Who said it? Doesn't matter, everyone believes it.

I'd like to start out with a link:

http://adage.com/century/campaigns.html

That link leads you to Ad Ages top 100 advertising campaigns of all time. Look at it and you'll notice something interesting; very few of the top 10 are dated past 1984. Only three make it to near today with Got Milk ('93), Coke Always ('93), and ESPN Sports Center ('95) being the only three recent campaigns to make it close today's date. And even then they are still more than ten year old campaigns. What happened? What about all these award-winning ads I see and read about every week? Why is Creativity magazine like a clearing house for awards? Each week the magazine is filled with all sorts of ads that win all sorts of awards. Yet with all those awards you'd think that we'd have more of today's ads in the top 100, but we don't. The answer is simple, an award winning ad has nothing to do with an effective ad. And that is where most of the industry went wrong.

I was posting a comment on an advertising blog recently. The blog is filled with example after example of award winning, cute looking, and interesting ads. As I looked at them I saw lots of flash and color but little in the way of effectiveness. So I commented on how ads today are more about style than substance. And the blogs owner responded with one of my favorite lines. It's a line that no one can attribute to any author. It's one of those line that "everyone just knows is true". It comes in all sorts of forms. His form was in the words:

"sounds like you want advertising to look like advertising, you know, the stuff people ignore. A good ad comes about when you actually respect the customer enough to try to create something that will actually be of interest to them. I find your comments several decades outdated."

I really got a chuckle out of it. Especially the first line which is what I was referring to as the myth that every knows is true but no one can find the author of. I laugh at that line because advertising is about what connects you customers to the product, not some silly mural on a wall where you'd have to look awfully hard to figure out what the product is. And even if you do, does it do more than catch your attention, do you remember it?

I work with a great guy who has a great saying:

"For an ad to work you need four things. It has to be:

Noticed
Liked
Believed
Remembered"

I agree with him but I take his list and make it a single phrase - emotional connection.
If you have an emotional connection you notice the ad, you like the ad, you believe the ad and you remember it. But most advertising these days is about only noticing. And most advertisers think that if they make an ad that is flashy and stands out from the crowd, then somehow that qualifies it as an ad that works. I know that syndrome. Someone tells me about some funny ad they saw where they can describe not only the content but what color shirt the actors wore. Yet ask them what it was for and they say, "Um, it had something to do with cars, but I don't know what it was for."

WOW! That was an effective advertisement [sarcasm]. I see it a lot. I see a lot of ads that grab your attention but do little to make an emotional connection. And then again I see some that do make the connection. The Geico Cavemen campaign is an example of a good ad. There is one simple underlying truth that makes it work so well, that they are actually turning it into a TV series. It's that we can connect to these people. These people suffer the same ills and feelings of abandonment that we all do, consciously or subconsciously we relate to their feelings. Like working through the pain of your mother, getting back with an old girlfriend, feeling victimized, or very simply not fitting in. And the juxtaposition of a caveman in our world makes it appealing in some way because we all like to watch other groups suffer. It makes us feel ok to know others have it worse than us. That is the crux of what reality television is and why it is so popular. Do we like Donald Trump because he's some billionaire that we respect? No we like him because he oozes with dysfunction, and all the people they wrangle on that show do also.

So going back to this fellas comment about me [sic] liking advertising that looks like advertising, that myth that everyone thinks is true but no one knows who said it. I want to say he got it wrong. He got it wrong because I'm about advertising that works. And what is that? Very simply advertising that has something your viewers connect to emotionally, whether it be a person behavior, a song, a feeling you portray visually, or an overall look. No one cares unless you give them a reason to. Hence why so many ads don't stand out in the crowd, they don't give anyone a reason to pay attention. So to see an ad that is a huge mural on a wall that looks like some artist simply had a fun day rather than something that was created to give the viewer an idea of what you are selling is not a good form of advertising to me. Oh they'll enter it into Cannes and wait with bated breath for an award, but they disservice their client, and most importantly the customer with gibberish like this. Do people notice it, sure. Do they care, not really. Does it increase brand awareness? No, because most everyone that sees it has no idea it is actually an ad and even if they did, it's so out there, that it doesn't have any emotional connection to them so it does nothing even though visually it stands out. The ad spent so much time catching your attention that it forgot it was trying to sell something.


Sorry to say that most large campaigns these days do little to make a connection, rather they make ads that are more designed so that the agency can win an award because the myth that drives advertising today is that for an ad to work it has to stand out from the clutter. People who are successful in business will tell you not to worry about the competition, just do what you do well. But most advertising today is about standing out in the field rather than simply making a message that by itself 'cuts through the clutter'. Perhaps that is why most ads are not successful.

And that is what is wrong with most of today's advertising world. An award winning ad should not be confused with a good ad. They are not one in the same.