Context is king and great advertising is a marriage of art & science.
BeenThereDoneThat
We harness the World’s best thinkers to solve the World's toughest problems
No.170: Tue 7th?November?2023
Hi, it’s David here.
This week’s School of Athens newsletter is written by Simon Michaelides. Simon is a serial CMO and recently became part of the BeenThere/DoneThat Partner Network.?
Simon speaks about advertising effectiveness and the importance of contextual advertising.?
In fact, he notes that the average reader/viewer only reads 30% of the words on a page, so with that in mind I’ll pass it over to Simon.
As always, we are curious to hear what you think
David Alberts
Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer at BeenThere/DoneThat
Hi, it’s Simon?here.
Marketers are under greater pressure than ever before to deliver results, and advertising efficacy is seemingly top of mind. How puzzling therefore that you don’t have to look very far to spot plenty of ads that just aren’t fit for purpose. This is not a new problem – In his 2019 IPA report “The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness” Peter Field revealed a worrying and growing decline in the effectiveness of creative campaigns, and in Adam Morgan’s podcast series “Let’s make this more interesting”, he and Peter recently reflected on “why so many smart, well-intentioned people produce such a sea of dull around us”. Has our obsession with data & near-term measurability clouded our creative judgement? Has the accessibility of data in the board room somehow led to a detrimental democratisation of marketing? Whatever the answer, it seems clear to me that many marketers have unwittingly lost sight of some of the basic principles of advertising effectiveness. Top of mind here is context: who you are trying to target, where they will see your ad, and what the real-world viewing experience will be.
As marketers we often remind ourselves that we are not the target audience, but when evaluating advertising creative, we also need to remind ourselves that when the target audience sees the ad, it will not be 12 inches away on a high-definition laptop screen, and they will not stare at it intently for several minutes to avidly take in every detail! Out in the real world, consumers are bombarded by thousands of ads every day, most of which are an unwelcome interruption. Even for the ads that consumers do choose to look at, the average engagement time (except for non-skippable AV ads) is less than 3 seconds! In order to be effective therefore, an ad needs to cut through the clutter, grab and hold attention, and drive memorability - yet too many ads fail even a basic clarity test!
OOH advertising provides the best examples, with marketers & agency creatives frequently guilty of failing to consider whether the creative will be legible from a distance, and whether it will be possible to process the volume of copy in the dwell-time available – something that is particularly challenging when travelling down an A road at 50mph! This billboard ad from the launch of the Waitrose Essentials range is a prime example of the lack of contextual consideration - a brilliantly simple idea, perfect for a cross-track format, that proved considerably less brilliant when applied elsewhere! Perhaps the root cause of the efficacy crisis is the seemingly forgotten fact that marketing is both a creative art and a science - Marketers are in the business of influencing the attitudes and behaviours of human beings, and much of that comes down to some principles of cognitive psychology and basic human physiology.
Our short-term memories can only handle 5 – 7 individual elements of information at any one time; the average person reads less than 30% of the words on a page; and pictures literally do speak a thousand words, with the brain processing images 60,000 times faster than text! Women have wider peripheral vision than men and can differentiate colours more finely, whilst men are more sensitive to fine detail and movement; and in the western world we process designs in a “Z” shaped pattern. Knowing all of this, it is not surprising then that some of the most memorable and successful ads of all time (“Hello Boys”) are often the simplest and bravest, where less is most definitely more - prioritising imagery over text, making bold use of colour &/or contrast, and paying careful attention to branding & layout. So, before you embark on your next advertising campaign, I would encourage you to remember two things: context is king, and great advertising is a marriage of art & science.
领英推荐
Simon Michaelides
BeenThere/DoneThat Partner
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