The People v the Turkey [of the Week]: Calling BS on ‘bad’ ads

This year, we’ve gained a new tradition. Campaign’s Christmas Turkey of Week being wrong. After declaring Amazon’s ‘Joyride’ a Turkey in December 2023, the anonymized reporter has put out 2024’s fourth Turkey of the “Week,” Coca-Cola’s AI-made ‘Holidays are coming’. Naturally, that’s awkward because it scored top marks across all of System1’s customer-based metrics.

• People love Coca-Cola’s AI remake of a Christmas classic

In a rather impressive flurry of big words, they even managed to put down the efforts of Coca-Cola’s entire marketing team and three different AI-forward production agencies. With last year’s swipe at Amazon’s spectacular in-house Christmas ad ‘Joyride’, I’m starting to think our masked keyboard warrior might have a stake in the traditional agency model. Next year, they’ll be shouting at random creators outside TikTok HQ.

• Amazon’s ‘Joyride’ is no Christmas turkey – it’s one of the world’s most effective ads

This is the perfect time to make the case to ditch Turkey for good and reveal the least effective ad according to real consumers.

Marketers’ opinions rarely matter

I wish I’d put a day aside to be a normo one last time before starting my first marketing role at Diageo. I wish I’d gone to the cinema late to skip the ads. Ignored all the me-too brands in Lidl. Bought water that wasn’t in a beer-like can. Doomscrolled Insta instead of LinkedIn. Or, simply sat and enjoyed myself, not knowing who Steven Bartlett was.

But alas, I didn’t.

Marketers aren’t normal people. We know far too much about advertising. This makes us terrible at judging advertising.

And Campaign’s anonymous poultry-hating author is no different. I checked System1’s creative measurement results for the past seven Turkeys. Below are the results based on the branded emotional response of 1,050 nationally representative people. Ie, the customer. It’s impressive – they are better than creative awards at selecting work consumers engage with, enjoy, and recall correctly what brand it’s for.

Don’t tell the bride, I’m sure they’ll love it

There’s this fantastically horrible show in the UK called ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’. In it, we follow a groom as he plans an entire wedding alone, getting no feedback from the woman he needs to build a lifelong relationship with. It’s hilarious. He shares wild wedding ideas he thinks his wife will love, gets creative and plans what he hopes will make the experience even better. Sometimes, it’s a triumph, and she loves the pickled egg-themed dress and the gravy fountain. Or the wedding in a pigsty massively backfires.

It reminds me of the marketer making an ad off gut feel, refusing to use research that brings the customer into the marketing process.

When we remove the feelings of those with whom we are trying to build relationships – things become a coin toss, just like advertising. Having the customer (or partner) help generate, bounce and refine ideas is always a good idea. We should decide if ads are successful using the customer’s opinion, not ours.

System1 has explored this before with the IPA, looking at what customer creative data selects campaigns that create more business effects. I rarely see anyone mention this research, which is surprising as I believe it explains how advertising works.

The different data you might think is more useful depends on what church of advertising you worship at.

1. You might think advertising works largely through framing. An ad makes a brand look successful and reminds us it exists. An ad being linked strongly to the brand is key. So, you think brand linkage is key.

2. You might believe that strategy needs to inform a message that changes the future of a brand. The customer is receptive to a message and should remember and recall it. And that will drive more sales. Like, “Guinness is good for me”. So, you think key message takeout is vital.

3. Or you might think ads should persuade, that the customer is ready to be sold to. And the best way to check if it’s worked is by asking them if they are ready to buy more after seeing an ad. So, you think persuasion (purchase intent) is key.

4. Or you may have read ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ and believe that decisions are made mainly in our subconscious, in fleeting milliseconds. And the best way to influence behavior is to build a positive branded image for a brand. So, you think positive emotions are key (what system1’s Star Rating measures).

In truth, it’s all the above, but we can only focus on so much.

Positive emotions supercharge your framing, persuasion and messaging. They increase memory encoding, helping lodge branded memories and create a positive, favorable brand image that increases salience. Brilliant strategy creates more emotions, and more emotions make brilliant strategy work harder.

This is why Star Rating selects campaigns that create more business effects (profit, market share, value and pricing power gains). And other types of customer data may lead you down the garden path.

It’s why, as creative research has gotten more emotional over the past 20 years, it’s become more useful for brands, according to Peter Field.

Revealing the Consumer’s Turkey of the Week

But finally, there’s no perfect data to collect from a customer. I’ve invited everyone to my sausage factory before in this column. I urge everyone to understand how research is done and used to answer our different briefs. No data is perfect or all-answering, but System1’s branded emotional metrics predicting long and short-term success have a rather good track record at selecting successful campaigns.

So, let me use them to select the worst festive ad out of the 1,118 released in November and tested with over 150,000+ real normal customers.

I’m just kidding.

I’m not throwing dry-meat-shade at any campaign. [Editor’s note: fowl play that].

The marketing mix is far too complex to confidently point at anything and call it a Turkey. Sure, we could use emotion-based data from a representative set of customers that’s been validated across channels to explain brand and business outcomes but even then - we don’t know the context or brief. Marketers must use research and make their own minds up about whether their campaign was a success.

Besides, I promise you, the bottom left of that chart is never that interesting. We’ve been led to believe bad ads are colossal messes causing some sort of negative reaction. That’s never the case. In the abyss, there's no emotion. Nothing. The Cost of Dull is the real enemy of advertising. Ads passing in the like ships in the night waste millions of media dollars.

Like I say to my mother every year, let’s drop the Turkey. It’s dry and bitter and isn’t doing anyone any good. There are plenty of other brilliant options out there, like us celebrating how brilliant UK and US advertising is. The fact that nine agencies, marketers and production teams have managed to leverage consistent strategy, customer insight and powerful storytelling to land nine 5.9-star scores this festive season is incredible.

I hope celebrating that becomes our tradition, not some mad Turkey hunt.

More Tindall on Effectiveness. Tell Andrew he is wrong here. Read more opinion on The Drum.