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Business challenge
Spikes is a marketing consultancy that uses its Excitement Search Engine to identify those rare moments when brands not only reach people but truly inspire them, based on a cross-industry database of over 750,000 Excitement Points®.
As a consultancy, Spikes needed to support clients in developing creative campaigns that can capture attention, whilst also being relevant and emotionally resonant. However, there is often a lack of comparable data showing why certain adverts stick in the memory and which creative elements actually make an impact. To provide well-founded recommendations for creative campaigns, Spikes required a reliable, continuous, and representative database on advertising impact.
Solution & research results
To build this type of database, YouGov, in collaboration with Spikes, conducts 4,000 online interviews each month with people aged 18 and over in Germany. The aim is to identify the adverts that made a strong positive impression on audiences in recent weeks, using YouGov’s highly engaged panel.
Respondents are first asked to name their favorite advert. If a person can name an advert, they then describe the brand, product, and content of the advert, so that the actual campaign can be clearly assessed. Respondents then evaluate how far a set of statements apply to the advert – for example, whether it reflects the company’s ideals or if it’s perceived as funny.
These statements are designed to reflect the eight creative dimensions of the Creative Index, created by Spikes and YouGov to uncover why an advert stands out positively. These creative dimensions are: purpose, storytelling, humor, surprising, reassuring, evokes joy, new and unseen, and generates conversation.
The ‘Favorite Advertisements’ ranking is then compiled. It combines the total number of mentions, scores for the eight creative dimensions, and the emotional score of an advert, to decide which adverts are currently most popular with German consumers.
Business outcomes
Spikes use the interview data to build Excitement Points®, and publish the ‘Favorite Advertisements’ rankings with YouGov. By analyzing attention gained and emotional impact, Spikes can clearly identify which campaigns perform best and which creative elements drive impact across industries over time. Co-produced with YouGov, the rankings also add an additional layer of findings to Spikes’ work, which can be used to support client conversations.
These insights also feed directly into Spikes’ strategic consultancy and creative development process. With continuous ad-effectiveness data at their fingertips, Spikes has a strong evidence base to guide creative decisions, enabling them to deliver more impactful, data-led campaigns to clients.
Customer testimonial
“With Excitement Points®, we now have, for the first time, a framework for systematically measuring creative impact from the consumer’s perspective. The combination of recall and the eight creative dimensions gives us a clear picture of why certain campaigns work. We now consistently use the results for creative decisions, agency briefings and the optimization of brand communication.”