Economic uncertainty has become the defining backdrop of FY26. Australia’s GDP growth is forecast to hover between 1.2% and 1.5%, while the cost-of-living crisis continues to squeeze household budgets (Reserve Bank of Australia, March 2025 Outlook). As discretionary spending tightens, brands find themselves under increasing pressure to deliver results with reduced marketing investment.
The instinctive reaction for many marketers is to cut brand activity, pivot to short-term tactics, or pull spend altogether. But history, and the data, tell a different story. In tough economic times, it’s not the brands that spend less that win, it’s the brands that spend smarter. And spending smarter starts with creativity.
Many marketers still believe that tightening media spend or focusing solely on performance marketing will deliver against short-term goals and preserve margins. Yet the relationship between marketing spend and effectiveness is not purely linear.
Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute highlights that the primary function of advertising is to build mental availability: making a brand easy to think of and easy to buy. Mental availability is built through consistent, distinctive, emotionally resonant communication over time, not through hyper-targeted tactical messages alone.
Similarly, Binet and Field’s seminal work “The Long and the Short of It” demonstrates that long-term brand-building campaigns significantly outperform short-term sales activations when it comes to sustainable growth.
During downturns, the temptation to over-invest in immediate returns can lead to long-term erosion of brand equity. And this is an expensive mistake to unwind once the economy recovers.
Simply put: chasing efficiencies without creativity leads to false economies. So you’ll spend less today, but you’ll definitely wake up paying for it tomorrow.
So, if budget cuts are inevitable, creative efficiency becomes critical.
Creative efficiency is about ensuring that every idea works harder.
Nielsen’s Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness study (2017) found that creative quality accounts for 47% of a campaign’s sales impact - more than targeting, reach, or brand factors individually. When executed well, creativity can act as a force multiplier, turning a modest budget into an outsized commercial impact.
Creativity enhances:
- Emotional engagement: People are more likely to notice, feel, and remember emotionally charged ads.
- Brand recall: Distinctive, surprising creative ideas leave stronger memory traces, supporting future purchasing decisions.
- Share of voice: Great ideas punch above their media weight, achieving earned reach through conversation, media coverage, or social sharing.
At my agency, we’ve had the recent pleasure of working with a number of brands like ROLLiN’ and MILKRUN - brands that didn’t retreat creatively just because of modest media budgets, instead, they leaned in, and it’s already paying off with fantastic results.
In an era of constrained budgets, creative strategy must be sharper, not safer.
Here’s what we’ve learned helping brands embrace creative efficiency on a tight budget:
- Lean into constraints.
Constraints often force teams to think more clearly and creatively. Limitations on budget, media channels, or production resources should be reframed as creative challenges.
- Build and reinforce distinctive brand assets.
Consistent use of assets like logos, colours, taglines, and sonic branding dramatically improves mental availability.
- Focus on emotions and their intensity.
Even when consumers aren’t immediately buying, emotions keep your brand top-of-mind. Advertising that makes people feel something is more likely to be remembered when purchase triggers occur later.
- Prioritise consumer insight.
Understanding how the economic climate is shifting consumer mindsets (e.g., increased value-seeking, ethical consumption, self-care) ensures your creative is not just distinctive, but relevant.
The Critical Role of Creative Agencies
In times like these, agencies must do more than just execute. They must lead and be vocal champions for bold, wildly effective creativity. Collaboration across creative, media, and data teams is essential. Strategy should be used to illuminate opportunity, but creativity must provide the spark that brings it to life.
Creative effectiveness is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation for achieving growth when every dollar counts.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we create, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.