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 campaigns outperformed rational campaigns on every brand and business metrics that had been measured. But why is this? This article aims to answer this seeming simple question. It argues that emotional, brand-building communications are more effective because they attract more attention, create stronger memories and are more likely to be shared.

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.

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture. But it didn’t quite go to plan. Every picture looked the same. 30 years after the “People’s Choice” series, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live. From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. Welcome to the age of average. Let’s dive in.

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 explores five principles that will help your brand be one that finds strength in the slowdown. The principles will help you increase your dominance during a downturn. They will help you be one of the 9% of companies who come out of the recession stronger than you went in.

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 spread in three directions. They go long, spreading across campaigns. They go wide, spreading across channels. And they go far, spreading across countries.

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 impact, we aim to minimise our waste. A century ago, American industrialist John Wanamaker is claimed to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Today, marketing strives to resolve this riddle. It aims to not only identify Wanamaker’s waste, but to eradicate it. We prioritise cheap channels to improve our ROI. We invest in touchpoints which can target those most likely to convert. And we avoid advertising on media that commands low levels of attention. At the same time, traditional broadcast communications are increasingly thought to be an inconceivable indulgence. They are mass. They are ignored. And they are expensive. I believe, however, that these three critiques are fundamentally flawed. This article argues that efficient doesn’t necessarily mean effective. It argues that more productive doesn’t necessarily mean more powerful. And it argues that being mass, ignored and expensive are not points of weakness but, in fact, points of strength.

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 expands, so too does the distance that divides our audience and us. They do not pore over our positioning. They do not dwell on the details of our designs. They do not ponder our products, prices or promotions. In fact, they do the opposite. Whilst we spend our time thinking about our brands, our consumers spend their time thinking about anything but. This, however, is not the only dimension upon which we differ. This article argues that we have different demographics, attitudes and personalities. It argues that we consume different media and consume it on different devices. It argues that we spend our working lives differently, our downtime differently and it argues that we shop at different stores. In short, this article argues that we are nothing like the consumers we serve.

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’ make just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over the next 30 years. I believe the vast majority of these to be not forecasts but fantasies. Snake oil dressed up as science. Fiction masquerading as fact. This article assesses how predictions have performed in five fields. It argues that poor projections have propagated throughout our society and proliferated throughout our industry. It argues that our fixation with forecasts is fundamentally flawed. So instead of focussing on the future, let’s take a moment to look at the predictions of the past. Let’s see how our projections panned out.

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 the mark and fallen flat. Brand purpose does not guarantee growth, nor does it forecast failure. It is not 100% foolproof, nor is it 100% flawed. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. This article argues that brand purposes that miss the mark fall into one of three pitfalls. They pursue a purpose that is too far removed from their product, they trivialise a culturally sensitive subject and they act in contradiction to their claims. Successful purposes avoid these pitfalls. They build a purpose on a role their product actually performs, they treat culturally important subjects with sensitivity and they align all of their brand’s actions. The result is a brand that is credible, considerate and committed.

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 tower 58 times taller than the Empire State Building. Clearly ‘big news’ is an understatement. Big data is a zeitgeist. It has monopolised the corporate conversation. It has captured our collective imagination, spread through every sector and intoxicated every industry. Marketing is no different. ‘Big data’ dominates our discourse. It promises to provide a deeper understanding of our consumers, to remove risk from our decision making and to reduce waste from our investments. And yet for every promise, there is a problem. This article argues that ‘big data’ is not the silver bullet we so wish it to be. It argues that we must stop treating it as a singular source of objective truth. And it argues that five big questions should cause us to cast a more critical eye.

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 faster than ever. That unicorn company’s are constantly being born. And that incumbents are being killed at breakneck pace. So we hyperventilate. We panic. We rush to the new and shiny. We bolt on technological tactics, believing the band aids will save us. From drone delivery to cheap chatbots we are seduced by the superficial. There is a better way. This article argues that the industry is not a runaway train of uncontrollable change. That our fear is misplaced. That by focussing on what might be important tomorrow, we miss out on what is important today.

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 specious myths; unquestioned, unfounded and ultimately unsound. By undervaluing older staff we undervalue expertise. By overlooking older audiences we overlook opportunity. This article makes the case that changing our ageist attitudes is not only a moral decision but a commercial one. A decision that would improve the quality of our work. And a decision that would improve the quality of our standing.

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 like a pipe dream. A far-flung fiction. An unattainable utopia. This is the story of the digital dark side. Told in five parts.

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 believe this perspective is fundamentally flawed. This article makes the case against the use of demographic cohorts in marketing. It questions the value of insights gleaned from the field of demography. And it debunks many of the practice’s major premises.