” How captivating, charming, and leaving an emotional impression should be the day job.
In The Cost of Dull, we’ve presented more evidence of this. Ads that are interesting enough to create fame need c. £10m less media to spend to achieve the same share of market changes. In 2025, move away from the rational and put on a show. Again, we’ve made that full research free here.
So that’s my list of 2024 vices. Leave some of those marketing vices behind, and you’ll be much better for it. Right. I think I’ve earned a Guinness, don’t you…?
Read more from Andrew here. Or more opinion on The Drum. You can talk vices with him on LinkedIn.
