- This Intuit ad scored 3.1 stars and achieved 77 on brand fluency due to a customer-centric story, creative polish and strong—albeit late—branding.
These creatives follow a formula that looks like this: Attention × Branding × Linkage = Equity. We call this the “ABLE” formula. Without this success formula, you will be un-ABLE to make money from your creative (hopefully we can all agree that joke is five-star creative!) The formula won’t guarantee success—even Disney has the occasional flop—but we believe that it can substantially improve your odds.
First, b-to-b creative needs to get attention. The brand that’s remembered is the brand that’s bought. And you cannot possibly remember something that you never paid attention to in the first place. This is why “17% faster processing speeds” rarely works as a message. Features are boring to most buyers, and boring is bad. The job of creative is to entertain, not to educate. Make b-to-b buyers laugh or cry: That means you need catchy music, like the country soundtrack in the Adobe ad. That means you need relatable characters, like the British small-business owners in the Simply Business ad. That means you need unique imagery, like the gigantic tax inspector chickens in the Intuit ad. To capture attention, you need to stand out, not blend in.
Second, b-to-b creative needs prominent branding. You want your brand to get remembered, not your competitor’s brand. Marketers act like magicians—waiting until the last two seconds to “reveal” the brand. But 99% of buyers have stopped paying attention by that time. Instead, you need to brand early, consistently and creatively. The Adobe ad has “Adobe” on the opening frame, and almost every other frame. The Simply Business spot similarly displays the brand name within the first two seconds. The Intuit ad is a bit underbranded, but pairing the attention-grabbing storyline with more heavy-handed branding would make that creative a box office hit.
Third, b-to-b creative needs category linkage. You want the right brand to be remembered in the right buying situations, so you should feature those situations in your creative. Too often, b-to-b creative is about the product, not about why, when or where people use those products. “When you’re having trouble keeping track of invoices and feeling totally overwhelmed, think of Quickbooks”—that’s the key message of the Intuit ad, and it’s delivered in a memorable way. The Simply Business and Adobe ads also link the brand to relevant situations. That’s better than linking to a fluffy brand attribute (“innovation”) or a rational product feature (“speeds”).
