How to Avoid Dull Advertising

How to break free from 'dull' advertising

In a telling survey in association with MAGNA Media Trials, LinkedIn found that -

Just under nine in 10 CMOs are advocating for bolder, more creative campaigns while 67% are increasing budgets for brand-building efforts.

What's more, the study found that video and display ads significantly increase brand KPIs like favorability, intent and purchase consideration.

That being so, won't the big ad spenders ensure an 'overflow' of creative juices in their campaigns?

Curiously, that's NOT happening!

In a recent post @Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist wrote on 'dull advertising'. Here's an excerpt:

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A few month ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival.

Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend ￡10m more a year in media on average to get the same results as a campaign that’s “not dull”.

Yet the majority of ads are dull. System1 collects how people feel about more than 100,000 ads to predict their long- and short-term potential. When Jon sorted the System1 database of ads by emotion, the most common emotion in these ads wasn’t Happiness, Surprise, or Anger; it was Neutrality, the absence of an emotion.

I thought about this in the context of how the creative sausage gets made — the internal process of making any sort of creative work. It’s frequently dull by design. Creative work is usually not a Darwinian survival of the most interesting ideas; it’s survival of the safest ideas. And safe ideas tend to be neutral.

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So, what gives?

As explained by Tom, a reason for 'dull' advertising is this -

If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. A creative review by committee leads to a peace treaty rather than interesting work.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn (in the survey mentioned above) says the main takeaway of its findings is that B2B brands must move beyond functionality and focus on building emotional connections.

It further elaborates thus -

The future of B2B advertising lies in creativity. B2B brands have an opportunity to move beyond just showcasing their products' functionalities and instead can weave together compelling narratives that resonate with their audience on a deeper level. By focusing on emotional connections, storytelling and sharing unique perspectives, B2B marketers can create ads that perform better and drive more engagement on LinkedIn.

For most startups and SMBs, all of above are easier said than done.

They can't be faulted because for them the priority is core biz activities instead of spending precious resources (time + money) on curating creative ads.

Way-out for startups?

For SMBs and startups, a likely solution lies in both

1/ creative designing while

2/ limiting spending on precious resources.

From this standpoint, we at VidBazaar feel that the WYSIWYG ads templates designed by us in Canva & PowerPoint can be of help.

4 reasons -

• Canva & PowerPoint are popular and easy-to-use tools.
• Even a non ad designer can redesign the ads.
• Being super-easy to redesign ads, your focus doesn't shift from core business.
• You can literally use the same template time and again for different ads.

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