Jenni Romaniuk, Research Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, suggests that identifying the main causes of advertising failure can help us make ads more effective.
If you believe the primary outcome of advertising is to persuade people to buy things they normally wouldn’t, then advertising will mostly disappoint. That is not the most common benefit a brand gets from advertising.
Advertising is just a broad name for company-controlled creative activity (in any media) aimed at shaping buyer memories in the brand’s future favor. A buyer’s memory is one of the most efficient sources of information (even for a google search, you need to remember what to type in). Advertising can freshen memories for a specific brand, to make the brand easier to retrieve. Andrew Ehrenberg called this role of advertising Creative Publicity – a way to publicize the brand, remind people of what it does and when to buy it, and on occasion, share some news such as informing about a new variant launched.
For advertising to work and freshen brand memories and in turn, help brands grow, a number of pieces need to be in place. Here are three fails to fix to help advertising to work more often.
- Failure to reach – Often reach failure happens at the planning stage, where marketers don’t plan for reach in the first place. It also happens after that, at the creative stage where the plan might be in place, but the creative just doesn’t get any attention. For advertising to work, we need to fix the advertising distribution issues of planning, delivering and noticing failures in reach.
- Failure to brand – Much of the paid for reach is wasted because it failed to brand. Whether via the brand name or distinctive assets, we need to get better at branding in every media environment so advertising can work for the brand.
- Failure to be buyable – Presence in as many channels/retailers as possible is a start, but you need the prominence to be found in competitive clutter, and a portfolio item suitable for that buying occasion.
These insights are supported by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research programs. Examples of projects in process include, what happens to different brands when they stop advertising for a long period of time (which is a better test than just stopping advertising for a week or a month), how to use distinctive assets to brand better in different contexts and how to construct better portfolios to realize revenue from good advertising.
Source: Romaniuk, J. (2021, January 4).
Let’s ask a better question: Why doesn’t advertising work (more often)? WARC.
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