The lies advertising tells itself about creativity—and why Jayel Ladioray wants to end them

In advertising, creativity has long been treated as the industry’s highest ideal. It wins awards, earns recognition, and gives brands their most memorable moments. But for every campaign that captures attention, only a handful go on to change behavior, build lasting brand value, or become part of culture.

For Nestlé Philippines Vice President and Head of Communications and Content Excellence, Jayel Ladioray, that’s where the real measure of creativity begins.

Speaking before marketers, creatives, and brand leaders at the adobo Masterclass on Creativity held at the Ayala Museum on Monday, July 20, Jayel challenged some of the industry’s most deeply rooted assumptions about originality, boldness, and effectiveness. 

^{Jayel Ladioray challenged the industry’s long-held assumptions about creativity, arguing that great ideas are measured not by the attention they attract, but by the behavior they inspire and the value they create.}

A Palanca Award–winning writer, film producer, songwriter, and long-time advertising insider, Jayel told the audience about the “lies” that quietly shape how agencies and clients think about creativity and effectiveness. For him, creativity that doesn’t move people, change behavior, or create value is just self-expression.

“Creativity earns attention, but it is effectiveness that builds connection,” he said. “The greatest ideas do both.”

Jayel began with a myth he said some agencies love to believe, that originality alone is inherently good. He pointed to the very Pinoy impulse summed up in the phrase “‘yung maiba naman”—to do something simply because it’s different. However, he said, this mindset can “still be completely irrelevant.” 

“Yes, you can be fresh, you can be different, you can win all the medals around the world,  but still be completely irrelevant.”

The problem, he argued, is when work is optimized for novelty, awards, and peer validation rather than clarity, effectiveness, and impact.

“We confuse being admired with being impactful.”

“At the end of the day, creativity is not measured by how much attention span you get from fellow creatives. It should be measured by what it moves people to do. If your goal is pure self-expression, you might be better off painting, or writing prose or poetry, or doing a digital post,” Jayel added. 

Originality is a means, not an end

Jayel argued that in marketing, originality is a means, not an end. Rather than chasing novelty for its own sake, he urged marketers to recognize the value of returning to ideas that have already proven meaningful to consumers. Drawing from Nestlé’s own portfolio, he shared how some of the company’s strongest brand revivals came not from reinvention, but from recommitting to their core purpose.

Promil, for instance, became synonymous with the idea of the “gifted child” through its iconic 1990s campaign featuring Shaira Luna. Over time, however, the brand moved away from that positioning.

“Promil actually forgot all about giftedness from 2015 onwards. Of course, the result was a decline,” he said.

Instead of searching for an entirely new platform, the team returned to what had always made Promil distinctive.

“We said, let’s go back to the heartland of Promil, which is giftedness. In 2023, we went back, and guess what? Promil is now enjoying the highest brand power scores in its life.”

He cited Chucky as another example. Following the pandemic, the childhood beverage brand had, in his words, “lost its way.” Rather than reinventing the brand, the team revisited its enduring platform, “Minsan lang sila bata,” bringing back a commercial first released in 2015 because its message remained just as relevant to Filipino families.

Nescafé’s iconic “Para Kanino Ka Bumabangon?” campaign told a similar story. Although the platform had become part of popular culture, it was discontinued just eight to ten months after launch because it failed to meet short-term sales expectations.

Looking back, Jayel acknowledged that the decision overlooked the campaign’s true role as a long-term brand equity platform rather than an immediate sales driver.

Years later, Nestlé revived the campaign after realizing consumers had never forgotten it.

“People remembered, and seven years later, we continued it again. Nescafé is now enjoying a renaissance. It even won the very first Tambuli Awards Campaign of the Decade,” he said, adding that the experience fundamentally changed how the company evaluates creative work. Instead of thinking in terms of annual campaigns, he said marketers should build platforms that can remain relevant for decades.

For Jayel, these examples point to a common truth that the most powerful ideas are not always the newest ones. More often, they are the ones that continue to resonate long after they are first introduced.

Courageous creativity

Jayel then turned to what he described as the second misconception in advertising: the belief that clients genuinely want bold ideas. In reality, he said, boldness is often welcomed only until it becomes uncomfortable.

“For clients, it really depends on what bold means,” he remarked, arguing that many organizations disguise fear as professionalism. Concepts such as alignment, defensibility, and consensus may sound like responsible decision-making, but they often become reasons to avoid taking creative risks.

For him, truly great work is rarely comfortable.

“We call it professionalism, but it’s really fear,” Jayel said. “Great work makes you feel uncomfortable. It creates that knot in your stomach — something you can’t sleep with.”

He observed that rather than brand rejecting ideas outright, such ideas are often diluted through a series of well-intentioned revisions where feedback from data, analytics, pre-testing, and multiple stakeholders gradually chips away at the original concept until all that remains is the safest version of the idea.

“The only thing left is the idea that has succeeded in protecting everyone else,” he said. That, according to Jayel, is where the industry’s real challenge lies.

“The biggest risk in advertising is not being wrong; it’s being ignored. We don’t have a creativity problem; we have a courage problem,” he underscored. 

The realization prompted a cultural shift within Nestlé. Instead of prioritizing consensus, the company adopted a new set of behaviors centered on collaboration over consensus, speed over perfection, learning over knowledge, and courage over comfort. Jayel shared that it took years to embed these principles across the organization, but they have since become part of how teams evaluate and champion creative work.

One of the strongest examples of that commitment is KitKat’s enduring “Have a Break, Have a KitKat” platform, which has remained globally consistent since 1957.

“It needs commitment and courage to be able to stick to this idea,” Jayel said, pointing to how the brand has continuously reinterpreted the concept without losing its core meaning. 

In the Philippines, the campaign evolved beyond advertising through branded benches, retail installations, and other everyday reminders that invited consumers to literally “take a break.” He also highlighted the global “Great KitKat Heist” campaign, which transformed the real-life theft of a truck carrying KitKat products into a real-time participatory experience. Through a “stolen KitKat tracker,” news coverage, memes, and social media engagement, what began as an unexpected crisis became one of the brand’s most talked-about campaigns.

“They turned a problem into participation,” Jayel said. “What started as a crime story turned into one of the most genius marketing moments.”

Beyond generating conversation, the campaign delivered tangible business results, driving sales while earning the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in PR. 

Jayel believes that ultimately, the campaign stands as proof that courageous creativity is most powerful when it creates both cultural relevance and commercial impact.

Creativity that creates culture

Jayel’s final point of contention addressed one of advertising’s longest-standing divides: the belief that agencies are responsible for creativity while clients are responsible for effectiveness.

For him, separating the two creates an incomplete way of thinking about marketing.

“It’s as if we are only working with one hemisphere of our brain,” he said. “Clients have the left brain for effectiveness, and we outsource our right brain for creativity to agencies. No—we should be whole-brained.”

Drawing from research involving 750 brands across 45 markets and billions of dollars in media investment, Jayel pointed out two factors that consistently drive marketing effectiveness: sufficient investment and creative quality. Those findings have since become embedded in how Nestlé evaluates its own campaigns. Every initiative, he shared, must be supported by adequate media investment while meeting a high creative standard that allows it to stand apart from the competition.

Beyond campaign performance, Jayel also shared that the company aligned agencies and brand teams around a shared goal of building brand power through meaningfulness, differentiation, and salience. A creative review board further challenges teams to critically evaluate their ideas by asking a deceptively simple question: “Maganda po talaga ‘to? Or it’s just wallpaper?”

^{Jayel Ladioray broke down the key drivers of marketing effectiveness, highlighting how investment, creative quality, brand halo, media mix, and platform optimization work together to deliver stronger business outcomes.}

For him, creativity should first strive to be distinctive before becoming original, contagious, and, with enough consistency, legendary.

The shift reflects a broader evolution in how Nestlé views creativity itself.

“We changed our mind,” he said. “Creativity is not decoration; it is a business decision.”

To illustrate what happens when creativity and effectiveness work together, Jayel shared some recent Nestlé campaigns that extended beyond advertising to influence culture and behavior.

Bonakid challenged the assumption that audiences no longer have the patience for long-form storytelling through “Mujigae,” a full-length feature film about a Korean-Filipino orphan searching for her place in the world.

“Bonakid challenged one of the myths: that people have no attention span,” he said. “The truth is, people do not have short attention spans. They have short patience for things that do not matter.”

The film became the first branded entertainment title to top Netflix Philippines rankings while generating millions in revenue through theatrical and streaming releases, alongside record-breaking brand equity scores, demonstrating that meaningful stories can still command attention when they resonate with the audience.

Maggi, meanwhile, found relevance within gaming culture by tapping into the growing trend of players recreating fictional dishes from video games. By identifying the most requested in-game recipes, recreating them using real ingredients, and collaborating with gaming creators, the brand transformed itself from a pantry staple into a natural part of conversations within the gaming community.

As Jayel puts it, “Gamers don’t need fantastical ingredients when the real magic has always been here—plus Maggi.

For Nescafé, the challenge extended beyond marketing coffee to safeguarding the future of coffee farming itself.

“The youth’s love for coffee is growing, but interest in coffee farming and agriculture is shrinking,” Jayel explained.

“People don’t think about what goes behind their cup, especially the people behind their beloved drink.”

To bridge that gap, the brand introduced the “Bangon na Rason” farm influencers—children of coffee farmers who received educational grants and became advocates for the next generation of agriculture. In an unconventional move, some of the country’s biggest TikTok creators temporarily handed over their accounts to these young storytellers, giving them a platform to share the realities of coffee farming with millions of viewers.

The campaign generated a 2,485 percent increase in conversations about coffee farmers, while the influencers’ audiences grew by as much as 116 percent. It also extended beyond social media through “Tasa ng Pag-asa,” contributing to Nescafé’s highest meaningful brand score in four years.

The campaign demonstrated that influence is earned not through brand messaging alone, but through authentic voices.

“Impact does not come from what brands say, but from who people trust enough to listen to.”

With these instances, executions, and debunking of misconceptions, Jayel challenged the audience to see creativity and effectiveness as inseparable. 

“We’ve been told a lie that creativity is only for dreamers and effectiveness is only for business folks to make real money. But the greatest ideas do both. They move people, change behavior, and create value,” he said. For him, creativity alone is not something to be admired and effectiveness — something to be measured should be exclusive. Ideally, they go hand-in-hand. 

“Creativity enters culture, but it is effectiveness that transforms that culture. Then creativity ceases to be something simply admired — it becomes something we can believe in; something that can change lives,” he concluded.

READ MORE:

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