Doohers and Shakers: Andrew Tindall

This month, we're starting a new long-form interview series - Doohers and Shakers. Our first guest is Andrew Tindall, SVP Global Partnerships at System1. Andrew builds global effectiveness partnerships with the world's largest and most exciting brands, agencies and media owners to scale creative effectiveness learnings and publish award-winning thought leadership with System1's data. Everything he shares is entertaining and full of practical advice. We hope you enjoy his answers as much as we did.

Your career path is unique, moving from medical training to a prominent role in advertising. What was the driving factor behind that shift, and how does a "science-first approach" inform your work in creative effectiveness?

I left medicine because I realised I was more obsessed with people’s lives than the technical details of the body. Medicine is full of uncertainty, but it is disciplined uncertainty. You’re trained to separate what you know from what you believe, and to grade evidence so you can act responsibly. Marketing, by contrast, often treats confidence as a substitute for proof.

A science-first approach in creative effectiveness is basically that discipline applied to advertising. I’m not interested in what marketers say they like. I’m interested in what real people feel, remember, and then buy. You can have the best strategy deck in the world, but if the work doesn’t create emotion, fluency and memory, it won’t drive behaviour change. Evidence keeps you honest, especially when the room is full of opinions.

Your concept of 'The Magic of Compound Creativity' is highly regarded. Could you explain the core idea behind it and provide a practical example of how a brand can apply this principle to drive long-term growth?

Compound Creativity is the idea that the biggest creative returns don’t come from a single brilliant campaign. They come from a brand building a recognisable creative world over time, then refreshing it without resetting it. When you repeat a distinctive device, character, platform or scenario, you make the next ad easier to process and more likely to stick. The effects stack.

A practical example is any brand that stops treating every campaign like a new brand launch. Pick a small set of distinctive assets, a consistent tone, a recurring frame, and use them relentlessly. Then refresh the execution, not the memory structure. You end up with work that is easier to recognise, easier to enjoy, and cheaper to make effective over time because you’re not rebuilding familiarity every quarter. Compare the Market is the obvious example across channels.

You've stated that "7 out of 10 OOH ads don't work." What are the key reasons for this ineffectiveness, and from a creative and media standpoint, what advice would you give brands to improve that rate?

That stat comes from research I ran with System1 and JCDecaux, Double Take. We tested thousands of outdoor campaigns and linked them to brand lift studies. Outdoor mostly works in glances of a few seconds. Around half of ads don’t achieve brand recognition in that time. Of the half that do, many don’t trigger enough useful emotion. In our testing, low emotional response materially reduces the commercial impact of OOH.

Most OOH fails for boring reasons. The ad is too complicated for the time people have to process it. The brand appears too small or too late. The message is trying to do five jobs at once. The distinctive assets are missing, or the design choices make the thing unreadable at speed. Lots of brands run a print ad on a billboard and act surprised when it doesn’t land.

The fix is also boring, which is why people resist it. Use fewer words. Make the brand easy to spot instantly. Use one visual idea. Use your distinctive assets with conviction. Assume people are distracted, moving, and giving you half a second. OOH is not a place for explanation. It’s a place to build memory structures at scale. From a media standpoint, buy it like you mean it. One beautiful site for one week can be a lovely photo for the internal wrap report. It is not the same thing as reach and frequency.

The adtech industry is often obsessed with short-term metrics. How can marketers and C-suite executives be convinced to prioritize emotional and long-term brand-building campaigns, even when the immediate ROI isn't obvious?

The easiest way to convince a CFO is to stop selling brand building as a moral philosophy and start selling it as risk management. Short-term metrics are seductive because they look controllable. They’re a comfy pair of old slippers. But they also create a brittle business. You end up harvesting demand instead of creating it, and then everyone panics when the pipeline dries up. Brand building is what makes next year easier.

The evidence base is strong. In my new book The Creative Dividend, we researched 1,265 campaigns in the Effie database and linked them to System1 creative measurement using a large-scale respondent base. Three things are clear.

One, campaigns that create Brand Effects tend to create more Business Results, and those business results compound.

Two, as lives have moved online, mental availability has become more important, and the media environment is more cluttered and lower-attention, so brands have to work harder. The link between Brand and Business effects has strengthened over the past decade.

Three, the average number of Brand Effects campaigns report has fallen materially over the same period.

Brand building has never been harder, or more important, and we’re doing less of it. Sorry, I went on a rant there. But that’s the point. The long term is not a luxury. It’s the operating system.

With the rise of LLMs, there's concern about a flood of uninspired AI slop. What role do you see AI playing in the future of advertising creativity, and what can brands do to ensure their work remains distinctive and emotionally resonant?

I think we need to cool our jets. System1 tests hundreds of thousands of ads. A large chunk are already dull, irritating, or pure salesmanship, and many don’t even get basic branding right. Human-made slop is already a bigger problem than AI-made slop.

AI will be useful for speed, iteration, and removing donkey work from production. It will also flood the world with competent, generic content, which is exactly what most brands already make. The danger is that marketers use AI as a shortcut around judgement, taste and craft, then wonder why everything looks the same and nothing feels like anything.

The brands that win will use AI like a tool in the hands of real creatives, not a replacement for them. Distinctiveness comes from having a recognisable world. Emotional resonance comes from human insight, humour, character and generosity.

AI can help you make more stuff. It cannot tell you what is worth making, or what will make people feel something. The fundamentals haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve become more important.

You write the column "Tindall on Effectiveness" for The Drum, emphasizing the science behind creative success. You focus on the principles of creation, while Veridooh's signature product is independent verification, guaranteeing the ad plays exactly as booked. From an effectiveness perspective, what is the commercial cost to a brand when a meticulously planned creative lacks verification and is subsequently compromised through missed plays or incorrect execution?

The cost is larger than people admit because OOH works partly by trust. You’re buying physical presence, scale, and repetition in the real world. If the plan isn’t delivered as booked, you don’t just lose impressions. You lose the memory-building you paid for. You lose the reach and frequency profile that makes OOH effective. And you introduce random gaps that make the campaign weaker than it should be.

There’s also a learning cost. If you don’t know what actually ran, you can’t evaluate performance properly, and you can’t make smarter decisions next time. Brands end up blaming the idea when the real problem was delivery. Verification is the difference between paying for an effectiveness plan and receiving one.

The OOH industry currently accounts for around 3% of total ad spend in the UK. What foundational shifts would be required for this figure to reach double digits?

OOH needs to stop underselling what it already is. It’s the last truly scalable, trusted, broad-reach medium that still lives in the real world. It should be winning more than it is.

Some of the industry innovation has drifted towards digital thinking: heavy targeting, dynamic creative, QR codes, and a grab for short-term actions. Those tools have a place, but they can also erode the core product if they become the default story. The biggest growth lever is still mass reach, quality environments, and repeatable creative effectiveness.

Creative is the other big lever. Profitability in OOH is wildly variable, and media spend alone doesn’t guarantee outcomes. If we lift the creative hit rate, returns become more repeatable, and confidence goes up. Then you unlock bigger, longer commitments.

There’s also boring infrastructure work: making it easier to buy at scale without sacrificing quality, more consistency in measurement and proof of delivery, and better integration into modelling so the true returns are visible.

What important truth about OOH advertising do very few people agree with you on?

OOH innovation has sometimes moved the industry backwards. The loss of scale and efficiency involved in heavy targeting and endless dynamic creative options often pales compared to what a properly broad, brilliantly simple outdoor campaign can do.

I’m a huge fan of OOH. It’s almost offensive that some people talk like the future is only programmatic DOOH. It has a place, but it should never make the core of the business play second fiddle.