As marketers, we don’t have to wait and wonder either. It’s obvious that people are struggling now. The adjustments they’re making in their budgets tell the unvarnished truth of what’s happening in the real world.

At its core, great creative comes from a springboard of dynamic brand differentiators, truths and insights. And that’s what great strategies unearth from deep dives into the heart of brands, their products and the consumers they seek to woo.

With the pandemic’s brutal effects on commerce, many companies were forced to slow almost to a state of hibernation. Now, with the economy roaring back to life, companies need to act quickly to get back in the game.

With spectators waiting an extra year for the 2020 Olympic games to get underway, pent-up enthusiasm is fueling wild anticipation. An AdWeek survey reports that currently 53% of US consumers are chomping at the bit to tune in.

Pizza Hut and Domino’s recent retro reboots represent an effort to satiate consumers’ growing hunger for the past. Millennials are craving the simpler times of their youth when phones weren’t very smart and when you turned on the TV you got what you got.

The Super Bowl was a reminder just what a difficult line brands have to walk these days. The stakes are high and consumers' expectations even higher when it comes to brands being part of the solution and not the problem.

For far too long, marketers have been at the mercy of ad agency tricks of the trade, paying a high price for smoke and mirrors and bloated rosters.

The effects the pandemic and the social and political upheaval of 2020 have had on brand communications is about to be seen upon one of advertising’s largest stages. This year’s Super Bowl will illustrate how brands are breaking away from traditional spending and building brand experiences.

Great creative ad work isn’t just the product of vivid, clever and over-active imaginations. Great creative springboards off the back of research, data and hard-earned learnings about not only a brand, product or service, but the customers that want them.

From distilling down your brand’s core goals and message, to pinpointing your highest value customers, the information and components that create a highly effective content strategy are greater than the sum of their parts. When done correctly, brands create a living, breathing ecosystem of communications.