The Creative Ladder in 2025: A Decade of Driving Creative Effectiveness

It’s been ten years since AdAge wrote, “The Creative Ladder has helped [Heineken] scale creative heights, culminating with the 2015 Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year award.”

Since then, The Creative Ladder, a project I led as Contagious’ founding head of creative capabilities for our brilliant Heineken clients, has gone on to become the most widely used creative evaluation framework by large brand-owners.

The results speak for themselves: all the companies using the Creative Ladder have achieved remarkable things. They’ve won the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year three times (Heineken, AB InBev back-to-back), Effie’s Most Effective Company three times consecutively (AB InBev), the Cannes Lions Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix 2024 (Kraft Heinz), and their best-ever Cannes Lions performance (PepsiCo in 2024). And I’m willing to bet that those last two companies will win Marketer of the Year titles in the next two years. In short, the Creative Ladder works.

So what is this secret weapon powering the world’s biggest buyers of professional creative services that you might not have heard of?

Noah Briar, co-founder of Percolate, described the Creative Ladder as one of his favourite examples of a brand using a ‘systems approach’ to creativity:

“The idea was simple: Create a structure around creative feedback that helped drive both consistency and risk-taking by getting everyone on the same page about what they are really feeling when they see new creative work. It did this by offering a kind of controlled vocabulary that could help them better articulate how they felt when they saw something.”

Noah Briar, Why is This Interesting? The Creative Systems Edition, Substack article 13 Sept, 2019

Over the course of 2025, its tenth anniversary year, I’ll be writing a few articles expanding on the Why, What, and How of the Ladder for anyone considering how they might replicate the success others have seen with it. But for now, to kick things off in January here’s a quick primer to introduce it.

To aid us I’ll use a version of the Creative Ladder based on its various incarnations today:

An aggregated version of the Creative Ladder based on its various incarnations in companies such as Heineken, Kraft Heinz, AbInbev and PepsiCo

So let’s start at the top…or… er.. at the bottom… because it’s a Ladder right? Whatever - what’s the point of this thing?

The Creative Ladder started life at ad agency Leo Burnett before the team at Contagious had the insight to ask how it might be re-written to also support brand owners. Ultimately it exists to make the practise of producing brand communications that are truly Great (vs merely Good) more predictable, repeatable and therefore scaleable throughout large organisations. It does this in the following way:

1. The primary role is delivered by the words which provide a shared language for discussing creativity in the same way your company probably already has for other critical areas of operations e.g. Finance, Legal and R&D. Experience from current users shows that having a shared language for creativity is the key unlock to the most crucial part of the creative process – giving creative feedback.

2. A secondary role is delivered by the numbers which allow for easy ‘scoring’ to track progress over time

The Creative Ladder is what I call an ‘Apex Predator’ tool because when fully applied it addresses a number of lower order symptoms. For example, having a formal shared language unlocks individual creative confidence, which unlocks capability which then improves the quality of creative work. This renewed confidence also provides a helpful emotional ‘security blanket’ in the awkward moment of giving creative feedback, which in turn supports higher levels of psychological safety during the entire creative process.

Finally, if we consider the Creative Ladder as a company’s ‘manifesto’ on how they believe modern brand communications work, it saves time and organizational calories by providing a single source of truth that avoids everyone inventing and applying their own personal theories, which is only natural in a vacuum.

Why is feedback so important? And why is it an ‘awkward moment’?

Of all the stages in the creative process feedback is the most important because bad feedback always leads to bad work, whereas great work can often be generated in spite of other negative factors - a bad brief for example. Feedback sessions very often involve people who are not creative professionals (but rather ‘business’ people - as I was during my decade in PepsiCo brand management) feeding back to creative professionals in internal or agency teams. This causes a relative imbalance in creative references and understanding, which can sometimes lead to overly subjective feedback. The Creative Ladder seeks to address this by helping to even the creative playing field and give all stakeholders, no matter their level of creative experience, a basic level of creative confidence to help them provide feedback that is a a little more objective, a little more robust. However it’s not designed to get everyone to agree on everything, but rather as a framework around which they can ‘disagree more objectively’.

Ah so it’s about having better discussions, not ‘scoring’ work. But the Ladder does have numbers on it?

The numbers are there to simplify, not stifle. They provide an easy, quick heuristic with which to categorise and compare work while playing an important role in forcing a crystallisation of creative opinion (no more vague feedback of “it’s not quite there”). This simple ‘rule of thumb’ thinking is particularly important for scaling easily across large organisations. The numbers are also important to track progress over time.

Hmmm…. It all still seems a bit reductive to be honest. Surely Creativity is based on unpredictable and instinctive brilliance which can’t be forced into a 10 step ‘formula’!?

Sure, creativity is chaotic, messy, and occasionally involves a eureka moment in the shower. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put some structure around it. Think of the Creative Ladder as a framework in the same way the Hero’s Journey is used by screenwriters. Or how Designers use the 4Ds of Design Thinking. They are all ‘formulas’ that, far from stifling invention, help provide the scaffolding to support bigger, more coherent, more effective ideas.

The Creative Ladder doesn’t seek to capture the true full complexity of creative decision-making but rather simplify it enough in order to build a base level of literacy, confidence and speed of decision-making. As the saying goes - All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Ok… So did you just make up this Ladder then? What’s it based on?

As I mentioned, the Creative Ladder is constructed to be a quick heuristic/rule of thumb; in general the higher up you go from 4 CLICHÉ , the more chance your message will be noticed and remembered.

It’s founded on two well proven insights:

1. The Brand Fame model which broadly says the more famous your brand is the more successful it will be. The primary objective of brand communications therefore is either to increase or retain the brand’s level of fame among its target audience.

And 2 - Most branded communications in the world aren’t creatively interesting enough to clear even the lowest bar—being noticed, let alone remembered or associated with the brand. (I’d conservatively estimate 60–80% fall into this 4 CLICHE category.) Sure, a massive media budget can force attention without improving creative quality; just hammer the audience with high-frequency ads. But that’s like showing up to a social event with a megaphone and shouting your name until everyone remembers it. It works—but you’re not gonna get an invite to the next party. In any case most brands can’t bankroll that level of obnoxiousness; they simply don’t have big enough media budgets to be boring.

So it’s just about Fame?

Yes - the TLDR of the Ladder is that the primary goal of all brands is to build Fame (famous for the right reasons and to the right audience). And you can’t just leapfrog your way to the top of the Ladder without climbing the fundamental rungs below i.e. all work that is for example 8. CONTAGIOUS must also be clearly associated with the brand as per 5. OWNABLE.

Surely everyone just wants a 10 ?

Totally - the most common question I get asked is how do I get a 10 LEGENDARY? But the chances of anyone scoring this highest of benchmarks are very slim, and we only know if it truly achieved it 5-10 years after launch, with luck and external events playing a significant role in deciding whether it makes it. All of which means the highest you can deliberately brief for is a 9 CULTURAL PHENOMENON.

But - and this is the main point – scoring in the top part of the Ladder will naturally require extra time and resources and most brief objectives don’t deserve or require this level of investment. An instore display for example may only need to be ‘Ownable’ and nothing more. Depending on the market environment a goal of moving to an annual average of 5 OWNABLE from a 4 CLICHÉ can be considered a significant success that should be applauded. Progress is progress, people!

Ok what about the others areas of the Ladder?

The Ladder breaks creative work into three main areas:

• Low Scores (1-4): The danger zone—work that’s confusing, damaging, or 4 CLICHÉ and therefore totally invisible (Remember most work in the world scores a 4)

• Middle Scores (5-6): The bread and butter – good honest work with a specific job to do. Apart from 4 CLICHE work, this is where most campaigns in the world would score, making this section the most interesting to understand.

• High Scores (7-10): The ultimate goal: this is the place where famous, iconic brands get built.

By the way, the gap between the top and the bottom is closer than you think. Much like the fine line relationship between Love and Hate, or Clever and Stupid*, the higher up the Ladder you push, the more chance you have to be 3 CONFUSING, or 1 DESTRUCTIVE. (In truth, the Creative Ladder is more of a creative circle)

*a Spinal Tap reference - I think the next version of the Ladder I develop should go to 11 - ?

You said the Ladder is mainly for use during creative feedback sessions. So that means it’s used for work in progress not finished work?

Yes exactly – we are judging the potential of work to hit certain rungs of the Creative Ladder. But it’s also used for reviewing finished work by formal internal groups known as Creative Councils who meet once a year (see last point below)

So does the Ladder replace existing Pre or Post testing?

No – it’s intended to work alongside those existing tools you already have, not replace them.

Ok, you’ve convinced me it might be interesting -  can I just start using it with my team?

Yes ! Although based on a decade of experience with a range of companies, the teams that have been most successful with it to date (ABInbev for example) have supported it in the following ways:

• Personalise it: Although the fundamental structure and language of the Ladder doesn’t change until/unless the science of Brand Fame does, the specific wording should be personalised to reflect your teams’ internal language and cultural grammar (literal and figurative)

• You need onboarding on how to use (and not use!) it: Teams who have simply released the Ladder into the organisation have seen limited take-up, or even negative outcomes due to confused usage - for example focusing too much on the numbers vs the language in creative conversations.

• Get the budget owners onboard: You need to get basic buy-in from the people that own the advertising and media budgets to avoid ‘organ rejection’ by the company. This means General Managers and Presidents, not just CMOs.

• There are two important set-piece meetings that maximise the Creative Ladder’s impact:

  • Creative Councils – large formal meetings that evaluate finished work retrospectively in order to set and track ambition, while providing a critical opportunity for organisational learning.

  • Creative BrainsTrusts – named after Pixar’s internal group with the same objective, these are smaller and more informal than the Councils and used to improve work in progress.