Advertising And The Fallacy Of Predictability.
Most companies are seeking advertising that has predictable results. To do so, we start from a predictable place and deploy predictable tactics. We’ve all been there. At the briefing discussing the objectives of the desired results or predicting the campaign’s outcome before anything has been created. Or worse, we’re sitting behind a two-way mirror, putting a disproportionate amount of trust into a few people who think they know what they will do when exposed to an ad. But in reality, they have no idea what they’ll make for dinner that night.
Everything we do as consumers online – our location, our preferences, our views, our searches, our purchases – is all captured, collated and interpreted by marketing scientists; The Analysts. Today, big data has undoubtedly turned the art of marketing into the science it now is.
But is that good? Let’s back up a little.
Has advertising ever been an art? Never. Commercial art at best, but advertising, since the dawn of Madison Avenue, has always been about culture and persuading people to change behaviour and act differently. Advertising is designed to sell, not be purchased. The piece of art hanging in the CEOs office that increases in value each year is quite rightly, art. Their ad that ran for 30 seconds in the Super Bowl that cost $5 million, is now consumed. Much more like the paint than the painting, the ad is an ingredient to build the brand.
Furthermore, is advertising a science? Absolutely not. In overly simplistic terms sciences tend to represent closed systems where we can isolate variables and quantitatively measure them in a repeatable fashion. This repeated experimentation is repeatedly precise, leading to theories, norms, and eventually scientific laws.
Yes, the marketing scientists and the analysts now have swaths of data they can use to define norms and thus give the perception that if someone does this, then there’s a decently probability they may take this action next because they have data that says 64% of people have done just that in the past. But these are not laws that can be repeated consistently over time. As every financial analyst will tell you, past performance does not predict future results.
The repetition of the predictable will only lead to further entrenchment of the ignorable and that will inevitably lead to diminishing ROI. And that’s the beauty of advertising. While people expect brands to have some consistency, we reward brands who show up in unexpected places and reward us with something new. Norms don’t break through. Norms don’t stop you in your tracks and make you think, make you do. What’s normal is ignorable.
So advertising is much more like social studies than it is art or science. Advertising is constantly evolving and complex, with dynamic systems making it nearly impossible to isolate every variable where the underlying context often changes over time. Which means repeated experimentation tends to provide fuzzy and somewhat differing results rather than precision. Social studies includes humanities, the arts, social sciences, including history, economics, geography and politics. Advertising, good advertising, is a reflection of all of this. It plays in this messy place of constantly changing variables and that’s what makes it dynamic, interesting, and human.
The best advertising planners I’ve worked with are interested people, not scientists. They don’t waste time analyzing data points to predict a common or linear output. They find the cracks, the holes, the missing threads that point to unique human, not data, insights to prevent predictability and bravely identify new paths. They study human behaviour, not the data of online behaviour. They are more like anthropologists than scientists.
So when it comes to your advertising, stop being predictable, stop being the norm. The norm is that 89% of advertising today goes unnoticed. That is a predictable and terrible norm to chase. Start from somewhere new, carve a new path, don’t pre-suppose the destination, and throw a full punch. The work that’s successful, the work that shines at the Effies and the Cannes Effectiveness Awards is the work that breaks from the norms. It’s creative, it stands out, it becomes part of culture, not data sets. It’s the work no one saw coming. No one predicted it, and that’s why it’s effective.
Bring your partner flowers tonight. It’s going to be unexpected. And the results are going to be fantastic.
The End.
