The analyst who showed consistency pays has now measured creative and media together, and they account for most of the result.

We recently published a piece on Compound Creativity, the System1 and IPA study showing that brands who keep the same creative team make better work year on year. We opened it by disclosing that we benefit commercially from that finding. The same disclosure applies here, because the same analyst has published again, and the new finding sits even closer to what we sell.

The Creative Dividend, published by System1 and Effie on 27 January 2026, is a book by Andrew Tindall, the System1 analyst behind Compound Creativity. Where that study measured what happens when brands stay with one creative team, this one measures what creative quality and media spend do to each other.

The study

The analysis covers 1,265 campaigns from 2007 to 2023 across the US, Europe, the UK and Ireland, representing $139 billion in market share between them, matched to consumer responses from more than 200,000 people. It links two databases that do not usually meet: Effie Insights, Effie's global archive of effectiveness case studies, which records the commercial outcomes campaigns reported, and System1's Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database, which records how consumers responded to the creative itself.

What it found

Creative quality and media support, planned together, account for 60.1 per cent of campaign Business Results on average, and as much as 98.3 per cent in certain categories. Business Results is the outcome measure in Effie's archive, the commercial results the campaigns themselves reported. Whatever else marketers argue about, the two things the study says account for the majority of the outcome are how good the work is and how properly it is backed.

The book breaks creative effectiveness into four layers it calls the Creativity Stack: Emotion, Distinctiveness, Showmanship and Consistency. The fourth layer is the ground Compound Creativity covered.

The measure worth knowing by name is Excess Share of Creativity, ESOC. It captures how much creative advantage actually enters the market once media support is considered. As we read it, that means a brilliant ad with no weight behind it and a flat ad with heavy weight waste the money in different ways. As ESOC rises, the study found, the likelihood of reporting profit growth increases exponentially. The release draws the conclusion in plain words: "good enough" creative is often the most expensive choice.

One more number, and it explains why the book exists. While most marketers say creativity matters, 41 per cent say it is still seen as a risk.

What to hold against it

A few things first. System1 sells ad testing and Effie runs effectiveness awards, so both authors profit when the industry believes creative quality is measurable and decisive, the same conflict we named in the Compound Creativity piece. The campaigns are American, European, British and Irish, with no Australian data in the set, so anything said about the Australian market from here is judgement rather than evidence. And the campaigns skew large, 1,265 of them representing $139 billion in market share between them, which is not the end of town most Australian businesses live at. The full book is a separate download from System1; every figure in this piece comes from the open press release, read at source.

What we think this means

In most of the businesses we work with, the creative budget and the media budget are decided in separate conversations, usually in that order, and the first one exists to be trimmed so the second one can grow. The assumption underneath is that distribution is the growth lever and the content is a cost of entry. The study says the two have to work together, and our reading is stronger than that: they multiply, so trimming the creative to fund the media shrinks what the media spend is worth.

The honest marker of where the evidence stops: the campaigns behind this study are the $139 billion kind, and nobody has run this analysis on a $40,000 campaign for an Australian family business. Our judgement is that the logic tightens at that scale rather than loosening, because a small budget cannot buy its way past flat work the way a large one sometimes can. Tindall's own line covers it: creative quality that changes memory, and media support that gives those memories a chance to form.

That is also why this study and Compound Creativity belong together. One says the work gets better when the team stays. The other says the work and the weight behind it account for most of what the money buys. Read side by side, they price the two decisions that usually look cheapest, swapping teams and trimming production, as the expensive ones.