Driving better outcomes from better creative decisions

He’s a trained doctor who got hooked to marketing and since then there’s been no looking back. Indeed, for Andrew Tindall,  Chief Growth Officer at System1, marketing is exciting because it’s “ubiquitous. It’s everywhere”.  

“It changes culture and is a very large part of everyone’s life so it’s quite an important industry. It also allows you to be quite creative – it’s  that marriage between science and creativity, between culture and human behaviour; and I found that really interesting,” shares Andrew Tindall. 

“So, much to my mum’s disappointment I decided not to be a doctor and instead chose this career. But being grounded in the rigorous approach of science has helped me research well and understand behavioral science,” Andrew adds, explaining how his foundation in science helps him with what he does today.     

Curating a database of emotions  

The work that Andrew does at System1 does is all about the intersection of science, creativity and human emotions. System1  essentially decodes  consumers’ emotional response and helps brands understand and improve the effectiveness of their communications. 

System1 helps marketers tap into consumers’ emotions to predict and improve the commercial impact of ads and ideas and it’s been doing it for about 25 years now. The company works extensively in the OOH space,  partnering with global OOH  majors like JCDecaux, and helping them understand how a certain OOH campaign has influenced people’s behaviour.  It entails discovering whether it drives quick brand recall or triggers a certain feeling in the people or entertains them. “These are drastically linked to outdoor outcomes like brand uplift, store visits, etc,” shares Andrew. 

Among the tools the company has developed is one called ‘Test your Ad’ which exposes advertising to Respondents. The company’s Face Trace IP is a collection of images of emotions that people feel when they see an ad.  Through the tool, respondents self-report how they feel, why they feel what they feel, etc.  The tools also captures other details like brand recognition and the key associations that a campaign brings to mind.  

Explaining it, Andrew says, “We turn the data we collect into key metrics that predict and explain how a particular advertising will perform. We have a star rating, which is based on the overall emotional response to advertising. The basic idea is that the more consumers feel, the more they buy, and the more it will create long-term behavior change.”  

Catering to a challenge 

Speaking about what drove System1, Andrew explains, “Marketers can spend a lot on  media, but they are not sure whether their creative choices are going to convert that media into growth. So if you don’t have a confidence in the creativity of your advertising campaign, then you will not give it enough media spend and you cannot plan and predict business outcomes. Often marketers are having to make creative choices based on intuition and opinions, which is very subjective. So with our data, we aim to understand more objectively how a particular advertising works, how it makes the consumer feel and think. This not only allows marketers to make better creative decisions, but also allows them to have the confidence to plan, measure and make better marketing investments.”  

“What we’ve managed to do is put some numbers to the magic,” says Andrew, summing up the process of marrying intangibles like creativity and emotions with data science. 

Read the full interview in the May edition of Outdoor Asia.