Your ad is weak.

Don’t worry, so is mine.

Actually, so is everyone’s.

The reality is that advertising is an extremely weak force.

Like gravity.

Wait, gravity is weak?

Yes, whenever you lift your arm to brush your teeth, you are defying gravity.

And like gravity, what’s needed to create a reliable pull on others is immense mass.

Planet-sized mass.

Or, to continue the analogy: mediocre ads backed by huge budgets.

What's the strongest force of persuasion?

Good ol' word of mouth, of course.

According to a study by Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.

Cookie’d banners may stalk you all around the internet.

But what will really seal the deal is a honest nudge from a friend.

The problem is you can’t pay for word-of-mouth like you pay for media.

Word-of-mouth is as nebulous as it is precious.

All you can do is things that increase the odds—amplify a brand's atmospherics, if you will.

Or, as ad folk like to say, increase your brand's cultural relevance.

In effect, increasing cultural relevance is increasing the odds of indirectly creating word-of-mouth.

If you do something that gets attention, makes someone laugh, resonates emotionally (a.k.a. um, decent creative), you're giving people reasons to create a strong word-of-mouth force on your behalf.

To tweet, gram, share, post about you, imprinting some personal endorsement in the process.

It’s not just that agency people want to do “cool stuff”—it's that we know fame is actually word-of-mouth, one step removed.

Unfortunately, no one can predict what creates cultural relevance.

You can't measure it, let alone guarantee it—and if you could, I'm almost certain it wouldn't work.

A paradox in terms.

Because at the core of creating cultural relevance is originality.

By definition, originality escapes the metrics of historical measurement.

The truly great stuff (Apple 1984 , Cadbury Gorilla, Sony Balls), are more likely to fail than to pass most forms of creative testing.

Truly great stuff is almost impossible for clients to buy.

It's always safer to increase the mass of average creative.

Perhaps that's the greatest irony in advertising.

In a lazy effort to reach humans, brands increase their weak ad's gravity with ever-increasing mass and budgets.

Yet, in the process of trying pull humans closer, the more humans do to push ads away.

Weak, it seems, stinks from a light year away.

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