In advertising, using emotion is entirely logical. Creative agencies have made this case consistently. But in 2013 Les Binet and Peter Field bought some much-needed data to the discussion. In their seminal report, The Long and The Short of It, the duo analysed 30 years of IPA effectiveness award submissions. The study found that emotional...
The shift to music streaming has led to songs getting shorter, music getting less melodically diverse and lyrics getting more repetitive. Or to put it another way, just as our visual culture has become more homogeneous, so too has the music that accompanies it. Let’s run through these arguments one by one.
A storm is coming. In 2020 Britain suffered its deepest recession in over 300 years. Two years later and the UK’s economic picture is not much prettier. This article argues that whilst recessions are a threat to some businesses, they are an opportunity for others. It argues that brands can not only survive a downturn but thrive in one. It...
To make a big impact, we need a big idea. In brand communications, coveting the ‘big idea’ is commonplace. We look for them. Long for them. Laud them and lionise them. And yet, despite its ubiquitous use, the ‘big idea’ remains incredibly ill-defined. This article is an attempt to change that. It argues that ‘big ideas’ are ‘big’ because they...
We live in the era of efficiency. The advertising industry is infatuated with it. Intoxicated by it. Enamoured and enthralled by it. We want our teams to be lean. Our processes to be agile. And our output to be optimised. Instead of focussing on making our work bigger, we focus on making it work harder. Instead of aiming to maximise our...
We spend eight hours a day thinking about the brands we build. Many of us more. We consider our clients’ companies and the categories in which they compete. We visit the sites in which our products are produced and the stores in which they are sold. We analyse their adverts and comb through their campaigns. But as our knowledge of a brand...
Marketers are prone to a prediction. You’ll find them in the annual tirade of trend decks. In the PowerPoint projections of self-proclaimed prophets. In the feeds of forecasters and futurists. To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies. In total, these three companies’...
Purpose is polarising. There are those who promote it as a paragon of positioning and a silver-bullet strategy for success. Then there are those who refute purpose’s power and dispute its capacity to connect with consumers. It is clearly a debate that divides. For every success story we have a plethora of painted-on purposes that have missed...
Big data is big news. Search for it and Google will return 75 million results. That’s a different article for every 100 people on earth. There are also 18 million videos on the topic. At 5 minutes each, it would take 170 years to watch them all. Then there’s the one million books on the subject. Stacked on top of each other they’d form a...
We believe we work in turbulent times. A quick skim of the industry press and you’ll learn that ecommerce is upending retail. Social media is uprooting advertising. Private labels are replacing brands. Advertising is dying. And TV is dead. We believe change is the new normal. That its pace is accelerating. That technological adoption is...
The advertising industry is addicted to youth. We are obsessed and possessed. We crave it in our agencies and we covet it in our audiences. We believe younger staff are more creative and younger consumers are more valuable. But this is nothing more than received wisdom. Dogma upon which we have all been indoctrinated. Spurious beliefs and...
The advent of digital media promised so much. Savvy shoppers would no longer be surreptitiously swayed by advertising alone. The internet would enable them to research products. Social media would allow them to share their experiences. And ecommence would provide the power to compare prices. Unfortunately, this pledge is increasingly looking...
It seems that a day doesn’t pass without another article hitting the headlines exposing the shortcomings of the Millennial generation. It seems we are obsessed with the concept of demographic cohorts. Or, to put it more specifically, we are obsessed with the idea that different generations have radically different beliefs and behaviours. I...