Dull and dullards.
Just about every advertising creative worth any damned thing at all believes three things down to the nubs of their former fingernails:
Agency life is unfair. This is one of those “res ipsa” things. Unarguable.
Work long enough and that career-making idea will come. Dubious, but maybe marginally defensible based on Woody Allen’s zing that 90% of life is a cliché.
Last, there’s our shared article of faith that better creative makes for more effective advertising; a point that’s been surprisingly controversial ever since Whipple started screeching about TP on TV.
The reason: Whipple, like all creative that succeeds in spite of itself, delivered at the cash register. Which explains why we’re now so blighted with all those mindless and/or irritating ads now heavily contributing to industry-corroding cognitive overload.
Of late, we’ve even painted the pigs with fresh coats of lipstick, courtesy of shiny new monikers like content, always-on, and performance.
Or worse. As in the email that farted its way into the inbox pitching the value of “rawthentic” marketing based on the widely pandered tale that Gen Z dislikes “highly produced” (sorry, Shogun), demands reality (not the way, Mandalorian), and craves “realness” (shame on you Barbie).
Then again, where synapses still fire, there’s hope. In this case, some good ol’ new school data.
To wit: you can succeed with unremarkable and uninteresting advertising. It just takes a bigger spend.
In a recent episode of the highly recommended Fergus on Strategy podcast, Adam Morgan of eatbigfish described UK and US effectiveness studies showing, in one example, a 10-million-pound sterling delta for “dull” to produce the same share gains that would have resulted from “interesting.”
His definition of dull: after seeing the ad, consumers report “feeling nothing at all.” A lack of response he attributes to factors ranging from not “meeting consumers where they care,” to being entirely rational, to blending in, not standing out.
I’ve pasted the link below if you want to dive in. But here’s an eye-opening number based on findings from System 1, a leading US ad testing service: close to 50% of TV — a cool $46B annually —is weighed down by being dull.
Equivalent data doesn’t yet exist for digital or other media but stand by—Morgan et al are just the beginning to spread the joy.
In the meantime, you’ve got to love the thinking. Because now, instead of trotting out platitudes about “stronger creative is a force multiplier” and “more interesting equals more memorability” we have a message for the CEO who prefers the comfort of conformity, even at the risk of invisibility:
Just tell her she needs to drop an extra six or seven zeros on the media and it’ll work just fine.
PS: You can find Fergus O’Carroll’s jaw-fest at www.onstrategyshowcase.com. Tell you something else: if every strategist had his pipes, we’d all be happier to sit through those endless creative briefings.
