Why advertising really needs shared, evidence-based foundations
At the risk of sounding like an old advertising bloke looking for validation, I’m going to talk about ageism in marketing, and in advertising in particular, about which there has been a debate rumbling for some time. But bear with me because I believe ageism a symptom of something much more interesting about the value advertising places on experience, the consequences of that value, and what we should do about it. And yes, architects can teach us something here.
So, ageism then. From telling advertising people to manage their careers as though they were professional athletes rather than, well, someone in a profession, to helpful pointers about how to manage your finances if your career effectively ends in your forties, we seem resigned to the fact that advertising as a career ends early. And yes, only 5% of people in advertising are in their fifties. This is weird. Of course professional athletes have short careers, but advertisers work behind a desk. There’s no other desk job I can think of where youth is at such a premium, but advertising’s obsession with youth is entirely understandable even if it’s entirely short-sighted.
And short-sighted it is. Because first, in and of itself, experience is useful. B&Q, who have hired older staff for years, understand this. Ian Cheshire, B&Q’s chief executive, said: “There are clear business benefits to employing a workforce that is age diverse and reflects the customer profile.” and that “We have found that older workers have a great rapport with the customers, as well as a conscientious attitude and real enthusiasm for the job.”. Older people in advertising would be equally conscientious and enthusiastic, and advertising people who ‘reflect the customer profile’ might be better placed to tap into the enormous spending power of older audiences.
Second, in other professions experience is valued because with experience comes efficiency and effectiveness. Surgeons who have performed operations thousands of times are more likely to do them well. Lawyers absorb mountains of case law knowledge and develop an ability to advocate better. Engineers literally build on experience the more they build things. But in advertising we actively discard ‘old stuff’ and start each task as though we know nothing.
Of course, older people cost more, and advertising generally is under enormous financial pressure, but the issue goes deeper than that, and I think the answer lies in our lack of shared foundations.
Before the surgeon picks up the scalpel, the engineer the CAD package or the lawyer the wig, they have a pretty good idea already about what they’re doing. Because in medicine, engineering, law and other professions, a solid and shared foundation of evidence-based knowledge is assimilated at the beginning of a career and built on afterwards. Once doctors, lawyers and engineers know what works, they’re in a good position to iterate, evolve and occasionally disrupt, provided there’s evidence that the new way of doing things is better. A shared evidence base doesn’t preclude innovation.
In advertising though the balance is wonky. Advertisers don’t operate with a shared foundation of evidence-based knowledge. Instead they fetishise creativity at the expense of an understanding of what works. Every new brief is approached with a blank slate, and because evidence is at the periphery and not the heart of advertising, we chase the next new thing instead of building on what works. We ignore our own history. As Dave Trott pointed out recently:
“What makes our business more trivial than any other form of creativity is that we aren’t trying to build on what went before. We’re just anxious to get to the latest technological gimmick before anyone else. I think this attitude cheapens what we do. We confuse being first with creativity. We confuse ‘new’ with ‘better’.”
And we do it because it’s easy to copy cool new stuff, especially if we don’t have to worry too much about it actually working.
It’s a cliché to say that the agency meetings are the best bit of a client’s day, but only because it’s true. Advertising agencies are there to support a client’s marketing goals, but they’re also there to entertain. To stimulate. To give their clients a good time. To show them new things. To be clever with the new brief. And bright young things are very good at all of that. There’s nothing wrong with enjoyable meetings of course, but a shared understanding of what works might give a more solid foundation to the froth. Of course, planners, creative people and client services people have to develop specific skills, but this usually happens on the job, and these skills are usually put in service of the next blank-piece-of-paper brief. Again, people in advertising don’t share a foundation of evidence-based knowledge. And because they don’t, experience doesn’t carry the value it does elsewhere. And that’s a big reason why there are very few older people in advertising.
So, where do the architects come in? Well, architects are also creative. They’re sometimes disruptive (Gaudí or Gehry anyone?) just as great advertising people are sometimes disruptive, but more often they’re just doing what they can to answer a brief with enough creativity to make buildings a pleasure to be in, just as advertisers aim to answer a brief with enough creativity to make ads a pleasure to be interrupted by. But architects are also engineers. They need to know what works, and for buildings that means knowing how maths and physics combine to allow buildings to work. There’s a, you guessed it, shared foundation of evidence-based knowledge, and architects need to learn it before they can bring their creativity to bear. Beautiful buildings that don’t stand up are useless. And guess what? Architects get better as they age. Frank Gehry finished the Guggenheim in Bilbao when he was 68. The Shard topped out when Renzo Piano was 65. Santiago Calatrava was the same age when the World Trade Center Transportation Hub opened in 2016. It seems creativity and experience are not mutually exclusive, despite advertising’s apparent belief to the contrary.
We need to be more like architects. There’s nothing trivial about architecture; designing buildings is a serious business, even if the end results are sometimes funny. And one of the ways we can become more like architects by building a shared body of knowledge about what works. Luckily, we might just be starting to do so:
Two complementary theories about brand building and brand management, both backed with a wealth of empirical evidence, are gaining more and more traction in advertising. Binet and Field’s analyses of 25+ years’ worth of IPA Effectiveness Award winners, The Long And Short Of It is one, and Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow the other. Both theories recommend advertising in a certain way to create the conditions for long-term brand health, and both are beginning to be accepted as foundational evidence across the industry.
Byron Sharp says (among other things) that categories take up more cognitive real estate than the brands within those categories, so advertising that has the best chance to drive brand growth needs to talk about the shared benefits of the category in a distinctive, memorable and consistent way, and crucially target all the current and potential future buyers of the category rather than just, say, heavy users of the brand.
Binet and Field make a distinction between long-term brand building activity and short-term sales activating activity. Mature brands need both for optimum sales performance, with the ratio determined by category and brand maturity among other things. The most commonly quoted split is 60:40 in favour of long-term brand building, and the sort of advertising that works best for this objective is fame-generating, emotionally resonant, creatively rich and (as with Byron Sharp) mass targeted.
These are simplistic summaries of complex arguments however. Embracing these models and creating ads to deliver the effects they suggest is an open-ended task for any brand. But the more often we develop creative work within the parameters of any model – the more experienced we get in other words – the more likely we are to get it right in a way that’s measurable and builds on the evidence base. It’s a win-win. And I’m sure that as we fill in the models ever more finely we’ll uncover other foundational truths that allow us to become ever more effective.
So, a plea. Let’s be more like architects. Architects rock. Evidence rocks. Understanding what works rocks. I hate that I’m devoting my career to what’s perceived as the most trivial of the creative industries, because I know how much people in the industry care about what they do. I’d like to make beautiful things in the knowledge that there’s a good chance they’ll work. I’d like to innovate but not chase novelty. I’d like a shared understanding with my clients of what works rather than having to build arguments from scratch every time. And in all of this I’d like experience to carry more weight than it does today. Perhaps if we can do this advertising might rock a bit more.
Written by Nick Stewart
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