‘You have to spend roughly £10m more on media to make up for a dull campaign’ /

More than 80% of ads fail to pass the attention threshold needed to make an impact on brand building. Yet, despite advertising being so forgettable, two-thirds (67%) of Brits say they feel bombarded by it – so even the advertising that wriggles its way through the net to attention isn’t interesting enough to offer value. 

Findings like these should compel brands to create more daring and entertaining marketing but bold, creative advertising that stands out is, it seems, deemed too risky. Given such a vast proportion of advertising is failing to have the desired impact, it’s time to reconsider what ‘risk’ really means, according to Adam Morgan, founder of consultancy Eatbigfish and author of Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders.

Having noticed a growing trend for the vanilla in adland, Morgan and Jon Evans, chief customer officer at System1, reached out to Peter Field to see whether there was the data to back this up. Assessing IPA data, they found that the more rational, sales-oriented ads the industry produced, the less effective it became as a whole. Importantly, they were also able to put a number to just how much extra media investment a dull ad requires to achieve the same impact as the most emotionally engaging campaigns – spoiler alert, it’s multi-millions of pounds.

Contagious caught up with Morgan to ask about the biggest reasons why the industry is producing so much dull content, and what marketers can do to ensure their campaigns, and their wallets, have to work a little less hard to land with consumers.

Why are dull ads such a big problem?

The vast majority of advertising produced is very, very dull. We haven’t as a business made enough impact in terms of changing that relationship between the industry and the quality of the work it produces. We should be much more frustrated about it than we all actually seem to be.

The whole point of the project that I and a few others are now working on is this: we’ve been talking for 12 to 15 years now about how we know that bringing more emotion drives up the commercial impact of your communications, gives you more bang for your buck – and that message is still not really breaking through in the way that we need it to. It’s not having enough of an impact on so much of the outputs of our industry.

So I was thinking about Daniel Kahneman’s finding that the pain of losing something was twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining it. And I wondered if we could use this to try a very different way to have the conversation. So this all started with a conversation I had with Peter Field where I said, ‘Could you take everything you and Les [Binet] have done with the IPA data and turn it upside down? Instead of showing us how much we gain from being creative could we see how much people lose from producing dull work? Could we, in fact, put an exact number on that?’ And Peter’s initial work showed that you could indeed put a cost on being dull: If you produce a dull campaign in the UK it costs you roughly £10m more in media spend to have the same commercial impact as an interesting campaign.

Tell us about working with Jon Evans at System1, and how that helped unlock the prevalence of dull advertising?

I used to work with a brilliant marketing director called Greg Nugent, who talked about ‘Logic logic magic’: you need to have the business logic very clearly established, but you also need to make sure you include ideas that capture the imagination. And Jon, Peter and I are looking to do this here as well. The System1 database is very large and very accurate in its predictive power, and so we asked ourselves, could you take some just really boring ideas like ‘watching paint dry’ and ‘a cow chewing grass for 30-seconds’ and test them against the 100,000 plus ads that they’ve tested over the last few years and see how they perform, comparatively? And it turns out that 30 seconds of a cow chewing grass outperforms 50% of the ads on their database. It’s hard to know whether we should laugh or cry. 

What motivated you to take on this research and what impact do you hope it might have on the industry?

One of my initiatives for doing this was a conversation I had in 2015 with a guy who writes industrial theatre. Industrial theatre is a form of communicating safety messaging in the South African mining community through theatre, dance or song. I said, ‘It’s just amazing that you do all of this stuff for a safety message.’ He said to me, very seriously, ‘When it’s a matter of life and death you can’t afford to bore the audience.’

I thought that was interesting because I’ve spent the last 25 years working with challengers, and challengers can’t afford to be dull. It is existential for them to attract attention, to stand out and be noticed. So that comment really stuck with me, and I started wondering what all the other brands and businesses were thinking who were producing all this dull work. Is it that they think they can afford to bore their audience – they have deep pockets – or is it that they don’t understand that they’re doing it? 

Talk us through the factors that contribute to the prevalence of dull advertising.

Our view is that there are four things going on. If Peter Field was here he would be saying it’s partly because there’s a generation of performance marketers in advertising. If you’ve been brought up on performance marketing your assumption is that the person out there is already interested in what you have to say. So you don’t have to make it particularly interesting. [But] they’re not particularly interested. In fact, in the UK, 56% of people say that they don’t feel emotionally connected to any single brand at all. Meta, in terms of media share, is about to overtake all of TV. TV is the most interesting platform, so we’re not just talking about dull content, but the compounding effect of dull content on dull platforms. So the performance mindset and performance platforms are a big part of it.

Second is the notion of optimisation, so as marketers try to produce content that can run across lots of different platforms, they make some apparently very sensible decisions about things like logo legibility. They want the logo to be legible in very small spaces as well as very large spaces. So they remove, for instance, much of the character of their logo in the interests of legibility, but in doing so also become much blander, and more like every other logo in their category. Creativity doesn’t become such a priority anymore; different kinds of considerations have come into play. They optimise distinctivity out of their brand, one apparently sensible decision at a time. 

The third is the notion of averaging...