If you have ever wondered whether investing in your law firm’s brand actually delivers a commercial return, new research from Effie Worldwide and System1 provides the most compelling answer yet. Their study, “The Creative Dividend,” analysed 1,265 marketing campaigns across the US and Europe, linking creative quality to business outcomes at a scale previously unattainable.
The findings are as relevant to growth hungry law firms as to other industries. Creative quality and media support together explain 60.1% of campaign business results. That is not a soft metric or a vague correlation. It is evidence that creativity, when executed properly, is one of the most reliable growth levers available to any business, including yours.
This article unpacks the key findings from this landmark research and translates them into practical guidance for law firms seeking sustainable, profitable growth in an increasingly competitive market.
Why Creativity Has Become the Single Largest Profit Multiplier
Paul Dyson’s research into the drivers of profitability has long established that creative quality can increase advertising profitability by up to twelve times. That places creativity ahead of targeting, media mix, budget allocation, and almost every other marketing decision within your control.
Yet here is the problem: most marketers, and by extension most law firms, significantly undervalue creativity’s commercial impact. The Effie and System1 research found that 68% of American marketers and 62% of European marketers rank creativity’s profit impact below what the data actually shows. Even more concerning, 61% of American marketers rank campaign targeting above creative quality, despite Dyson’s research showing targeting delivers only a 1.1x profit multiplier compared to creativity’s 12x.
For law firms, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. If your competitors are undervaluing creativity while chasing efficiency metrics and targeting refinements, there is significant competitive advantage available to firms willing to invest in genuinely distinctive, emotionally engaging marketing.
The research also reveals a confidence gap in the industry. Around half of marketers report low confidence in advertising’s ability to deliver effectiveness, and four in ten are uncertain about using creativity to achieve it. This is not a knowledge gap but a confidence gap, and it explains why so many businesses, including law firms, default to safe, forgettable marketing rather than creative work that actually builds brands and drives growth.
Understanding the Creativity Stack: Four Layers That Drive Results
The research introduces what System1 calls the “Creativity Stack,” a framework built from four creative layers that consistently boost marketing effectiveness. Understanding these layers gives you a practical guide for evaluating and improving your own firm’s marketing.
Layer One: Emotion
Emotion is the foundation of effective marketing. The research confirms what neuroscience has long suggested: when people feel something, they form stronger memories. These memories shape what people notice, what they recognise, and ultimately what they choose when they need legal services.
The data is striking. Campaigns with high emotional intensity report more brand effects than those with low intensity. When that emotional response is positive, the effects compound over time. Campaigns that surprise and delight audiences do not just build more memory; they create conditions for profit that persist long after the campaign ends.
Perhaps most importantly, the research quantifies “the cost of dull.” Campaigns that generate high neutrality, meaning they fail to make people feel anything, see campaign-spend returns that are 40% lower than emotionally engaging work. In practical terms, dull advertising costs you more to achieve the same results as work that actually connects with people.
For law firms, this is a wake-up call. Legal services advertising has historically defaulted to rational, feature-focused messaging: our expertise, our experience, our results. While these elements matter, they rarely create the emotional connection that builds lasting brand preference. The firms that break from category conventions and find ways to genuinely connect with potential clients will spend their marketing dollars far more efficiently.
Layer Two: Distinctiveness
Emotion builds memories, but those memories only become commercially valuable when people associate them with the correct brand. That is distinctiveness. A distinctive brand comes to mind quickly and with little effort. Distinctive advertising makes the brand recognisable, so memories are stored with a clear label.
This aligns directly with Jenni Romaniuk‘s foundational research on Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs), explored in her books “How Brands Grow Part 2” and “Better Brand Health.” Romaniuk defines DBAs as the non-brand-name elements that trigger the brand in memory: logos, colours, taglines, characters, jingles, fonts, and other sensory cues. Her research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute demonstrates that brands grow when they employ clear and consistent cues that bring the brand to mind when encountered in advertising or at the point of purchase.
Romaniuk’s framework identifies two critical qualities every DBA must possess: uniqueness (how strongly the asset is linked to your brand versus competitors) and fame (how widely the asset is recognised among category buyers). An asset can be highly unique but unknown, or widely recognised but not distinctively yours. The goal is to build assets that score high on both dimensions.
System1’s Creative Dividend research validates and extends Romaniuk’s work. They measure distinctiveness through what they call “Fluency Rating,” capturing how effortlessly branding is processed and recognised. The average across all ads in their database is 81% correct brand recognition, providing a useful benchmark for strong distinctiveness.
Here is the critical finding: when advertising is low in distinctiveness, the brand-building power of emotion is largely lost. Even highly emotional advertising delivers fewer brand effects when the branding is not easily recognised. This confirms Romaniuk’s argument that distinctive assets are not merely aesthetic choices but commercial necessities that determine whether your marketing investment builds your brand or simply entertains an audience who cannot remember who paid for it.
The Creative Dividend research analysed nine core asset types that frequently appear across effective campaigns: logos, symbols, celebrities used consistently, colours, slogans, typefaces, product shapes, jingles, sonic cues, and what System1 calls “Fluent Devices.” The use of audio DBAs, including jingles and sonic devices, substantially increases the chance of achieving high distinctiveness. This matters particularly as more advertising is consumed in distracted environments where people may look away but cannot close their ears.
For law firms, this means your brand strategy must include clear, consistent visual and verbal cues that make your firm instantly recognisable. As Romaniuk emphasises, these assets require patience and protection. They must be used consistently over years to build the memory structures that trigger recognition. Changing your logo, abandoning a colour palette, or refreshing your visual identity every few years undermines the compounding effect that makes DBAs commercially valuable.
This might include distinctive colour palettes, consistent visual styles, memorable taglines, or Fluent Devices: recurring characters, scenarios, or creative approaches that build recognition over time. The research shows that Fluent Devices, when used consistently, triple the chance of reporting gains in brand distinctiveness and double the chance of increasing fame. They also deliver twice the profit likelihood of campaigns featuring celebrities or no distinctive device at all.
For a deeper exploration of how Romaniuk’s principles apply to legal practices, see what Jenni Romaniuk can teach your practice.
Case Study: Morgan & Morgan and the Creative Dividend in Action
While Australian law firms operate in a different regulatory environment, the principles of the Creative Dividend are universal. No law firm demonstrates this better than Morgan & Morgan, America’s largest personal injury firm, which has grown from a Florida startup in 1988 to a national powerhouse with over 1,000 attorneys across all 50 US states.
Morgan & Morgan’s marketing approach is a masterclass in applying every layer of the Creativity Stack.
Emotion Through Humour
The firm’s advertising consistently breaks from the sombre, serious tone typical of legal services. Their 2025 “There’s a Reason” campaign employs humorous scenarios that make people feel something rather than simply presenting credentials. As founder John Morgan explains: “We want to stand out from the pack and leave an impression. The goal is to make a connection with the audience, so they remember us if they ever need to call.”
The firm runs an 80-person in-house creative agency specifically to maintain creative control and produce work that entertains rather than merely informs. This commitment to emotional engagement, particularly through humour, exemplifies the research finding that campaigns creating positive emotion deliver stronger brand effects and business results.
Distinctive Brand Assets
Morgan & Morgan has built unmistakable distinctiveness through consistent visual and verbal cues: their bright blue and yellow colour palette, the “For the People” tagline, and most powerfully, John Morgan himself as what System1 would call a Fluent Device.
John Morgan appears consistently across decades of advertising, becoming as recognisable as the firm’s logo. This is precisely what Romaniuk’s research prescribes and what the Creative Dividend confirms: a consistent human element that builds recognition and triggers the brand in memory more effectively than a rotating cast of spokespeople or celebrities.
Showmanship That Earns Attention
The firm’s advertising entertains rather than lectures. Their spots featuring NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and golfer John Daly bring showmanship to categories that competitors treat with deadly seriousness. They understand that in skippable media environments, work that entertains earns the attention that rational arguments cannot command.
Consistency Compounded Over Decades
Morgan & Morgan began television advertising in 1989 and has maintained their approach for over 35 years. While competitors constantly refresh their messaging and creative direction, Morgan & Morgan compounds the same memory structures year after year. The “Morgan & Morgan Effect,” as industry observers call it, demonstrates the exponential advantage of consistency the research identifies.
The Results
The commercial outcomes confirm the Creative Dividend principles. Morgan & Morgan now invests approximately $350 million annually in advertising across over 1,000 attorneys, but the return on that investment reflects the multiplying effect of creative quality.
Their 2024 partnership with the Pittsburgh Penguins, named to Ad Age’s ‘Top Sports Marketing Campaigns of 2024’, delivered measurable brand effects: recall of Morgan & Morgan as the team’s go-to injury attorneys grew from 51% to 71%, with a 350% increase in the firm becoming fans’ first choice and a 300% increase in likely use of their services.
In 2025, the firm secured major verdicts including a $425.7 million jury verdict in a California data privacy case against Google, demonstrating that brand-building and commercial results compound together.
Lessons for Australian Law Firms
The scale differs enormously, but the principles translate directly. Australian firms cannot match Morgan & Morgan’s budget, but they can apply the same strategic framework:
- Emotional engagement over rational claims: Find ways to make potential clients feel something, whether through humour, empathy, or surprise.
- Build distinctive assets and protect them: Develop visual and verbal cues unique to your firm and commit to them over years, not campaigns.
- Earn attention through showmanship: Create content worth watching rather than content that interrupts.
- Commit to consistency: Resist the temptation to constantly refresh. Let your brand compound.
Morgan & Morgan proves that law firms are not exempt from the principles of effective marketing. The firms that treat creativity as a commercial investment rather than a cost centre will capture the Creative Dividend their competitors leave on the table.
Layer Three: Showmanship
Showmanship is the craft of making an idea worth watching. It is the “how” behind emotion: the narrative choices, human detail, and sense of life that make feeling more likely, more intense, and more memorable.
Orlando Wood‘s research, referenced extensively in the Creative Dividend study, distinguishes between “showmanship” and “salesmanship” in advertising. Showmanship earns attention through entertainment, narrative, and human connection. Salesmanship assumes attention and focuses on literal messaging and product-centric persuasion.
The data shows that high-showmanship campaigns are 50% more likely to report trust gains and 51% more likely to report fame growth. This matters because showmanship becomes increasingly important as media budgets shift toward skippable formats. When potential clients can scroll past your content in milliseconds, work that entertains and engages earns the attention that rational arguments cannot command.
For law firms competing in social media and digital environments, this is essential. The firms that understand the value exchange within these media channels and entertain with showmanship to earn attention have the greatest chance of lasting impact.
Layer Four: Consistency
Consistency is the compounding layer, and it may be the most undervalued element in law firm marketing. When brands reuse assets, maintain the same associations, and show up with familiar cues across channels, they become easier to learn and faster to recognise.
The research introduces “Compound Creativity,” a framework measuring how creatively consistent a brand is over multiple years. It captures strategy, execution across channels, and what a brand chooses to keep the same or change.
The findings are remarkable. The most consistent brands generate 4x higher ROI than inconsistent competitors. They are three times more likely to report incremental profit growth. And the gap widens over time as each exposure strengthens memory structures.
Importantly, consistency in marketing execution is not about creative restraint or dullness. It enables creativity. Brands that stretch the same creative idea across media and time, playing with familiar elements in interesting ways, outperform those that constantly reset their approach.
For law firms, this has profound implications. The temptation to chase new ideas, new messaging, or new visual approaches with each campaign undermines the compounding effect that builds real brand equity. As the research notes, it is easier to refresh an existing memory structure than to build a new one.
The Growing Importance of Brand Building in a Digital World
The rise of digital media has fundamentally reshaped how advertising works and how marketers measure success. Over the past decade, most media spend has shifted into digital channels, and much of that spend flows into environments that receive only a few seconds of attention.
This shift has created a troubling pattern. The research found that Meta’s global revenue strongly correlates (91%) with the number of short-term objectives reported in marketing campaigns each year. As digital spend increases, campaigns pursue more short-term goals: impressions, clicks, conversions, and other metrics that are easy to track but rarely reflect lasting brand impact.
The consequence is visible in the work itself. The emotional response to advertising has been decreasing over the past decade, closely following the decrease in brand-building effects. Campaigns now report 37% fewer brand effects than they did a decade ago.
Yet here is the paradox: brand building has become more important, not less. Decisions are increasingly made online, in search engines and AI-generated summaries, where the brand must be recalled from memory rather than recognised on a physical shelf. Advertising must work harder to create brands that easily come to mind.
For law firms, this means the path to sustainable growth requires balancing short-term lead generation with long-term brand building. As Binet and Field’s research has established, and as we have explored in what Les Binet and Sarah Carter can teach your law firm, this balance is not optional. It is the foundation of marketing strategies that actually work.
The Business Results That Matter
The Creative Dividend research aligns with Binet and Field’s framework for measuring effectiveness, identifying six business results that matter for sustained growth: incremental revenue, incremental profit, market share growth, new customer penetration, customer loyalty, and reduced price sensitivity.
Most campaigns report revenue gains. Far fewer report profit or market share growth. Revenue is common and shallow. Profit and market share are rare and meaningful.
The research shows that price effects, the ability to charge more and rely less on discounting, are the rarest business result but have a substantial impact on profitability. Campaigns that achieve pricing power alongside penetration and loyalty create compounding advantages that persist over time.
For law firms, this translates to a focus on building preference, not just awareness. A firm that potential clients actively prefer, rather than simply know about, can charge appropriate fees, attract better matters, and grow market share without competing purely on price. This aligns with the principles Jenni Romaniuk outlines in her work on brand health, which we have explored in what Jenni Romaniuk can teach your practice.
Brand Effects: The Bridge to Commercial Outcomes
Brand effects are the crucial link between creative quality and business results. They capture how advertising changes memory and perception, making them measurable assets as valuable as any other investment your firm makes.
The research identifies eight brand effects: awareness, brand image, brand equity, consideration, trust, fame, differentiation, and distinctiveness. Not all are equal, and their relative importance has shifted.
In recent years, brand equity (combining salience, differentiation, and meaningfulness), fame, and trust have become the most important brand effects for business success. This contrasts with earlier periods when brand image and differentiation ranked higher.
The shift reflects changes in how consumers make decisions. In a digital world where advertising often receives low attention and decisions begin in search engines or AI assistants, having a brand that easily comes to mind has become crucial.
Fame, in particular, has gained importance as campaign strategies increasingly depend on network effects and expanding reach through social sharing. Trust has become more important as customers have become more sceptical in a digital world where brands spread across touchpoints inconsistently.
For law firms, this suggests a focus on becoming the firm that comes to mind first when someone needs legal services in your practice areas. Building trust through consistent presence and messaging matters more than it once did. And creating work worth talking about, work that generates fame, multiplies the impact of every marketing dollar spent.
Invest in Creative Quality, Not Just Media Volume
The research makes clear that creative quality multiplies media effectiveness. A distinctive, emotionally engaging campaign with modest media spend will often outperform a forgettable campaign with larger budgets. Before increasing your media investment, ensure your creative work is strong enough to justify that investment.
This does not mean every piece of content needs to be an award-winning campaign. It means applying the principles of the Creativity Stack: ensuring your work creates some emotional response rather than neutrality, maintaining distinctive brand elements that make your firm recognisable, finding ways to engage rather than simply inform, and committing to consistency over time.
Balance Short-Term and Long-Term Investment
The two-speed approach to growth recognises that law firms need both immediate lead generation and long-term brand building. The Creative Dividend research reinforces this balance while providing evidence for why brand building delivers compounding returns.
Firms that pursue only short-term digital metrics, chasing impressions, clicks, and immediate conversions, are likely to see declining effectiveness over time. Those that invest in brand effects alongside performance marketing create advantages that make future growth easier and less expensive.
Commit to Consistency
Perhaps the most actionable finding is the power of consistency. Resist the temptation to constantly refresh your messaging, visual identity, or creative approach. Find a positioning that works, develop distinctive assets that build recognition, and commit to them over years, not quarters.
This does not mean static repetition. It means what the research calls “imaginative repetition,” refreshing and strengthening the same memory structures rather than rebuilding from scratch with each campaign.
Measure What Matters
The research challenges the dominance of short-term digital metrics in marketing measurement. While these metrics have their place, they should not crowd out measurement of brand effects and business results that actually drive sustained growth.
For law firms, this means tracking not just enquiries and conversions but also brand health metrics over time. Are you becoming more recognisable? More trusted? More often considered? These indicators predict future performance in ways that click-through rates cannot.
The Creative Dividend in Perspective
The Creative Dividend research arrives at a moment when marketing effectiveness faces structural challenges. Short-term metrics dominate. Attention is fragmented. Budgets are scrutinised. In this environment, the evidence for creativity’s commercial impact is both timely and necessary.
For law firms, the implications are clear. Creativity is not a luxury or a nice-to-have. It is the largest single profit multiplier within your control. The firms that invest in distinctive, emotionally engaging, consistent brand building will compound their advantages over competitors who chase efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.
Advertising is not a cost to be minimised. It is an investment that, when treated properly, reliably grows businesses willing to invest with ambition and belief. That is the Creative Dividend.
Key Takeaways for Law Firms
- Creative quality delivers a 12x profit multiplier, making it the most powerful lever within marketing’s control.
- The Creativity Stack (emotion, distinctiveness, showmanship, and consistency) provides a practical framework for evaluating and improving your marketing.
- Dull advertising costs 40% more to achieve the same results as emotionally engaging work.
- Consistency compounds: the most consistent brands generate 4x higher ROI and are 3x more likely to report profit growth.
- Brand building has become more important as decisions increasingly happen in digital environments where brands must be recalled from memory.
- Short-term metrics can distract from the brand effects and business results that drive sustainable growth.
- Creative confidence matters: the firms willing to back distinctive creative ideas with sustained investment will outperform those that default to safe, forgettable marketing.
Is Your Law Firm Capturing the Creative Dividend?
Most law firms leave the Creative Dividend on the table. They invest in marketing that fails to create emotion, lacks distinctive assets, and changes direction before consistency can compound. The result is marketing spend that generates activity but not growth.
At Practice Proof, we help Australian law firms build brands that deliver measurable commercial returns. Our approach combines the evidence-based principles outlined in this research with deep expertise in law firm marketing—from brand strategy and website design to SEO, Google Ads, and everything else your law firm needs to balance short-term lead generation with long-term brand building.
Ready to stop wasting marketing budget on forgettable work? Book a discovery call to discuss how your firm can start capturing the Creative Dividend.
