The Unexpected Advantage

Surprise and unexpected twists in comms and marketing are often attributed to creative. But what of the role played by strategy, and by extension, research?

There's no doubt that surprise is central to engaging and keeping an audience. We know from System1 and Effie's 2025 Creative Dividend research that surprising ads deliver 4.5x the "fame effects" of the dullest ones. Some great new analysis from Cannes goes further, arguing that surprise is less about the event itself, but more about how we challenge the assumptions people hold about the brand or category in focus.

There are short, executional surprises, that the authors refer to as the "Short Oh!"

And then there is the "Long Ohhhh!" which is something that makes the audience step back and reassess their relationship with the brand or category entirely. Achieving that effect, according to the former CMO of Aldi, comes from discipline and rigour in your thinking, rather than crazy ideas.

There's a certain amount of revisionist history that always goes on with case studies, and how we talk about them, but this all sounds like strategy to me.

When you look at the winners of the creative effectiveness Lions for 2026 you'll find a lot of assumptions being challenged. One campaign in particular stands out to me. It's a great example of the long ohhhh in practice. It's also one of those pieces of work that demonstrates why the preservation of variance in research is so critical. And, particularly with all of the fast tech-enabled research tools we all have at our fingertips these days, how there is always a danger of averaging real people, and real life, into smooth blobs that are divorced from reality if we aren't thoughtful about designing for a diversity of perspectives.

So, let's talk about Vaseline.

It's a brand that has been around forever. One that has been managed as a "maintain" rather than "invest" brand within the Unilever portfolio. It has been, at least in recent memory, a lean cash cow with limited marketing investment, no innovation, and plateauing penetration.

Skincare is a category of specialists. Niacinamide for your pores, retinol for your lines, a precise promise on every bottle. In skincare today, being a generalist brand is increasingly a liability because the category logic has trained people to believe that specialists work and generalists don't.

Mass generalists like Vaseline also traditionally rely on media that forces them into focusing on one single "winning message" pushed out to everyone. Something true of everyone, but specific to no one. As a result, those brands become commodities.

Meanwhile, specialists win through proliferation. Ten SKUs is ten opportunities to signal expertise and establish premium positioning.

If you're one of these large incumbent brands, you can continue to play the game and continue looking for the middle of the road message that appeals to everyone. Though, if we're all honest with each other, what brand actually has the budget to be boring?

Instead, Vaseline looked toward smaller groups of people, and the edges, where relevance is increasingly found in today's world. Thousands of existing hacks and millions of people using the product in alternative ways: marathon runners using it to prevent chafing, photographers smearing it on lenses for a soft-focus effect, Thai worshippers protecting their knees on temple floors, tattoo artists using it for aftercare. All of these are more specific than "all-purpose moisturiser," and therefore immediately more relevant to real people, doing real things, in real life.

So that became the foundation for Vaseline Verified, their effectiveness award winning campaign where scientists lab-tested the uses people were already posting and gave the ones that worked a blue "Verified" tick, borrowed from social media verification. The scientists themselves fronted the content, with each video following the same structure: the user's hack, the lab test, the result, and the badge.

As a result of the campaign, underlying sales increased by 13.5% across key markets. That's the long Ohhhh at work, and some crafty comms strategy working very hard for a brand that had plateaued and was headed for decline.

The Unexpected Advantage

It's never been easier to discern what's happening at the mean. Claude can help you get there very quickly. As an aside, I really enjoy theories about that being why we're seeing so many pink cleats during this year's world cup.

But let's all be so for real, for just a minute. As it pertains to strategy or research, there is no advantage associated with the mean. None. Zero. Your closest competitor can arrive there just as easily and just as efficiently as you and your LLM of choice can. So, whether you're at an agency or in a brand, insights, or innovation role, that's the risk you take every time you design for the mean: that you'll just end up in the same place as the those you're competing against for share.

The value of strategy has always been in making meaningfully different choices, and today that core principle feels more critical than ever. If you only ever look in most obvious places, you're far less likely to find the spark you need to make those choices.

In the words of Joe Burns, nobody has ever had an original idea by being efficient.

The roles played by both strategy and research at real risk right now. As the tools get better and faster at handing us the mean, it gets easier to mistake a confident composite of most people for insight or understanding. And, by extension, to resign the role of surprise and the effectiveness spoils that accompany it to other parts of the process - like creative.

Which brings me back to the essence of ideas like Vaseline Verified. There is the short oh, and then there's the long ohhhh. The latter can't happen without researchers and strategists who look beyond the average, and clients who are willing to use these tools to actively seek out meaningful advantage.

You've probably already got a pretty good idea of what's going on at the mean. Strategy and research should be pointed elsewhere.