THE GREATEST COMEBACK IN ADVERTISING HISTORY IS NIGH

I believe we are on the verge of the biggest comeback in advertising history. But before I announce what that comeback is, allow me to provide a little context.

Over the past decade, it’s no secret new technologies have produced massive changes in the ways we can create, deliver and measure advertising. User-friendly and inexpensive tech makes shooting, editing and designing ads easy and fast - even for people with no design, photography or video production skills. Cheap online media combined with lower production costs have made advertising accessible to everyone. Micro-targeted programmatic buys promise to deliver ads to the right people, at the right time with a personalized message. Who needs a media planner when AI can do all that faster and for less? Other technologies allow us to “listen in” on and respond to consumer conversations, gather data, track ad performance in real time and respond to our markets 24/7/365. How great is that?

Actually, not so great at all – at least not for advertising clients. According to the IPA, Advertising effectiveness has dropped around 50% since 2012. And the bad news continues:

• The quality of creative work has cratered. A recent Digiday survey found 77% of advertisers are unhappy with agency campaign quality
• A Nielsen study shows people are 46% more likely to change brands than just 5 years ago and only 8% claim to be brand loyal
• Distrust and frustration with agencies has generated a tsunami of companies taking advertising services in-house
• In a recent WBR Insights survey marketers said their biggest challenge was differentiating their brand from competitors and 65% worry that running more promotions will devalue their brand, reduce margins or condition consumers to expect discounts
• Over 2 billion people have ad blockers and rising
• Advertising fraud is geometrically worse than it ever was with traditional media – online fake impressions, fake viewing times, fake traffic, fake clicks and fake followers are ripping clients off by the billions
• Online tracking continues to shred our privacy rights under the weak guise that it allows platforms to serve us more relevant ads and content – yeah, right
• According to research by Trust Working Group, public favourability towards advertising was just 25% in 2019, down from 48% in 1992
• Out of all the ways to reach people, the eight most distrusted media channels are all online

The implosion of advertising effectiveness is predominantly due to the massive swing to online, short-term, sales activation marketing at the expense of brand building. Les Binet and Peter Field define brand-building and sales activation as, “Activation is when you evoke an immediate behavioural response, without necessarily affecting long-term memories or behaviour. Brand-building is when you create long term memories that influence behaviour over the long term.”

Reams of historical and recent evidence from massive studies by Les Binet and Peter Field, WARC, Ebiquity, ThinkBox, Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and others show direct marketing (performance marketing) has always needed brand advertising to maximize returns. In the mad race to squeeze performance and efficiency out of every last advertising cent, the marketing industry has abandoned all common sense, historical pretext, current performance data and most of their brand building efforts. Our obsession with the new over the known has turned the marketing industry into a subset of itself - direct marketing. In a stunning Orwellian use of double-speak, agencies who specialize in and promote online sales activation have renamed it “performance marketing”.

“Everyone wants informational ‘content writing’ rather than creative copywriting. We optimise everything to suit Google’s algorithm or maximise click-through rates but never think about creating ads that delight people. Everyone looks at ‘data’ but misses the information that actually matters. Almost all ads online are actually direct response and not advertising.”

-Samuel Scott, The Drum, “Advertising Has Lost Its Humanity and Ability To Entertain”

Instead of growing and harvesting, we’ve skipped the growing part altogether and gone straight to harvesting with disastrous results for clients, agencies and advertising in general. If agencies and clients are truly data-driven as most claim, they should get behind the wheel of the data below and step on the gas:

• Long-term brand building is unequivocally more effective than short-term sales activation in generating profit and growth. Read about it here.
• Short-term sales activation tactics do not increase long-term growth – in fact, they may stunt it. Read about it here, here and here
• Mass marketed long-term brand building campaigns increase both short-term sales and long-term growth. Read about it here.
• Traditional media is still more memorable and effective than online channels. Read about it here.
• Spending more than 40% of your budget on short-term, online sales activation tactics is counterproductive. Read about it here.
• Millennials are not rejecting advertising – they’re not buying because they’re broke. Read about it here.
• Up to 50% of online impressions and clicks are fraudulent. Read about it here.
• Long-term, brand building ads are more likely to be noticed and are more memorable. Read about it here.
• You need both targeted and mass market reach. Read about it here.
• Integrated campaigns with a consistent message that run on 5 different media platforms increase ROI by 35%. Read about it here.

So what does all this mean? For the ad industry to regain the little trust it once had, attract the most talented minds and stem the tide to in-housing and consultancies, we must make advertising more effective. And to make advertising more effective we need to:

• Make long-term positioning strategies mandatory
• Invest the majority of our budgets into long-term brand building and support it with performance ads – not the other way around
• Demand and develop big, creative campaign ideas designed to run and last for many years – not just weeks or months
• Actually let those big campaign ideas run for more than 6 months
• Shoot for fame by making our ads more original, surprising, entertaining and interesting
• Revolt against any ad platform that does not allow or penalizes against the above (For example, FB/Instagram penalizes ads with headlines in images – even though headlines are proven to be more important than images alone)
• Quit bombarding people with crap ads, retargeting and boring content
• Make long-term brand-building courses an integral part of school curriculums
• Hire some old fart creatives and strategists that actually know how to position brands and create campaigns designed for the long-term. Research by the Financial Times’ Board Brand Rift revealed “50% of business leaders rate their knowledge of brand-building as average to very poor”.

In other words, we need to – actually must - get back in the business of making wildly creative and entertaining ad campaigns that are both big (in terms of idea, not necessarily spend) and long (in terms of being designed and written to run for many years). We must keep them going with impossible to ignore and hard to forget creative executions primarily through brand-building executions and supported by performance executions. We must integrate them all across both traditional and new platforms with consistent messaging and distinctive brand experiences.

I predict short-term performance marketing will be relegated to a supporting role as the industry adopts something much better. I believe the Big Campaign with long-term brand building at its core is about to make the biggest comeback in advertising history. It must or advertising as we know and love it will continue to devolve and lose even more credibility and perceived value.

We have all the evidence we need to advocate for big and long campaigns over small and short ones. Present this evidence to your clients, show it to your CEO and demand your teams embrace it. Long live the Big Campaign and long-term brand building!

READ OUR 12 EVIDENCE-BASED PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE BRAND BUILDING CAMPAIGNS HERE.

Eternally Yours:

David Smith | CCO, Founder [email protected]

About Immortology

Immortology is a full-service agency specializing in creating legendary creative and strategic solutions that help our clients outsmart, outdo and outlast – not outspend – their competitors. Our secret? We create long ideas designed to maximize growth through a never-ending series of fresh brand experiences that surprise and delight people, rally employees and strike fear into the hearts of our clients' rivals for decades to come.