Has advertising lost its personality?
I was kindly invited to take part in this year’s One Question Debate and join a panel of marketers to consider the question - “In the pursuit of performance has marketing lost its personality?” Having decided to narrow the question, it gave rise to these words.
Not one to believe in the existence of some of much-mourned Golden Age of Advertising, I’ve tended to believe that advertising simply conforms to what the American science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon termed ‘Sturgeons Revelation’ (or ‘Sturgeon’s Law’ as it is often referred to). As he put it in the March 1958 issue of Venture magazine:
“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.”
So I initially approached this question with caution. Had advertising really lost its personality? Or had advertising always been mostly vapid, ignorable landfill?
It turns out that advertising has indeed become flatter.
In his most recent analysis of IPA data published as ‘The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness’ Peter Field has noted the changing nature of the type of advertising we are generally exposed to. As he puts it:
“Instead of emotionally engaging human stories that seek to charm and captivate, we are seeing more didactic, literal presentations that seek to prompt us into action".
Echoing this assessment is Orlando Wood’s (truly excellent) book for the IPA, Lemon: A Repair Manual to Reverse the Crisis in Creative Effectiveness. It includes an analysis of 620 ads appearing in Coronation Street between 2004 and 2018. This too, highlights a significant shift in the style of advertising we are exposed to - and provides us with a fresh granularity of insight.
Specifically, the analysis reveals a decline in the use of characters, sense of context, distinctive accents, ambiguity, wordplay, double meaning, and metaphor. Advertising today demonstrates less self-awareness, is less self-referential, employs less implicit communication between people, deploys less cultural references, and fewer stories with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Conversely, it reveals a greater use of voiceovers, monologue, more focus on things than people, more people as props not characters.
The shift is significant.
This is advertising designed for the left-hemisphere.
It’s advertising designed for that part of the brain that as Wood characterises it, prizes utility, power and control, whose principle tool is language, that is concerned with cause and effect, that likes clarity and certainty, that is literal and prefers the literal over the implicit. It’s advertising designed for that part of the brain that is flat and simplified, lacking in depth and nuance.
This is advertising that neglects the right hemisphere of the brain. This is the part of the brain which understands the world through connections and relationships between things (rather than cause and effect), that’s rooted in bodily or visceral experience, that’s empathetic, understands the feelings of others, and understands what’s implied. It’s the part of the brain that understands metaphor, humour, and irony.
In other words, we are creating more and more advertising which neglects that part of the brain we must engage if we want to create the associations and connections that lie at the heart of long-term brand building.
It means that we are giving up on advertising that seeks to influence behaviour not simply through the conscious processing of verbal or factual messages, but as Paul Feldwick characterises it, “by influencing emotions and mediating 'relationships' between the consumer and the brand”.
And it means that we are giving up on advertising that treats implicit communication and execution as vital, not merely window-dressing for a message.
So what’s driving this?
The corporation’s appetite for control and belief in rationalism has meant that it has always preferred the idea that advertising is essentially a one-way communication from the advertiser to the consumer.
It’s an ideology that prizes attention, recall, proposition, benefits, message, and persuasion.
It’s an ideology that treats people as subjects and receivers, not active participants and collaborators in meaning-making.
And perhaps most damagingly of all, it’s an ideology that treats the role played by creativity, execution and emotional elements as being simply to support this communication, either by fostering liking of the advertising, which transfers to the brand, or by increasing attention, which aids memory of the key message.
(And it is an ideology. Rooted in the thinking of Elmo Lewis and his AIDA (awareness - interest - desire - action) model that dates back to 1898, of Daniel Starch and his print advertising testing methodology of the 1920s, of Claude Hopkins and his insistence back in 1923 that selling was a rational, fact-based process, and of Rosser Reeves and his assertion from 1961 that advertising was about getting ‘a unique selling proposition’ into people’s heads, it is based on nothing more than conjecture and appeals to so-called common sense - without a shred of solid empirical evidence).
Over ten years ago Paul Feldwick and Robert Heath summarised it thus:
“For the marketing organisation, then, the [information processing] model fulfils a need to remain consistent with the organisational myths of rational decision making, replicability and control. It does this by reducing the essence of the creative content to a single proposition or idea that can be owned, replicated and controlled; by envisaging the communication process as a mechanistic transfer of this unit of information whose efficiency can be measured; and by projecting on to the consumer's choices the same myth of rational decision making that the organisation values internally.”
So there’s nothing particularly new here. Plus ça change. But this age-old predilection has become dangerously - turbocharged by corporate impatience and the rise of short-term thinking.
Equity-based compensation that accounts for more than half of Fortune 500 executive pay and focusses minds on market movements; so-called ‘long-term’ incentive plans that do not have a performance horizon of more than three years; senior company executives who are willing to decrease discretionary spending on such areas as research and development, advertising, maintenance, and hiring in order to meet short-term earnings targets; business leaders who are willing to delay new projects, even if it means sacrifices in value creation; the trillions of dollars of corporate profits being diverted from long-term investment and used instead to buy back shares; the undervaluing of future cashflows; the shrinking tenures of CEOs hostage to short-term performance evaluation in capital markets… impatience is everywhere.
Systemic impatience has been compounded by the struggle to find growth in low- or no-growth markets, as well a narrow focus on short-term efficiency blinding businesses to the long-term damage their actions risk.
As a result, not only are more and more campaigns running and being evaluated over periods of less than six months, but the percentage of budget allocation to long-term brand-building amongst creatively-awarded campaigns has fallen to just under 66% (well under the optimal allocation of 75%) over the last four years. As Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, has put it, “The long is short. Investment choice, like other life choices, is being re-tuned to a shorter wave-length.”
Needless to say, this impatience and demand for results today has been passed on to creative agencies. Creative departments are being compelled to tune to a shorter wave-length, and the pressure on creative time is relentless. The speed at which businesses can scale (and die), products be iterated, ideas spread, and data fed back does not change the fact that the squeeze on time squeezes out the space for the chaos, play, and exploration that are fundamental for right-brain creativity.
This is having serious consequences.
Client businesses are failing to leverage the real power and advantage that creativity confers.
In fact when we insist that marketing marketing’s priority is not the longer-term health of a brand and business but the short-term, we are in the business not of value creation but value destruction.
It’s value destroying because most people aren’t “in the market” for anything most of the time.
It’s value-destroying because with the exception of direct response advertising, most advertising simply does not pay back in the short term.
It’s value destroying because half of advertising’s effects will crystallise more than a year later.
It’s value-destroying because the creation of what Binet and Field call “associations”, Sharp calls “memory structures” and Williamson calls “empires of the mind” takes time. And it’s these memories that sustain salience and preference.
It’s value-destroying because these memories work by supporting prices not just by driving volumes or share - and as Binet and Field have demonstrated, pricing effects are slower to crystallise than volume effects.
So what do we do?
We have to start recognising that the case for investing in brand-building isn’t going to make itself.
Strong brands help generate future cashflows by sustaining customer preference (i.e. they keep coming back), reducing price elasticity (i.e. people are willing to pay more), creating retailer preference (i.e securing distribution), creating new option spaces (i.e opening up new sources of future value), etc.
And yet while 73% of business leaders cite business resilience as a business priority - only 55% of business leaders believe that a strong brand impacts business resilience.
And while 71% of business leaders cite future cashflow as a business priority - only 49% of business leaders believe that a strong brand impacts future cashflow.
Meanwhile 33% of marketers are not confident in their brand building know-how.
Until we address these issues of knowledge, competence, and confidence we are unlikely to make much in the way of progress.
Binet and Field have of course done much to demonstrate the difference between short-term sales activation and long-term brand-building, how they drive different marketing effects, and they how demand different communications approaches.
So I’m not going to clumsily rehash their findings and conclusions (I’ve already done that in earlier scribblings) and instead offer some suggestions of my own.
We must recognise that short-termism is a choice, not an obligation.
One marketer recently confessed that “We had a problem that we were focusing on the wrong metrics, the short-term, because we have fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.”
Um. No you don’t.
As Lynn Stout has reminded us, despite the popular narrative and what’s taught in business schools, the law does not require that corporate leaders owe a special fiduciary duty to shareholders. The corporate code of Delaware, where the majority of Fortune 500 businesses are incorporated, states that corporations can be formed for any lawful purpose. Similarly, the typical charter of a public company will usually just define the company’s purpose as “anything lawful.”
So pursuing short-term results is a choice not a legal obligation. It’s a choice driven by the ideology (there’s that word again) of shareholder value. And it’s worth noting that the evidence points pretty clearly to the conclusion that if you want to hinder the value and growth of a business then focusing on short-term results to satisfy shareholders is the way to go.
Stop fighting reality.
When it comes to long-term brand-building, reality does not map well to the instincts and assumptions of the corporation.
And since this is an error of corporate ideology not a fault with reality, comfortable beliefs as Feldwick and Heath long argued, will need to be abandoned.
In particular the corporation will need to let go of the belief that advertising works as a rational communication vehicle, the assumption that communication operates exclusively on the level of explicit content, and the prejudice that advertising that contains no 'message', 'proposition' or 'benefit' is deficient.
It’s a view of the world (and of human nature) that might not accord with the corporations instincts and needs, but whatever the inconvenience, it really is not for the world to bend to the corporation’s distorted view of reality.
Execution must be treated as being fundamental, not peripheral, to brand-building.
Given that the industry of ‘messaging’ is so depressingly uninterested in it, it’s worth reflecting on how people consume communications.
The psychologists Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson have distinguished between so-called ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ communication.
‘Digital’ communication they argue is logical, conscious, explicit and intellectual. This is used for the sharing of information about objects and for the transmission of knowledge.
In contrast, ‘analogue’ communication encompasses virtually all non-verbal communication. It is implied rather than stated, and it is experienced to a large extent unconsciously.
A digital clock givens us unambiguous replicable information about an abstract number. While an analogue clock expresses time spatially - it’s open to interpretation.
Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson conclusion draw from their studies and analysis:
“Wherever relationship is the central issue of communication, we find that digital language is almost meaningless. This is not only the case between animals and between man and animals, but in many other contingencies in human life, e.g. courtship, love, succour, combat…”
Voice matters more than message. It’s the How, not the What that matters in human communication.
Turning to advertising, Stephen King in JWT’s Planning Guide noted back in 1974:
“An advertisement as a stimulus is a combination of medium, words, pictures, movements, symbols, associations, tones of voice, etc. The stimulus is received as a totality; the receiver does not separate content and form. The individual elements of an advertisement have no meaning on their own. They can only be judged in combination.”
Judith Williamson in her wonderful, essential, hostile and demanding book Decoding Advertising: Ideology and Meaning In Advertising demonstrates (perhaps better than any advertising practitioner) how advertising’s real work lies in its aesthetic wholes, and how it operates largely silently, through its codes and signals. It’s worth quoting from her concluding chapter at length:
“What an advertisement ‘says’ is merely what it claims to say; it is part of the deceptive mythology of advertising to believe that an advertisement is simply a transparent vehicle for a ‘message’ behind it. Certainly a large part of any advertisement is this ‘message’: we are told something about a product, and asked to buy it. the information we are given is frequently untrue, and even when it is true, we are often being persuaded to buy products which are unnecessary... a criticism of advertising on these grounds is valid, and I would support it. However such a criticism is in many ways the greatest obstacle of all to a true understanding of the role of advertisements in our society, because it is based on the assumption that ads are merely the invisible conveyors of certain undesirable messages, and only sees meaning in the overt ‘content’ of the ad rather than it its ‘form’ - in other words, ignoring the ‘content’ of the ‘form’.”
This isn’t mere speculation. The marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (so enamoured by clients for their ‘laws of growth’) agree - in their analysis of the drivers of advertising effectiveness they have concluded that “How advertisers choose to communicate (framing, characters, situations) is possibly more impactful than what is communicated”.
The fact of the matter is that treating creativity merely as a means of tricking or bribing the viewer into paying attention to the message within it profoundly undervalues and undermines the both the nature and the value of creativity.
Creativity isn’t some kind of distraction tactic, bait or bribe. It isn’t a wrapper or envelope for a message.
It is the content.
We have to market to people not data points.
When you stop talking to people and start to market to data points, your communications will look like it was created by a robot.
And as an industry we at risk of being as removed, sheltered, and alienated from ordinary life in the real world as that annual gathering of 1%-ers we know as Davos. Time spent in meetings amongst ourselves is not time spent amidst culture. And talking about participating in culture is not participating in culture. We cannot simply subcontract that time to ‘vendors’ and tell them to come back from their exploring and tell us all about it and expect to be injected with an innate, intuitive understanding of the World Out There. Wecannot kid ourselves. We do not understand the world. We just understand the debrief presentation.
And as Richard Huntingdon has bemoaned, we now have a generation of planners who simply do not have the skills to facilitate group discussions, who if they do so are doing it infrequently, doing the ‘quick and dirty’ kind for pitches or to prove some creative wheeze the client isn’t buying, and for the most part doing it untrained in both interviewing, listening, and analysis skills.
And for that I lay much of the blame on client organisations for withdrawing funding for robust agency research and driving a wedge between people and planners - all in the name of “objectivity”.
Writes Huntingdon:
“Planners are left arguing the toss with researchers that, with a few notable and welcome exceptions, are not greatly practiced in the way creative ideas are conceived and brought to life. Moreover, by severing the link from consumer to planner to creatives and splicing together many more steps, stages and voices we have slowed down the flow of energy, insight and corrective feedback into the creative process from fibre optic broadband to a dodgy dial up service with a crossed line or worse to the pony express.”
This disconnect is arguably but part of a wider, deeper uncoupling. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board reflecting on the increase of inequality within societies, has talked about the need for capitalism to become more inclusive.
His focus was on how banking and bankers must change, but I have taken the liberty of substituting the “corporation” for “bankers”, for his point has implications for all:
“When [corporations] become detached from end-users, their only reward becomes money. Purely financial compensation ignores the non-pecuniary rewards to employment, such as the satisfaction from helping a client or colleague succeed. This reductionist view of the human condition is a poor foundation for ethical [corporations] needed to support long-term prosperity. To help rebuild that foundation, [corporations], like all of us, need to avoid compartmentalisation – the division of our lives into different realms, each with its own set of rules. Home is distinct from work; ethics from law; the individual from the system. This process begins with boards and senior management defining clearly the purpose of their organisations and promoting a culture of ethical business throughout them. Employees must be grounded in strong connections to their clients and their communities. To move to a world that once again values the future, [corporations] need to see themselves as custodians of their institutions, improving them before passing them along to their successors.”
I think that’s worth reflecting on.
We must make time for creativity.
Communications that uses characters, sense of context, distinctive accents, ambiguity, wordplay, double meaning, and metaphor, that exercises less self-awareness, is self-referential, employs implicit communication between people, uses less cultural references - communications that is designed for that part of the brain which understands the world through connections and relationships between things (rather than cause and effect), that’s empathetic, understands the feelings of others, and understands what’s implied that understands metaphor, humour, and irony takes time to develop.
“Didactic, literal presentations that seek to prompt us into action” as Field characterises them are not (or at least should not be) time intensive to develop. If-This-Then-That creativity that doesn’t exploit subtlety, nuance, the complexities of the implicit. There is less to be explored. Less to be discovered. Less to be invented. Its creative palette is flat.
But the inconvenient fact of the matter is that kind of work that builds and sustains brands takes time to develop. It takes time to develop because its creation does not - indeed cannot - follow a linear step-by-step process. It arises out a journey - one of play and of exploration.
If we genuinely wish to create for the long-term, then we must protect creative departments being compelled to tune to an ever shorter wave-length.
So to answer the question - “In the pursuit of performance has advertising lost its personality?”
The answer is Yes.
And it’s clear what we need to do if we wish to escape the endless, barren, ineffective vistas of advertising flatland.
We must collectively reorientate ourselves to focus on the long-term as well as the short-term.
We must help our clients better understand and appreciate the business case for brand-building.
We must equip our clients in turn to make a better case for brand-building within their organisations.
We must fundamentally reimagine how brand-building communication works - and accommodate ourselves to the fact that addressing different brain hemispheres demands different kinds of creative approach.
We must create the right conditions for this kind of creativity to be developed.
And we must rediscover the magic and power of execution and let go of our insistence on idea and message as the be-all and end-all of advertising success.
Disproportionate and sustained advantage awaits.
***
Sources
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