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God Save the King: how an obsession with making things that are easy to measure is killing advertising. (And what to do about it.)

Writer's picture: UK CreativeUK Creative

Elliott Starr is Creative Director at Impero.

Thursday 7th November 2024


 

The 'curse of knowledge' is the tendency for people deeply entrenched in a topic to overemphasise complex details. This is what's happening in advertising and marketing. 



It’s leading many CMO/CEO/ agency leadership collectives to take inspiration from the 1991 box office smash ‘Thelma & Louise’. Roof down, tyres turning, they’re headed straight for the cliff's edge. Into the canyon of beige. The valley of forgettable. The chasm of convoluted messages the average mind cannot process. It’s a black hole of metaphors if I’ve ever seen one.


So, why is this happening? Well, we’re all a bit obsessed with short-term sales strategies. Not only that, but the obsession is growing, despite plenty of evidence they offer far lower value for marketing money than building a brand.


Rational, performance advertising performs a vital function. It’s also much more scalable and accessible for a growing business than emotional brand advertising, which tends to have a higher entry cost. This is all to say; it has its place.


To explain my stance on what ‘that place’ is, I’ll use what I call ‘the teenager test’. How would I explain this to a grumpy, hormone-ridden teen, who finds everything I say insufferable? Here goes:


Ok, let’s say there’s someone at school you like. You approach them and ask if they’d like to go to Nando’s with you. That’s performance. You’ve approached them and asked for something. 


But there’s an issue. You oddly have also just had Nando’s for lunch, and you smeared your greasy, paprika-ridden fingers all over your school jumper. As a result, they respond:


‘Is that chicken grease on your jumper? Come back tomorrow.’


How many times would that exact situation need to repeat itself before you considered changing your jumper? Hopefully only once. Well, changing your jumper is like brand advertising. It’s changing that person’s perception of you. And it’s crazy how many businesses burn through cash repeatedly approaching people with a greasy jumper.


A wonderful question I stumbled upon in Donella Meadows’ ‘Thinking in Systems’ is:


'Are you measuring success, or are you measuring something that's easy to quantify?'


I feel advertising and marketing have become so enamoured with measuring something that’s easy to quantify, we are no longer measuring actual success. Not in a long-term way, at least. The seduction of a marketing dashboard is intoxicating, is it not? It plays perfectly into the innate human desire for certainty and averting loss. We are over-indexing on these things to the detriment of long-term brand success.


Morgan Housel offers some insight in ‘Same As Ever’: Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness. In most fields, a handful of variables dictate the majority of outcomes. But paying attention to only those few variables can feel like you’re leaving too much of the outcome to fate. The more knobs you can fiddle with—the hundred-tab spreadsheet, or the Big Data analysis—the more control you feel you have over the situation, if only because the impression of knowledge increases. The flip side is that paying attention to only a few variables while ignoring the majority of others can make you look ignorant.’


Recently, Nike made a series of rather costly mistakes. They assumed the Covid-born D2C boom would last forever, reduced brand advertising, cut wholesale ties, and made redundant swathes of experienced (brand) marketers. Then, when life returned to new normal, customers returned to their usual physical purchase points, Nike wasn’t there, and they drifted to other brands. (Not listening to Byron Sharp’s instructions for brands to have both mental availability and physical availability.)


As Brand Strategist Massimo Giunco put it:


‘Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs. something that was more effective but less easy to be measured. In conclusion: an impressive waste of money.’


Then there’s Marketing Professor Scott Galloway, who said this of Nike’s decline: ‘During the pandemic, running clubs boomed. This should’ve been great news for Nike. Instead, it was a shot of adrenaline for Nike competitors. (Hoka sales were up 27% last quarter, while Q3 sales for On were up 46%.) Meanwhile, Nike’s former CEO John Donahoe blamed remote work for the firm’s innovation slowdown.’


Nike’s not alone. We have two huge, adjacent industries neglecting emotional, long-term, brand-building advertising. At the same time, we are lamenting a loss of creativity and effectiveness. If we want the latter, we need the former.


In a talk titled ‘Addressing the crisis in creativity’, System1’s Orlando Wood warns of a cannibalising overemphasis on ‘left-brain thinking’ in advertising and marketing, leading to abstraction, flatness, and a decline in emotional resonance:


The same kind of changes were seen in the late Roman Empire, particularly under Emperor Diocletian, who imposed rigid structures on society. The art of that period became lifeless, static, and increasingly shallow— mirroring the decline in creativity and vitality in the broader culture. When we overemphasise the left hemisphere’s mode of thinking, we end up with abstraction, flatness, and a loss of emotional resonance. History shows us that periods dominated by the left hemisphere produce art that is rigid and devitalised, while right-hemisphere periods bring about art that emphasises depth, flow, and connection. Advertising today reflects this same shift toward the dominance of left-brain thinking.’


Whilst the notion of left-brain thinking has been criticised for being overly simplistic, the broader point still stands. Most modern advertising does not present a story with a sense of live time, space, and depth. There’s also a marked decline in distinctive accents, wordplay, and implicit communication.


I’ve recently been reading through PDFs of previous lectures hosted by The Brands Lectures. In all this informational inhaling, I’m noticing some curious overlaps. But what’s screaming at me is the need for more people in our industry to understand emotional, brand-building advertising is not an expensive luxury. It’s the backbone of history’s best, biggest brands.


But what do we see today? A logo in the first 5 seconds of the ad. Let’s talk about that, shall we?


The executional templates the big digital platforms are suggesting to marketers are of huge benefit to the platforms. But they’re less instrumental to the long-term growth of a marketer’s brand.


If one of the behemothic digital lads can prove advertising on their platform means your logo was seen by thousands of people, even if all that happened was they watched your ad for 3 seconds, saw your logo, and then skipped, oh, and by the way, you don’t pay if people skip… 


That means you get logo exposure for free, and that’s a hard deal to walk away from. But my seeing your logo doesn’t guarantee other positive effects for your brand. I might even stop paying attention the second I see a logo, even if I do sit through your ad. You beaming your logo at me might even annoy me a little. Brand-attributable annoyance, is that something we should measure? Because even if I’ve missed the small ‘sponsored’ text on the left-hand side of your ‘sponsored video’, once I see your logo, I know without a doubt I’m watching an ad, and it wants something from me.


Many brands are running creative just like this on television. If all you want me to know is you exist, and you have a logo, then this approach may well achieve that. 


But let’s rewind 25 years. Would ‘Double Life’ by PlayStation have lulled me into such attentive submission with its prose if I was staring at a giant logo, centre screen, 3 seconds in? I doubt it. 


25 years ago, no one woke up thinking ‘I hope I see an ad today’. Then, thousands of ads tried to get their attention. The ones that were brilliant, particularly because they didn’t feel like ads, did. In that regard, at least, little has changed in the last 25 years.


Back to Orland Wood:


‘Today’s ads, particularly on platforms like YouTube, are overwhelmingly dominated by left-brain features.’


It’s worth noting at this point, that when I say ‘emotional, brand-building advertising’, I don’t mean TV ads or ‘Films’. It’s an agnostic term. I simply mean emotional, and brand building. 


Tesla famously ‘didn’t advertise’. But they did create a fast, attractive EV in a market filled with slow, ugly cars. They also put a car in space, launched a ‘ludicrous button’, built a superior charging infrastructure, created a more fun in-car experience for those charging/waiting, and offered the ability to use your phone as a key. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it does sound like a business building a brand to me.


Les Binet and Peter Field have shown us emotional campaigns consistently outperform their rational counterparts. (By almost two to one). The metrics are clear— long-term increases in sales, market share, and penetration are best achieved through campaigns that tap into the emotions of the audience. 


Emotional advertising, executed in a way as to be a visual, audible, conceptual, and linguistic anomaly, works on your brain, and it works on your business. This isn’t a gut feeling or an opinion. It’s science. 


Emotional advertising more intensely activates key regions in the brain associated with long-term memory and decision-making. (At a bare minimum, this means if you’re running effective brand creative work against a solid media plan, you then need to spend less on your performance advertising for it to convert a prospect.)


Let’s look at ‘The Creative Dividend’. This was a study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Adobe. It examined the impact of creativity on business performance. It surveyed over 300 senior managers across various industries. It revealed that companies prioritising creativity outperform their competitors in several key areas:


-Greater success in terms of revenue growth, market share, and talent acquisition.


-A market share 1.5 times greater than their competitors.


-3.5 times better likelihood to achieve 10% or greater revenue growth than their peers.


-82% of the companies surveyed acknowledged a strong correlation between their creative endeavours and positive business outcomes.


In his lecture for The Brands Lectures, Adam Morgan tells us interesting advertising works 6x harder, per £ spent. That is to say, if you want to be dull, ‘you have to do it with your eyes wide open’. Dull can be effective, it’ll just cost you a lot more. 


(It’s worth noting that ‘interesting’ and ‘brand building’ are not interchangeable terms. Done incorrectly, advertising can be interesting while not building a brand.)


Given all this science, and advocacy from our industry’s thought leaders, you’d think marketers all over the world would be tripping over their own feet trying to build their brands with emotional advertising.


But what are we seeing in the market?


IPA data shows a doubling of typical advertising budgets spent on short-term sales activation between 2006 and 2016.


Orlando Wood tells us:


‘There is now a well-documented crisis in advertising, which has seen a steady decline in the creative effectiveness of advertising over the past 15 years.’


He said this in 2020. I’m, of course, finding correlation and not causation in these people’s words, but ‘the past 15 years’ lines up concerningly well ‘between 2006 and 2016’. Wood himself says:


‘Analysis of more than 700 ads over the last 30 years reveals a significant shift towards left-brain features after 2006. This isn’t just a matter of taste; it has a direct impact on advertising effectiveness.’


What is it about 2006? 


Well, in July of that year, Twitter launched. In September, Facebook debuted its ‘News Feed’ and opened registrations for all people (not just US college students). In October, Google acquired YouTube, which resulted in the mainstreaming of online video. Experiments with mobile social networks also started and were widely adopted a year later, in 2007. This then coincided with the launch of the iPhone.


Fast forward to 2019, and Peter Field cites Adidas, who over-invested in short-term performance marketing, which initially boosted ROI but failed to sustain brand growth. Their econometric modelling revealed that 65% of their sales were actually driven by long-term brand advertising,  something they had been neglecting. 


(This conveniently closely matches the 60 | 40 [brand advertising to performance advertising] rule suggested by the work of Field and Les Binet. The Adidas mix was 23 | 77.)


In his lecture ‘Brands— Falling in Love Again’, Peter Field also points us to Karen Nelson-Field’s work, which argues that when it comes to media, we pay for eyeballs. Instead, we should be paying for attentive seconds.  The following few paragraphs are from Peter Field’s lecture:


‘[Karen Nelson-Field] looked at a significant number of digital platforms and their sub-platforms, finding that the same ad across different digital platforms resulted in dramatically different levels of attention. Some digital platforms are really bad at building mental availability because nobody pays any attention to the ads that run on them. 


She researched about 130,000 ads, some social and some non-social, to identify how many achieved 2.5 seconds of attention, as her research teaches us that is where the attention-memory threshold begins. We have some small chance to build a brand if we can keep someone’s attention for 2.5 seconds.


It is not a big ask. 85 % of these ads didn’t even make 2.5 seconds. The remaining 15 % don’t take account of fraud, bots and the like, so you can probably halve that. In short, perhaps only 7-8% of digital ads are being seen long enough by humans to begin to build a brand.’


Back to Orlando Wood’s work, described by Field:


‘[Wood]looked at the Coronation Street ad break over thirty years as a sample, assessing the number of left and right brain features in the ads. He found that ads have been going more and more left brain and less and less right brain. 


This is really worrying because, as Orlando points out, it is right-brain features that correlate with long-term business success. They build the brand and drive long-term growth. Left brain features might drive some short-term effects but will not contribute very meaningfully to the longer term.'


So, where does this all leave us?


We’re in a world where brands are spending more and more money on performance marketing, despite plenty of evidence showing that for long-term growth, it’s significantly less effective. What’s more, potentially, only 7-8% of performance ads are actually being seen long enough to have a brand impact. At the same time, this is also a world lamenting the loss of creativity and effectiveness in advertising.


To rub salt in the wound, the law of averages suggests many people populating this world are socially fawning over the brand-building triumphs of companies like Liquid Death, applauding with one hand, while starving with the other.


What are we to do, and where does the responsibility fall?


If you work for a creative company, you won’t like my answer. I believe it falls to us. Creativity is our product, and we’re failing to advertise it effectively.


People much smarter than me agree. Let’s take the wise words of the distingué, salmon-theory-themed Strategist, Rob Estreitinho:


If a client isn't buying brand-building advertising from you, there are a few conclusions you could reach. One: they're idiots. Two: they've not read 'The Long and Short of It’. Three: they're only interested in what's new. Four: you've not made the case properly for why they should invest in your creativity.’


The data to make that case properly does exist. I’ve shared it in this article, and the people I’ve referenced speak to it far more compellingly than I have.


Surely, with the collective talent living at any agency, we’re capable of helping business leaders in most sectors see that at some point, they need to change tack from simply trying to convert existing demand, to generating demand and then converting it? Surely we're capable of helping them see they need to create salience? Helping them see they need to manufacture the conditions for their brand to come easily to mind, and for people to begin seeking it?


In an ideal world, surely we're also capable of helping them see they need to create that salience in a way that also drives fame for the brand?


Oh, and as a final pas de bourrée, what drives fame, again?


Peter Field tells us The top correlations are: Shock (28%), Surprise (27%), Amazement (14%), Disgust (11%), and Hilarity (10%).


Sounds a lot like being a visual, audible, conceptual, and linguistic anomaly, doesn’t it?


Or, to put it more simply, being interesting.


 

Elliott Starr is Creative Director at Impero.

Thursday 7th November 2024


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