‘Playing safe’ the riskiest strategy for global campaigns

Brand owners wanting to discover the secret to effective multi-market advertising are being urged to ditch the temptation to play it safe, and instead combine clear brand recognition with “creative deviance” to enable their ideas to travel without losing their power.

So says a new Publicis London report called “World Class” an initiative created with System1 and Effie that draws on the agency’s experience in creating campaigns for brands including Essity, Electrolux, Marriott Bonvoy and Renault.

World Class analysed 1,262 Effie cases from Europe and the US, alongside System1 Test Your Ad responses from around 250,000 people.

Overall, “playing safe” is the riskiest thing a brand can do with a global budget, with the campaigns that travelled the best not the ones that got smoothed out for every market, but the ones bold enough to still feel like something.

In fact, distinctiveness emerged as the foundation of effective global work, with the most distinctive multi-market campaigns more than four times as likely to report profit growth.

“Creative deviance” built on that foundation: campaigns in the top third reported an average of 2.03 business effects, compared with 1.29 in the bottom third, a difference of around 57%.

Business effects are reported commercial outcomes, including incremental revenue and profit, market share, new customer penetration, loyalty and reduced price sensitivity. None of the campaigns in the bottom third reported profit growth.

“Creative Deviance” has five components:

– Emotionally charged work was linked with 40% more business effects.
– Provocation was linked with 29% more business effects.
– Unexpected work was linked with 24% more business effects.
– Category-breaking was linked with 20% more business effects.
– Visually arresting work was linked with 13% more business effects.

Multi-market campaigns reported 29% more brand effects than single-market campaigns, including awareness and “fame”, but 9% fewer business effects.

For marketers, the findings suggest that scale alone does not guarantee stronger commercial results. Brands should focus on protecting distinctiveness, maintaining strong brand recognition and resisting the pull towards category comfort as ideas scale across markets.

Publicis London chief strategy officer Katie Hibbard said: “Too often, international advertising becomes a watered-down version of local work. As campaigns move across more countries, cultures and organisations, ideas can gradually get sanded down. We created World Class to understand what makes an idea travel commercially as well as creatively.

“Distinctiveness is the foundation. ‘Creative deviance’ is the multiplier. The strongest global ideas don’t win because they say the same thing everywhere. They win because they have something worth saying anywhere. Holding on to that as they scale is what separates work that simply travels from work that moves the world.”

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