A couple of years ago, frustrated with the overwhelming short term obsession and knee jerkism in the marketing world, I set about creating a set of Principles based on what isn't likely to change soon, or ever, for brands and advertisers.
By speaking to the marketers running the most successful businesses in the country like Yorkshire Tea and Nestle, to the disrupters in eye-watering growth like Astonish and Olly’s, then going on to look at a longer list of the most successful brands in the world, and finally comparing to the emerging weight evidence in effectiveness from the likes of WARC, the IPA and System1, I was able to land on a set of four brand communications Principles that I believe have the biggest impact on lasting brand growth.
Principle #2: Entertainment (and the myth of changing attention spans)
No matter how many people want to convince you that attention spans are getting shorter, it’s just not true. We humans are largely the same as we were 10,000 years ago, albeit with a few more tools, a load more stress and Uber.
Our attention spans are the same as they always were, we’re just a bit more choosy in where we point them because we have more choice than we used to have (remember when there were only 5 channels and you couldn’t pause or rewind?), and surprise, surprise, that means we’re paying less attention to advertising. We humans haven't changed. Advertising has.
Think about the past 20 years, and how the whole entertainment economy has reshaped… We’ve seen the rise of the ‘creator’, the birth of Netflix, the dawn of the meme, Gemma Collins falling down a hole. We’re paying more attention to entertainment than ever before.
In the same period, we’ve seen the advertising world do everything it can to kill off entertainment, trying instead to find a silver bullet in targeting while cutting corners to save costs, or creating ‘purpose-led’ campaigns that are mostly lost on anybody living in the real world.
The bar for entertainment is set higher than ever before, and many brands and advertisers have simply stopped trying to jump over it.
Adam Morgan's recent work on ‘The Extraordinary Cost of Dull’* found that a dull campaign, that doesn’t entertain, costs the advertiser £10m a pop on average… so with the waste from the average dull campaign you could buy a decent yacht or a small island in Belize.
But the fact you’ve read this far suggests you believe attention spans can still last more than 2 seconds, you’re convinced of the power in entertainment, and you’re prepared to stand out. So how do we get started?
Firstly we can define entertainment in brand communications very simply… gaining and holding attention (anywhere), by making the viewer feel something.
Whether we’re making somebody laugh, cry, shocked, or moved, the measure of entertainment is the strength of feeling we provoke. This means the starting point for creating something entertaining is to focus on making the viewer feel something, then making that feeling as strong as possible, rather than thinking too much about what we want them to think.
Because in most categories, 90% of people aren’t in the market to buy at this very moment, and when they are, they make 95% of their purchases without engaging the brain, so we use entertainment to make them feel something, to wedge your brand somewhere in the mind, so it pops up easier the next time they’re walking down a supermarket aisle or scrolling online.
Now the other big change in the world of marketing in the past 20 years has been the rise of the ‘thought-leader’ who can offer a handful of hacks that are miraculously applicable to any brand in any category and solve any issue.
Unfortunately creating something entertaining isn’t this simple. There’s no such thing as best practice. Generic rules, by their very nature, destroy creativity. What worked once may not work again. What worked here may not work there. What make one person laugh could fail to make someone else bat an eyelid.
But whilst we don’t believe there’s such a thing as an entertainment cheat sheet (‘guaranteed to 10X your growth in 30 days with these 3 hacks’), there are tried and tested methods (from beyond the marketing world) that we know give us the best chance of entertaining…
Tell a story
From the moment humans could speak, we learnt to tell stories. We have evolved to listen to, create and share stories. This instinct has kept us alive and driven us to build religions, empires and streaming services. As an advertiser, whether you’re trying to entertain in a single image at a bus stop, or in a 60-second TV ad, you stand better chance of entertaining when you tell a story.
Don’t try to please everybody
Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize Winner) said ‘The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.’ He didn’t work in advertising, but the words couldn’t be more appropriate. There is no such thing as universal entertainment; the comedians, films, books, music that any one person loves the most are almost always different from the person sitting next to them. Advertising can’t be truly liked by everyone, and the more you aim to achieve that the more the fear of being disliked will push you towards forgettable. You must choose between being loved by some people, or ignored by everyone.
And remember, even those who don’t like you, will remember you more than those who never notice you.
Think beyond the visual
The red car and the blue car had a race, all red wants to do is stuff his face… You can probably fill in the rest. In fact, you’re probably singing along in your head right now. That’s because audio, especially music and familiar voices, has a stronger, more direct link to emotional memories than visual queues. Audio should therefore never be considered an addition or an afterthought. The audible part of an ad, be it music, dialogue or voiceover, has at least as much of a bearing as the visual on just how entertaining and emotive your ad is.
Reward the audience
‘Getting’ a joke activates the same reward system in the brain as food, sex and drugs, and as a result rewards the effort of working it out with a little hit of Dopamine. Of course if it’s too hard to work out then the viewer isn’t going to make a special effort to do so.
Unfortunately too many advertisers worry too much about the people who might not get it, that they dumb it down to the point they take away the joy from those that would.
Remember there will always be the odd idiot, not everybody gets every joke, and that’s okay. Once again, you can choose to be ignored by everybody, or remembered by some.
Create contrast
Anybody who’s watched Disney’s 2009 film ‘Up’ will know it is one of the most powerful and traumatic tales of storytelling so far this century, and that’s largely because of the use of contrast in the story… joyful idyllic marriage descends quickly into darkness and death, followed by youth and innocence.
The best entertainers and storytellers, whether they’re painting a picture, shooting a film or writing a novel, know that to make something lighter, you make the area around it darker.
This list is by no means exhaustive, there are infinite ways to provoke feeling, and connect that feeling to your brand by entertaining (and there are just as many ways to mess it up) but if you take just one thing away, remember that the biggest risk you can take, is to be ignored.
That’s why entertaining is one of the four Principles of Unforgettable Brands.
*in collaboration with Peter Field and Jon Evans