In 2004, neuroscientists at the Baylor College of Medicine put participants in an fMRI scanner to test whether they could tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi after it was given to them, resulting in participants not knowing, and preferences being split evenly. Those who were offered a labeled Coke chose it 73% of the time in comparison to an unlabeled but identical Coke, and scans showed brain regions linked to memory and cultural association showing signals. Meanwhile, the Pepsi did not show the same effect, showing that the difference was a memory structure that was built over years.

Therefore, this post presents 10 principles based on findings from research backgrounds that work together to find compatible answers:

• Econometrics and case databases (such as the IPA Effectiveness Databank, WARC, and Medialab) that center on what drove business results.
• Marketing science (with findings from Ehrenberg-Bass, Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk) that as how people actually buy.
• Attention and neuroscience (with findings from Karen Nelson-Field,Lumen and Erasmus University) that ask what happens in the human brain when an ad is viewed.

How does growth actually work?

Principles 1 and 2: Balance the mix, and grow through reach

Long-term brand building drives growth and pricing power, while short-term activation collects pre-existing demand. Based on this, Binet and Field’s analysis of the IPA databank popularized the idea of a 60% starting point for brand-building spending, while 40% is allocated to activation. However, an exceptional case would be B2B and subscription-model businesses that often require more brand investment. In relation, the idea that brands mainly grow by attracting new customers rather than optimizing for more loyalty from existing ones comes from Ehrenberg-Bass, as light buyers often outnumber heavy buyers. Consequently, a brand that does not focus on attracting new customers is leaving most of the market untouched.

Principle 7: Go big on budget

In 2025, Les Binet and Will Davis analyzed IPA Effectiveness Award-winning case studies and found that ROI explained only 11% of the variation in profit payback, while budget explained 89%. In contrast, a survey in the same research found that 65% of senior marketers said ROI was the biggest contributor to effectiveness and only 35% said budget.

The logic comes from the idea that profit equals ROI multiplied by spend, where ROI tends to cluster in a fairly narrow band across brands, while budgets vary enormously, so budget ends up explaining most of the difference. From this, Binet's advice is to stop setting budgets as last year plus inflation, and instead to model them against growth goals and competitors' share of voice.

How does memory work?

Principles 3 and 4: Build mental availability, and protect it with distinctive assets

Where mental availability in this sense refers to the probability that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, Romaniuk's work at Ehrenberg-Bass frames this through category entry points (CEPs): the situations, needs, and cues that trigger a purchase decision. So, the more CEPs a brand is linked to, the more often it is thought of.

Distinctive assets (colors, shapes, characters, sounds, taglines) can protect and speed up that link, but two things matter most: how famous the asset is, and how uniquely it points to your brand. Being different does not necessarily help if buyers can't attribute the difference to you. Here, the Coke study is the neurological illustration, as the brand cue reached into memory and shifted the choice.

Principle 8: Buy attention, not impressions

A "viewable" impression only means an ad had the opportunity to be seen, however, Karen Nelson-Field's research shows that attention is what actually connects advertising to memory. Her team's work found that around 85% of digital ad placements receive less than 2.5 seconds of attention, which she describes as a threshold for building memory. More recent work adds an important refinement, showing that memory can form in as little as 1.5 seconds, but only when the brand has distinctive assets that people recognize quickly. Without this, attention can be earned and still be credited to a better-known competitor, therefore linking back to principles 3 and 4.

What makes creative work?

Principles 5 and 6: Emotion beats rational, and creative quality is a multiplier

Binet and Field's analysis found that campaigns built on emotional appeals tend to generate stronger business effects than those built on rational persuasion. Moreover, Peter Field's follow-up study for the IPA, which merged the IPA databank with the Gunn Report's creative awards data, found that creatively awarded campaigns grew market share around eleven times more efficiently than non-awarded ones. But the comparison was between 38 creatively awarded campaigns and 175 non-awarded ones, and every campaign in the sample was already good enough to win an IPA Effectiveness Award. Therefore, the result is best read as showing that, among effective campaigns, creative excellence is associated with better efficiency.

Principles 9 and 10: Consistency compounds, and craft builds fluency

Brands and agencies often tire of a campaign long before audiences do, as tested by the "Compound Creativity" research, a collaboration between System1 and the IPA. By analyzing 4,164 ads from 56 brands, with responses from roughly 625,000 consumers, they matched them against IPA business-effect data. The brands with the most consistent creative produced 27% more brand effects than the least consistent. Related findings presented at WARC suggested consistency makes media work substantially harder, and that agency stability was linked to better outcomes. But the point is not to repeat the same ad forever, as it is more important to build distinctive, memorable structures and refresh them with new executions so the platform stays recognizable, as the real risk is irrelevance caused by switching, not wear-out.

What the evidence cannot tell us

• Selection bias: Where much of the databank evidence comes from award entries, and brands and agencies choose to enter their successes.
• Correlation versus causation: As databank studies can show that things move together, but not always why.
• Category and context: Splits like 60/40 are starting points, but a new brand or a B2B firm face different problems.
• Evolving findings: The attention research, for example, has already been refined from a single 2.5-second benchmark to a more nuanced picture involving asset fluency.

Putting it to work

Want to read more? We have condensed all 10 principles, along with more real-life examples, in a downloadable which you can find here: https://www.alpha.one/whitepapers/10-principles-of-marketing-creative-effectiveness

References

Binet, L., & Field, P. (2013). The long and the short of it: Balancing short and long-term marketing strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Binet, L., & Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in context: A manual for brand building. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Campaign Brief. (2010). The greater the creative, the greater the effect. https://campaignbrief.com/?p=60382

Creative Salon. (2025). VCCP Media and Dr Karen Nelson-Field: Hacking the attention economy. https://creative.salon/articles/features/vccp-media-dr-karen-nelson-field-hacking-the-attention-economy

Field, P. (2010). The link between creativity and effectiveness [Report]. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. (2024). How creative consistency strengthens brands and business effects [News release]. https://ipa.co.uk/news/creative-consistency

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. (2025). Go big or go home: Binet and Davis at the IPA Effectiveness Conference 2025 [News release]. https://ipa.co.uk/news/go-big-or-go-home/

Marketing Week. (2025a, October 7). Budget is eight times more likely to drive effectiveness than ROI, finds IPA research. https://www.marketingweek.com/budget-drive-effectiveness-roi/

Marketing Week. (2025b). Dr Karen Nelson-Field: Uniting creative, media and branding is the "perfect nirvana". https://www.marketingweek.com/attention-hacking-creative-media/

McClure, S. M., Li, J., Tomlin, D., Cypert, K. S., Montague, L. M., & Montague, P. R. (2004). Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron, 44(2), 379–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2004.09.019

Nelson-Field, K. (2025). The truth about human behaviour: How to build brand memory in 1.5 seconds. Think with Google. https://business.google.com/us/think/future-of-marketing/future-of-attention-human-centric-ai-marketing/

Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building distinctive brand assets. Oxford University Press.

Romaniuk, J. (2022). Better brand health: Measures and metrics for a how brands grow world. Oxford University Press.

Sharp, B. (2010). How brands grow: What marketers don't know. Oxford University Press.

Stanford Law School. (2008, October 7). Neuro-Cola: Neuroscience's ability to measure consumer preference (Part 1). https://law.stanford.edu/2008/10/07/neuro-cola-neurosciences-ability-to-measure-consumer-preference-part-1/

System1. (2025). Consistency: The creative glue for commercial growth. https://system1group.com/blog/power-of-compound-creativity

System1, & Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. (2024). The magic of compound creativity [Report]. System1.

Tindall, A., Binet, L., & Carter, S. (2025, June 26). The power of compound creativity. WARC. https://www.warc.com/article/the-power-of-compound-creativity-cca96ae626444c3b8f43bc76f72ee16f

World Federation of Advertisers. (2026, June 3). Go big on media spend or go home, marketers told. https://wfanet.org/l/mailing2/link/6f387e34-c5d4-42f8-a93f-d06f9fdff0ed/68278

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