Five things to know about creative campaigns

By Emma Jefferies:

Creative campaigns are the ones with the real wow factor. They’re the ideas that make people pause mid‑scroll, look up or talk about a brand the next day. At their best, they’re unexpected, exciting and memorable.

But creativity on its own isn’t enough. A campaign can look brilliant and still do absolutely nothing. For creativity to work, it has to earn its place by solving a real business problem that supports a clear goal.

Here are five things to keep in mind if you want creative campaigns that don’t just look good, but actually deliver value.

1. Creativity must link back to the business

The old trick of floating something down the Thames might grab attention, but without a clear link back to the business and its objectives, it’s essentially pointless. Creativity shouldn’t exist for its own sake. It needs to drive a specific action or outcome, whether that’s awareness, consideration, sales or behaviour change. There must be a clear commercial reason for doing it.

Every strong creative idea starts with a business problem. That’s what gives it value. This problem might sit with the customer, or with the brand. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. The most effective campaigns come from knowing exactly which problem you’re solving and being clear about that from the very start.

2. If you have to explain it, you’ve lost the creativity

Good creative ideas are simple. If you have to explain the idea, you’ve already lost people. Creativity needs to be clean, clear and instantly understood. People should ‘get it’ in seconds.

A strong creative campaign distils all the thinking, the insight, the strategy and the objective, into a single idea that lands immediately. A good example is Spotify Wrapped: take user performance data, turn it into shareable stories and let the audience do the distribution. No explanation needed - just a clear, simple idea executed in a way that earns attention and engages conversation.

3. Creative campaigns work best as a burst of activity

Creative campaigns aren’t the same as always‑on PR, and they shouldn’t feel like it either. Always‑on activity plays an important role in maintaining visibility, credibility and momentum, but creative campaigns need to stand apart from that baseline. They need to feel different enough that people notice the shift.

The most effective creative campaigns work as a moment in time, or a carefully planned series of moments, that interrupt the normal flow of communications. They create a spike rather than a steady line. Something that cuts through because it doesn’t look, sound or behave like everything else the brand is doing day to day.

4. Where to start when you’re looking for an idea

Staring at a blank page is often the hardest part of the creative process. The problem isn’t a lack of ideas so much as not knowing where to begin. But there are a few reliable places to start:

• Do something out of the ordinary

  Doing something counter‑intuitive instantly creates interest. When you place an object, message or experience in an unexpected context, people notice because it breaks the pattern.

• Turn it up to 11

  Take an insight or problem and push it to its logical conclusion. Exaggeration is a classic creative technique because it makes abstract issues tangible and impossible to ignore. By dialling something up, you expose the truth of the problem in a way data or rational arguments often can’t.

• Shift the focus

  When the solution or technology lacks that natural “wow factor”, shift the story. If everyone is having the same conversation, the best approach often lies in reframing it. Look at the issue from a completely different angle and decide what the story should really be about.

Often, creativity isn’t about finding something entirely new, it’s about seeing the same thing differently.

5. No idea is a new idea

Which leads us to the final point. There is no such thing as a completely new idea, only iterations of existing ones.

Apple didn’t invent the smartphone. IBM did. Touchscreens, mobile internet and apps all existed before the iPhone. What Apple did was take familiar elements, combine them in a smarter way and re‑present them so they felt easier, more intuitive and more desirable. The success came from execution and timing, but it was built on ideas that already existed.

Creative campaigns work in the same way. We borrow, adapt, remix and evolve ideas rather than inventing them from scratch. Inspiration rarely comes from nowhere, and that’s okay.