Why (your) Advertising isn’t working anymore.

Advertising changed more in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty. The introduction of digital marketing and the tools that allowed targeting and measuring performance established new standards for the business. Suddenly you could spend less and more targeted to talk to your ideal customer.

And guess what.

At first, it worked. Big Time.

Brands were built overnight via social media. People were clicking at ads and converting. And money started pouring in on these platforms.

But, there is always a but. Over time the digital ads stopped working. The easy excuse is that people became blind to them or, even worse, installed tools to avoid them. The reality is that a crucial factor of the brand-building process was left out. Persuasion.

In an interview with?LBB’s Addison Capper, Sir John Hegarty described the issue brilliantly.

“It has to understand that there are two factors: persuasion and promotion. What we’ve become obsessed with over the last 20 years is promotion. Virtually all social media is promotion: promote, promote, promote, promote. They’ve given up on persuasion: I have to persuade you that this is a great brand. There’s a great line: a brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but also by the people who know about it. That is so important, and we’ve forgotten that lesson. Take Rolls Royce. I’m sure neither you or I will ever buy a Rolls Royce. But we know who they are. We know what they stand for. We know what values they have. Therefore, it adds to their value and their desirability. We’ve forgotten that.

Just as we, as creative people, have forgotten to look back at the history of advertising, I think marketing people today have forgotten how to build a great brand. And somehow, we’re going to have to get back to that.”

Simply put, we stopped creating real brand value through advertising. Look at any “social media darling brand” that emerged and disappeared fast. Remember mahabis slippers? They were all the rage. From zero to success and back to zero. Why? Because they only promoted. None of their advertising was focused on creating an authentic brand connection. And when slipper season passed, we forgot about them and moved on.

But can it all be attributed to the advertising mix’s lack of persuasion?

Yes and no.

There are two significant factors in play right now that contribute to the ineffectiveness of ads. One is the lack of a strategic focus on persuading. The second is the mishandling of the ad space, especially in digital.

I’ll start from the latter. A couple of years ago, Prof G (Scott Galloway) said that brands pay money to advertise to those who cannot afford their products. Over-advertising on the “free to air” platforms of the internet and cable tv is so annoying that affluent consumers invest in an ad-free environment.

The over-advertising in a specific medium is not new. Print, Radio, and TV suffered from the same disease before. Banner blindness was ad deftness or right page blindness (since the ads were on the right page of magazines. The cure was regulation and creativity. Rules limited the number of ads broadcasted per hour, and creativity helped create ads that caught the eye and persuaded the audience.

Now rules are again set. Regulations protect individuals’ privacy by limiting over-targeting and personal data used to create buyer personas for ads to target. The fact that these rules were imposed by Apple tells you a lot about what the aforementioned affluent individuals value.

These rules, combined with the effects of over-exposure to advertising, made all ads irrelevant. Promoting and not persuading started to have a heavier toll on the bottom line. Furthermore, the brands that still do the work correctly began to regain ground. During the pandemic, the trend to buy Direct to Consumer (DTC) products was reversed in favor of big brands in the FMCG sector. Why? Because category ladders cannot be avoided, especially when brand trust is essential.

Big FMCG brands do one thing very well. Advertise the hell out of their USP repeatedly, creating a significant mental association (category ladder) to win over the consumer during her visit to the supermarket.

Guess what the DTC advertising never did. You guessed it. Persuade through advertising enough to build the all-important mental associations that would create brand trust.

Persuasion in advertising can be achieved through a very creative ad that people want to see and relate to or through simple repetitive messages that hit the target. The latter is the territory of FMCG brands. USP repeatedly delivered through simple self-explanatory ads.

On the other hand, the creative approach is challenging and pays dividends in multiples when done right. Look at the iconic Levi’s “Launderette” ad that Sir John Hegarty that we quoted above crafted. The ad was so powerful that it reversed Jeans’ negative trend, making Levi’s a mega brand with an uplift in sales of 800%. And the benefits started pilling on in unexpected ways. Nick Kamen wore Rayban Wayfarers and boxer shorts. Wayfarers began selling out, and boxers’ shorts became cool again. Marvin Gaye’s “I heard it through the grapevine” became a number 1 hit fifteen years after its release. And last but not least, Nick Kamen became a Pop Star.

How does someone hit the mark, though? What makes an ad work and one fail? Is there a formula, and if so, why doesn’t everybody use it?

Here’s the thing. You cannot have a great ad campaign without a strategy to help shape it. Look around. Behind every great campaign, a planning department did the work, wrote the creative brief, and created a framework that allowed the creative department to materialize the vision.

Nowadays, with the fast-paced creative work requested for social media, most agencies present insights and sell them as a strategy. The creative work is based on insights, and the content produced most of the time misses the mark and, at best, transforms the brand into a stand-up comedian, or worse, they let the campaign run through creators (we called them influencers a couple of years ago) that validate their own brand and not the clients.

So, in short, Ads aren’t working because they lack the strategic framework to create campaigns that persuade and promote. The creative work suffers from the lack of strategy, and the media execution gets lost in the overwhelming advertising offering that each of us endures daily.

The way for brands is to go back to the drawing board and invest in research to build solid strategic frameworks with their agencies that will end up creating great campaigns that hit the mark.

*The article was also posted in my medium page