Northern Marketing Festival – Key Takeaways

The Client Services team went on a field trip recently, leaving Bear Town behind for the big city lights of Manchester to attend Prolific North’s Northern Marketing Festival. I’m Hannah, an Account Executive here at Thrive and I wanted to share a few of my takeaways and highlights from the day.

PG Tips – Consistency Is King

I’m a keen tea drinker, so understandably I was looking forward to the talk we had from Elle Barker, Chief Marketing Officer (UK&I) at Lipton Teas, on the return of Monkey as the face of PG Tips. And it didn’t disappoint. Elle dived into the reasoning and logic behind the reintroduction of Monkey, along with the positive results they’ve seen from doing so.

What stood out most was Elle’s view on consistency being king. She mentioned that unlike their main competitor, Yorkshire Tea, PG Tips had explored different advertising routes, whilst Yorkshire Tea kept theirs consistent. Elle believed that Yorkshire Tea’s strong creative and consistency had been key to their success at staying front of mind for consumers. So, PG Tips took note, they went into the archives and brought back Monkey, a creative which they knew had good brand recall and which was viewed positively by their audiences. By doing so, PG Tips brought back consistency too.

This ties back to a key principle we talk about a lot at Thrive, that a brand is a promise kept. This is the need for brands to deliver on the expectations they set, the need for a brand to be consistent. As Elle highlighted, one way to do this in advertising is to not be afraid to stick with creative which you know is effective and to continually reinvent it. By doing so, brand consistency is maintained. As we’ve seen with Yorkshire Tea, which won a Gold Award at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards for its long-term brand building case study, consistency can build trust, earn loyalty, and ultimately drive conversions.

IMA – Creativity as a Competitive Advantage

Ben Cunningham, Director of Media, and Ben Ducker, Executive Creative Director, from IMA shared a great presentation all about the importance of creativity in advertising. I particularly enjoyed how they utilised the theme of marriage throughout their talk, which was creative in itself! The concept helped illustrate how, due to the rapid growth of digital media, increased short termism, reduced attention and the erosion of creative effectiveness that came with it, media and creative metaphorically got divorced.

The two Bens, as they called themselves, discussed the importance of media and creative being married together to result in effective advertising. This is something we advocate and implement at Thrive. We believe that a great idea builds value over time. Creating something truly distinctive helps you to stand out from the crowd and consequently has a stronger staying power in people’s minds. The more distinctive your creative, the harder it is for competitors to replicate, making it one of the most powerful competitive advantages a brand can have. And this links back to the reintroduction of Monkey for PG Tips. This creative has become well known as part of the PG Tips identity and other tea companies can’t copy it – it’s distinctive. Creativity is a topic we feel strongly about; you can read more of our thinking on creativity in our recent bite paper.