Mind the Gap
Memories are most strongly shaped by story. Creatives in advertising have long understood this fact, and when at their best, are crafting rich, poignant, multidimensional stories - reframing the familiar or even inviting people into one to write their own version of a story.
The core ingredients of a traditional narrative arc - setting, motivation, obstacle, tension, resolution - require a high bar for both (1) duration spent with the ad, and (2) active attention to discern the narrative elements.
Foundational research by Orlando Wood at System1 - shared in Lemon - shows that the most effective ads of the past 30 years most commonly feature well-crafted builds upon these elements (characters with agency, inferred relationship dynamics between characters, non-verbal communication, surprising action, and narrative transgressions/irony/satire). Stories that leave a little gap for the audience to fill in the missing pieces.
The best of the best ads are simply stories, well-told.
Here's one of my favorites of all time. There's no real dialogue, very little exposition or narrative arc, and it relies A LOT on what I (the viewer) am bringing to the party to interpret the meaning and fill in the gaps.
The reverse - not bringing enough to an ad - can also be true. I still have no earthly idea who the people in the "What A Pro Wants" ad for AT&T are, and running it endlessly out-of-context surely isnt helping me much.
It's been well documented that the two fundamental requirements for storytelling (long dwell time and active attention) are among the least likely things for a brand to have easy access to today. Against that backdrop, Orlando Wood's (brilliant, full credit where it's due) recognition that advertising's decline in effectiveness is not solely due to short-termism or the rise of digital, but ALSO through the declining use of the most fundamental elements of storytelling - the devices that are most likely to help something stick in your memory - is a crucial build.
With the shift to more investment in media channels that are not conducive to using these devices (again, very well documented), it seems obvious in hindsight that work with the potential to activate this right-brain led responses will be less and less common. If you have - at most - two seconds of attention guaranteed, the Shaggy Dog has left the building. The internet has killed nuance.
A subtle point that Wood poses is that there's another compounding effect in the loss of work that leaves a gap for the viewer to fill in. The shift to more short-term, digitally best-practice optimized, work, wholly lacking in the use of more effective Right-Brained features (intuited, felt, rich and subtle, pregnant with meaning, narratively exposed and interesting), has been reinforced by a loss of mass/shared culture.
Even though great brands seek to shape culture, advertising is much, much, more commonly a reflection of culture. And culture and entertainment are without a doubt fracturing. While there are still icons that transcend (T.Swift, anyone?), ideas that permeate widely ("What's your Roman Empire?"), even platforms that have the ability to reach nearly everyone (Netflix, YouTube) - people are not tuning into the same programming or ideas, their isolating into smaller and smaller, cozy, tribes (and that's MORE THAN OK - it's probably a very good thing). Even the most "mass" TV programming is still just a fraction of the population; the most widely watched events (read: Super Bowl and Olympics coverage or Cumulative viewership of US National Election Results) still only reaches less than half the US population, on a more routine basis it's less than 10%.
Which means that the shared reference set for jokes, for nuanced transgressions, has shrunk dramatically. All that's left are the generic, the bland/sanitized, the stereotypical and contrived, or the cringe when speaking to a wide group. There's no room for humor when the joke has to be explained, directly.
Nope. Not buying it.
There still has to be a way to build creative in a way that's rich with meaning, even in super-concentrated form. It might take a form that's quite different, using a different set of principles to convey that meaning than more traditional story structures....but the ability to communicate indirectly, in ways that are rich with meaning - at least to some - has to still be possible in a modern, social-web-based world.
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So, here's my non-Orlando Wood-endorsed list of modern right-brained advertising attributes that work, even without the benefits of time, attention, or both. Said another way, here's an (incomplete list) of Scott's shortcuts to language beyond language - gaps that can be left, so that people can fill them in to great effect.
Let the Media & Context speak for you
Going beyond "the media is the message" a bit, there are other elements of building context outside the content of an ad that will telegraph more meaning as people connect the dots themselves.
With enough planning (and craft, and commitment to build attention for an idea) it is possible to develop campaign structures in which ideas that are not pushed to audiences but always discovered by them, people will be more likely to remember discovering something they find incredible rather than recall something they were forced to view elsewhere. As an example, The Home Depot has invested many hundreds of millions of dollars in their Team Depot program, in which THD Team Members tackle building projects in their local communities, putting their skills to use to invest in making their communities stronger. The founders of THD strongly believed that trying to profit from/take credit for "simply doing the right thing" fundamentally degrades the goodwill it is meant to create - so without massive cultural change, you will never hear that talked about publicly. But in terms of public good, the program creates an exponentially higher impact than any other corporate giving program you've heard of. That's an idea that is only ever discovered.
Context can also be built through under-the-radar seasonal alignment - Tillamook launching their iScreen tech parody the week before Apple's WWDC is a fantastic example of taking advantage of overlooked moments where a community will all be paying attention to the same event.
This campaign goes further than brilliant timing for their launch. They tap into multiple mechanisms to show how this real-but-silly technology gives you permission to be a little selfish with your indulgences. The parody launch with Jimmy Kimmel, the NASA-scientist-turned-social-influencer collab, the adorable husband-wife-couple faux fight instigator - the campaign is designed to have multiple entry points play out over a few weeks, building a groundswell of attention across different sides of culture.
Casting for Impact
If people are going to be featured in an ad, there are more signaling opportunities than ever before for making an ad deliver meaning on multiple levels. Ads no longer are the domain of Actors, Employees, Customers, or Celebrities alone, there are a range of subcategories and affinities that people represent that can communicate without words.
The massive growth of ads featuring celebrity spokespeople is proof that more and more brands are relying on the inferred cultural equity a celebrity can bring to their content.
Microsoft profiling a partnership with MMA fighter-turned-cult-hero-food-reviewer Keith Lee to promote the small-business impact of their OpenAI-fueled CoPilot features clearly signals Microsoft's desire to build beyond Corporate America & Enterprise clients.
Easter Eggs
A broad category of meaning-making, but there are plenty of examples of strong, memorable, ad creative that is significantly enhanced by features that have been "hidden" in the work. Most often, these are serendipitous, the result of a great production team getting the most out of their talents. But some can be planned for intentionally.
Long story getting longer, we can help our brands be even more memorable by being less direct, and we don't always have to rely on storytelling within the ad itself to create the magic. Trust your audience, they'll fill in the gaps.