Is your advertising driving your business ahead, enhancing brand equity and building market share?
Most advertising does not do those things. Most is readily forgettable and is wasting much of the media investment supporting it.
But there is hope! Hot off the presses: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull is a must read whitepaper and must watch video. It is a great read regardless of how you feel about your current advertising. The report is based on a ton of data in the US and UK and was developed by three of the most preeminent thinkers in advertising effectiveness in the world: Peter Field (of “The Long and Short of It” fame), Adam Morgan (founder of eatbigfish) and Jon Evans of System1 (the preeminent creative advertising testing company in the world).
These advertising experts did the hard research and analysis to uncover what is driving successful and unsuccessful advertising. If you are in the advertising business you really need to know about this work.
A great deal of advertising today is simply dull!
How dull, you might ask? So dull that one ad in the researchers’ database literally shows cows grazing – nothing else. 20 seconds of cows munching on grass in a field. Let me say it again: nothing happens other than cows grazing. And that ad scored in line with the average TV ad for effectiveness. Clearly “average” isn’t so good anymore when it comes to advertising.
The authors appropriately conclude that playing it safe is a poor strategy. Making ads less interesting, risky or edgy to avoid offending the boss or consumers leads to boring ads. These folks have the clear data to prove that boring ads simply don’t work.
Here’s how they summarized what they did and found:
The Extraordinary Cost of Dull
- They measured dull by using a neutral emotional reaction as a measure, the most common reaction from their extensive testing database.
- They split the ads into four quartiles of dull to measure how much of an effectiveness gap dull creates and how much money is being wasted on ads that don’t engage.
- As ads get duller, positive emotion falls but negative reaction stays steady. You can’t bore your way out of negative emotion.
- The good news is that non dull media ads attract the most media investment of the four quartiles – marketers are backing interesting ads.
- The bad news is that tens of billions are still being spent on dull ads.
- Dull ads pay a severe effectiveness penalty. To make ads in the dull quartiles as interesting as the non-dull ones, marketers would need to spend $189 billion – as much as the GDP of Greece!
- In B2B ads, the situation is even worse – the least dull ads get the smallest, not the largest share of spend. B2B advertisers are routinely airing dull work.
Clearly the world of advertising must do better.
Luckily there is an antidote.
Adam Morgan and eatbigfish have developed five questions that you can ask on your journey to avoiding dull advertising. Ask yourself these questions as you are working on strategy and creative:
Source: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull
A few thoughts from Mercer Island Group
The message of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull is pretty simple but profound: if your advertising is dull, you’re wasting money. And even if it is emotionally neutral, you’re wasting money.
Emotion builds brands AND sells. And there is so much more to this story than the brief synopsis presented here! We recommend the following:
- All marketers and agency execs should read the whitepaper (here). And watch an incredibly entertaining and educational video here. And then commit to supporting interesting, emotion provoking advertising.
- Clients, ask your agency what they think of the paper. Have a discussion on what the findings may mean to your own work. Agencies, share this work and thinking with your clients.
- Test your work with a strong research company that has a solid methodology and research norms like System1.
- Develop your own philosophies regarding how to evaluate the potential of creative work to be interesting and stir positive emotions.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
