Are your ads putting consumers to sleep?

The crisis of creativity was first documented in 2019, with Les Binet and Peter Fields, looking at the diminishing business outcomes achieved by even highly awarded creative campaigns. There were some reasons attributed to this—short-termism, mainly driven by the advent of digital channels, and excessive focus on measured media metrics facilitated by technology. 

 

More recently, Peter Fields and Adam Morgan have taken the narrative one step further quantifying the cost of dull advertising. As per their study, lackluster creative can be compensated for by spending a lot more in media dollars to generate similar end results (sales, share gain, brand equity). 

 

Intuitively, this is not a surprising learning—we have always known that creativity has the biggest impact on media ROI. But this is still a good approach to bring back the discussion on creativity to the limelight—and quantifying the impact in dollar terms does get everyone’s attention. 

 

There have been a few different discussions around the crisis of creativity—and depending on who you ask, it centres around the lack of storytelling, the lack of emotion/humour, and is further exacerbated by the crisis of attention. But there is still a lack of clarity on what exactly is meant by dull advertising; how do we recognise it early in the creative process and what marketers and researchers need to do to remedy it. 

 

We need to start with the fundamental psychological process governing how we interact with the world—how we process information and how we engage with external stimuli. Recent advances in scientific understanding have identified that our brains are predictive machines—continuously predicting what comes next and adjusting behaviours accordingly.

 

As outlined in the book Seven and a Half lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett, when the actual event is in line with the prediction it goes un-noticed and we do not actively engage with it. It is only when there is dissonance, between the prediction and the actual event, that we bring to bear our active attention to what is happening. Active attention utilises valuable energy and so we are miserly with it, habituating as much as we can with past learnings and experiences guiding our predictions.

 

To compare this with a more prevalent narrative of the two systems: System1 is this process of constant prediction, which guides the majority of our decision making. When an event does not align with our predictions, and we bring our active attention to bear, it is System2. Humans are altricial animals—blank canvases when we are born, and everything we learn and experience shapes the constant predictions our brains engage in. Without System2 there is no System1. Active attention is needed for learning and for something new to get stored in memory, thereby making it easier for us to engage with the world with less energy expenditure.

 

When viewed through this lens, dull advertising is advertising that seamlessly aligns with what our brains predicted. Another word we can use to describe this is wallpaper advertising—present, but not actively noticed. 

 

When we encounter an ad do we already perceive we know what it is all about? If yes, chances are high that we will glance away, scroll past, skip it etc., depending on the medium in which it is experienced. In fact, the crisis of attention stems from a lack of dissonance that pervades advertising today. 

 

The Age of Average is well documented in other areas and also pervades advertising with brands seemingly looking the same and using the same category tropes. 

 

Taking all this into account, we can clearly identify the impact of dull advertising more clearly—lack of dissonance leads to low attention which results in high brand misattribution—thereby not impacting the core measures of both long-term brand building and short-term conversion. And as we increasingly rely on GenAI to create ads, to satisfy the need for numerous pieces of content in every campaign, this trend of regressing to the average will only accelerate.

 

So, what is the fix? All too often it is easy to go down the path focused on capturing attention as the end-goal. However, we can create dissonance that brings active attention to bear—but not all dissonance is useful. Once we have managed to bring active attention to bear do people see the brand and its role in the narrative? Do we leave behind a clear message of what the brand does and why it should matter to the audience? If not, then it is just click-bait—and click-bait is worse than wallpaper advertising. Because it can negatively impact the equity of the brand. 

 

So, how can we understand early in the creative process whether the ad is wallpaper or not? This is the role of creative pre-testing—there are many different approaches and tools and on which a lot has been written and discussed. 

 

At its core, creative pre-testing is about understanding if the creative delivers to the marketing intent within the media context in which it will be seen and engaged with. Each individual media channel has a unique content consumption behaviour (scroll-based, search-based), which is the constraint within which creativity needs to work. Dissonance early in the creative story can bring active attention to bear and we need to be able to see this in the testing.

 

Once we have caught attention, there is still a need to hold attention for longer and in the process help people perceive or understand what brands are trying to say. Therefore, it starts with clarity of the marketing intent and campaign objectives, and holding these steadfast as we review creative testing results. 

 

When an ad can capture and hold attention for a longer duration and drives the right perception for the brand it is a strong ad. If an ad captures attention but does not drive the right perceptions for the brand it is click-bait. And when an ad does not capture attention in itself it is wallpaper.

 

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Ramanathan Vythilingam is a senior market insights professional at Unilever and an adjunct professor of marketing at business schools in Singapore.