A few years ago, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the preeminent marketing institution, researched how many ads TV viewers could correctly remember the brand and the message the day after they viewed them.
Before you start, "But Gareth, remembering the day after isn't always that important, so long as you got into their subconscious….".
Even if we accept this, the results were poor—abysmal. Only 16% of ads were correctly remembered, while 84% were not.
You can only imagine the results for online and social videos when getting folks not to hit skip or stop their constant scrolling, which is a massive challenge to overcome before they even get to watch your ad.
These results should be painful for us marketers and agency folk, but they should also be liberating and inspiring.
It's always good to start with the typical fact that your audience (those you want to influence to purchase your product or service) does not care about what you say. Remember that when you think about creating communications, you should strive to be in the 16% of ads remembered the next day.
It's a challenge and one you really must accept.
After all, it's tough to sell a secret.
We marketers and agency folk are in the memory business. We aim to build positive memories for our brands, and it's worth remembering and embracing the fact that everything is marketing. Every single interaction is another opportunity to create a positive or, indeed, negative memory. And one single negative memory could kill you in the eyes of the receiver.
So, why are so few ads remembered? Why are so few building memories? Why are so few creating influence and action?
For me, it's all to do with averages.
We live in a world of averages. If you look, you'll see it everywhere. Look at Airbnb; homes the world over look the same, coffee shops are the same, cityscapes, inner-city developments, hotels, SUVs (thanks to the wind tunnel), logos, film posters, book covers, franchises, product design, and social influencers, to name a few.
I bring this up because advertising in every category is, for the most part, the same. You'll see it for yourself if you look at all the brands in your category and how they communicate. Category conventions are everywhere.
If everyone is the same, who stands out?
Who is making it easier to remember, like, and buy them?
Decades ago, the late great Bill Bernbach said, "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic." Thank you, Bill.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising's (IPA) EffWorks research on the 3rd Age of Effectiveness from last year stated that we have an attention problem. We aren't creating anywhere near enough of it, which is very bad when building memories for our brands.
You must embrace the challenge and harness the power of creativity to ensure you stand out more than your competition, making it easier to remember, like, and buy your products and services.
It would help if you aimed to be better than average. I know it's not easy. Creativity can be tricky to get your head around because it pulls you out of your comfort zone. Please don't quote me on this, but no one has ever been fired for doing the same thing as everyone else. Marketers and agency folks must be brave and put your brand's head above the parapet. You may get shot (albeit extremely unlikely), but you must be seen and garner attention to build some of that memory stuff.
Creativity is not intuitively easy to understand. Its influence lies in our evolution. It's good to remember that human behaviour was first optimised for the plains of Africa, and our instincts have kept our species alive for over 100,000 years. We have hundreds of subconscious heuristics, and it's worth noting that creativity influences four essential marketing elements: familiarity, salience, herding, and distinctiveness.
Things we like or are familiar with that didn't kill us. Things other people do/use are probably a good decision. Things that come to our minds quickly reduce cognitive load. Distinctive things get noticed and remembered more.
When you think about great creative marketing, it typically exploits these.
In 2014, Paul Dyson looked at all the advertising levers to see which was most impactful in delivering business profit. The size of your brand was top by a long way. The biggest brand usually wins. Creativity was second. Every other thing we do was struggling to catch up. Kantar revisited this a couple of years ago and found the same results. If you aren't the biggest in your category, you had best harness the power of creativity to ensure you aren't ignored. If you are the biggest, it will be bloody useful for you, too. Being the biggest and harnessing the power of creativity would make it very hard for your competition to beat.
It's scary and often hard to harness, embrace, and sell to the C-Suite. However, creativity delivers attention, surprise, engagement, enjoyment, reaction, emotion, likeability, memory, difference, distinctiveness, fame, talkability, shareability, and action.
And these all deliver sales, margin, and profit.
What business doesn't want that?
The good folks in the C-Suite love them, and that's for sure.
The world is not waiting for more of the same. So, please don't give them more of the same.
My advice would be to aim for something better than average.
Something Different can help with this.
