Why Emotion Drives Effectiveness More Than We Might Like to Admit

As creative industry leaders, we like to believe we’re in the business of rational persuasion. We talk about being data-led, insight-driven and optimised. We measure what works and we defend what we can prove. We build cases, not just campaigns.

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And yet, quietly, often uncomfortably, we know that the work that really moves the needle doesn’t just inform. It makes people feel something.

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I was on a Teams call recently. It was a creative review with ten people. A few cameras were off, with a lot of polite agreement. The idea had already been through the system. It had been refined, de-risked and improved. What remained was competent, it was on strategy and it ticked every box. And yet, despite this, something was missing.

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No one was asking the most important question: Will anyone actually feel something when they see this?

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Later that day, my daughter forwarded me a piece of writing from a school friend. It was the words of a young boy reflecting on the loss of his mother. It was raw and unpolished. It was completely human. For five minutes, I was transported. I sat at my desk with tears streaming down my face.

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And it struck me, not gently, but uncomfortably, later that evening: I cannot remember the last time an ad did that to me. Something that made me laugh out loud, or made me cry.

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Now, before we declare the industry broken – it isn’t. Much of the work we produce today is strategically sound. It is well-crafted and data-informed. In other words, it works. The problem is that while competence delivers, it is rarely remembered. This is because moving people is where disproportionate value lives. 

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Somewhere along the way, in our pursuit of certainty, we reduced risk. And in doing so, we diluted the very thing that makes work memorable. We didn’t do this deliberately or recklessly. It was incremental: A safer choice here, a broader message there.

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The result of this is work that performs, but rarely resonates. And this is where the fertile opportunity sits, because emotion isn’t the opposite of effectiveness. It’s a proven multiplier of it.

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Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank, spanning 30 years, more than 700 brands and 80 categories, is unambiguous: Emotional advertising is roughly twice as effective as purely rational advertising over the long term.

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It also delivers significantly greater profit over time. Emotional campaigns are far more likely to produce sustained growth and pricing power – not because emotion replaces rational messaging but because it amplifies everything else.

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Emotion does what logic alone cannot. It creates memory, drives sharing, builds affinity and lowers resistance. Ultimately, it influences behaviour, not by force but by connection. As Binet himself put it:

“Emotions affect the prices people are willing to pay as much as they affect the volume that gets sold. In the long run, emotion is where the really big profits lie.”

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So the question is not whether what we’re doing is working. It is. Rather, the question is: How much more could it be working? For CEOs and CMOs, this isn’t a philosophical debate. It’s a commercial one.

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Under-weighting emotion shows up in very real ways: greater price sensitivity, higher spend to sustain sales, and brands that fade the moment media stops. Over-weighting short-term rational messaging can look efficient on a dashboard, but it quietly erodes memory, margin and desire over time.

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Rebalancing towards emotion isn’t about being “softer”. It’s about buying future cash flow at a discount.

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This is not a call to abandon rigour or to romanticise a past that was no more perfect than today. It’s a call to rebalance and recognise that effectiveness is not built on what people think alone, but also on what they feel.

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Perhaps, in our reviews we should not just ask whether the work is clear, or if it is on strategy, or whether it delivers on the KPI. Perhaps we should also ask: Will anyone care? Will anyone remember this tomorrow? Would I send this to someone I love? And brands’ leaders would do well to ask: Will this still be earning for us in three years’ time?

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The best work has always done both. It works. And it moves.

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In our work, the most effective ideas tend to have three things in common:

1. They are anchored in a sharp human truth.

2. They keep at least one uncomfortable edge — something that makes people feel something specific.

3. They are judged not only by what people say they think, but by what they visibly feel.

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When those elements are protected through the process, the work may feel less “safe” in the room, but it performs harder, and compounds longer in the market. We’ve proven, time and again, that creativity drives commercial growth, not as decoration but as a business tool.

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The most powerful creativity doesn’t just communicate. It recruits, it makes people want to be part of something.

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We don’t need to go back. We need to move forward, with everything we now know, and reintroduce the one thing we’ve quietly sidelined: Emotion.

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When we combine the precision of modern marketing with the power of human truth, we don’t just create better campaigns, we build brands with stronger pricing power, more resilient demand. We build far more valuable businesses.

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