Click here to view a 14-minute video of the key findings.

Click here to download a PDF of the slides.

Click here to download System1’s Another Dull Whitepaper: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull.

Boring ads cost a fortune.

Creative testing giant System1, Adam Morgan, founder of ad agency eatbigfish, Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer of System1 and host of Uncensored CMO, and Peter Field, the legendary “godfather of marketing effectiveness,” recently released a major study analyzing IPA (The Institute for Practitioners in Advertising) data that revealed brands must spend significantly more media money on dull ads compared to interesting, non-dull ads.

Sourced from the IPA Effectiveness Databank of thousands of marketing effectiveness case studies, Peter Field found that dull ads don’t work very hard.

Interesting ads, a.k.a. fame ads, generate 6.1X more share growth than dull, rational ads. Peter Field reports:

• Advertisers have to spend 2.6X more on dull ads than on interesting ads to achieve the same very large market share growth.
• Advertisers would have to spend 2X more on dull ads than on interesting ads to generate very large profit growth.
• Advertisers must spend 2.6X more on dull ads than on interesting ads to have large business effects.

Neutrality, the absence of emotion, is the most common reaction to ads

System1 has tested hundreds of thousands of ads, measuring how people feel about ads to predict their long- and short-term potential. Despite the myth that TV ads outperform AM/FM radio ads due to “sight, sound, and motion,” the emotional reactions to U.S. TV and AM/FM radio ads are virtually the same.

Half of all U.S. ad response is the no emotion “neutral” response. 43% of the response to U.S. AM/FM radio and TV ads is the positive “surprise/happy” emotion.

Business-to-business ads are even duller with greater neutral “feeling nothing” responses

B2B AM/FM radio ads elicit greater positive emotions (43%) versus B2B TV ads (37%). Still, B2B ads generate a massive amount of dullness with 53%/54% indicating neutral responses.

Marketers have two jobs: Converting existing demand and creating future demand

Each approach requires very different creative and media strategies.

Converting existing demand targets the tiny percentage of people who are in-market and ready to buy. The Ehrenberg Institute of Marketing Science reports only 5% of consumers are in-market at any point in time.

Converting existing demand is also called “performance marketing.” This requires rational and dull copy using tightly target media. Dull ads do have a time and a place.

Creating future demand targets the 95% who are not in-market and not thinking about the category. The objective is to create ads that produce positive feelings, especially happiness. If an ad makes people feel good, it’s more memorable and more effective at building positive associations with a brand.

James Hurman’s book Future Demand, explains, “Creating Future Demand is most efficiently achieved by targeting very broad audiences of ‘all category buyers’ with emotional messaging that is designed to stand out and be enjoyed by consumers, creating positive memories of our brand that will influence future purchase decisions.”

Les Binet: “Emotion is the most powerful selling tool we have”

Les Binet, the head of global effectiveness at adam&eveDDB London, states:

“The process of building a brand, which is ultimately about preparing someone to buy your product at some point in the future, takes a very long time. When somebody buys a car, that process of making the decision starts maybe 10 or 20 years before they actually come to buy it. Even the process of selecting a chocolate bar, as I did earlier on, that decision has been brewing in my mind ever since I was in school.

In order to really build strong brands, you’ve got to start preparing consumers long before they even start thinking about the product or the purchase. That means engaging them when they’re not interested in what you have to say, when they are not thinking about the product, when they have no need to be satisfied. So you can only do that by engaging them with things that are intrinsically interesting at a human level and that will be remembered for a very long time.

So emotion is the most powerful selling tool we have. And therefore, emotional media are much more powerful for building brands and generating profit.”

System1 star ratings: The more you feel, the more you buy

System1 rates ads with one to five stars to predict long-term brand share growth. This is based on the emotional response to the ad and how positive the reaction is.

Ads that that only earn a one-star rating will not realize any long-term share growth. An ad that achieves a three-star emotional response yields a two-point increase in long-term share.

The four drivers of dull ads, “the four Horsemen of the Dullocalypse,” according to Adam Morgan of eatbigfish:

1. “Performance: There is a trend towards ad spend going to performance channels like search, digital display, and social media advertising. There’s nothing inherently less creative about any of these channels. But the metrics they are measured on are invariably short-term and transactional. Performance marketing channels don’t directly aim to build brands or create long-term mental availability, they’re aimed at people in the market now. Such ads tend to aim for brand recognition before emotional impact, which leads to higher neutrality. In other words, dullness.
2. Optimization: This helps explain why performance marketing advertising is so dull. Put simply, the more channels and media types you’re advertising across, the simpler your assets need to be, in order to be optimized for as many different touchpoints as possible.
3. Averaging: Designs, color schemes, tones of voice, even selfie poses are converging in what commentator Alex Murrell has called “The Age Of Average.” This is a kind of optimization effect too – individuals and brands copying what seems to be working for others, but at market scale the effect is to homogenize everything. [What happens is all brands in the category sound the same.] Nothing looks bad but nothing stands out. That’s a recipe for dullness.
4. Procurement: we live in an era of cascading budgeting cuts, with clients cutting marketing budgets and holding companies implementing cuts of their own in turn. The result is that creative directors are having to pay more attention than ever to the bottom line, and that agencies and clients have less time to work on a campaign and get from good to great. In those circumstances, it’s no wonder repetitive or dull ads get through too often.”

The “Anti Dull Dial” from Adam Morgan and eatbigfish: Five questions to ask when working on strategy and advertising to prevent dull ads

1. “Are we meeting them [the audience] where they care, and speaking to them in their language? People find ads interesting when the ads are about things they care about too, and aren’t full of business-speak or jargon.
2. Are we using the real bar to judge what’s interesting, or some invented one of our own? As marketers we can’t lie to ourselves, and pretend something’s going to interest our audience when it really won’t. Fortunately, there are ways of measuring these things – testing with System1’s Test Your Ad platform, for example, will give a fast, objective measure of how interesting consumers find an ad.
3. Are we showing real distinctiveness and character? Remember Averaging, the third horseman of the Dullocalypse? Here’s where you take him on. Does your ad [sound,] look and feel distinctive, and distinctively you? That might mean a recurring brand character or Fluent Device, or other colourful and entertaining assets.
4. Are we using emotion, drama and storytelling? As … System1 might put it, are we entertaining for commercial gain? Nothing beats dullness more thoroughly than an entertaining ad – particularly, as we’ll see, a funny one.
5. Are we denying one of their key assumptions, and surprising them? Happiness isn’t the only beneficial emotion for advertising – Surprise plays a big part too, and dullness kills surprise. So it’s worth deliberately aiming to go against some audience expectations and give them something that’ll make people sit up, not snooze.”

According to System1, “The more you can answer “Yes” to these five questions, the less dull your ad is going to be.”

To make your ads more interesting, utilize more right brain features

Jon Evans, System1 Chief Customer Officer, offers these best practices:

• Emotion – using emotion over rational persuasion
• Story – telling a good story over a product demo
• Character – using characters with agency
• Fluency – recurring character or situation that creates memorable associations with your brand
• Sound – using music to amplify emotion

Adam Morgan, founder of the ad agency eatbigfish, created a wonderful podcast series called Let’s Make This More Interesting. Morgan speaks with fascinating people who excel at engaging their audiences like reality show producers, teachers, and Sesame Street writers.

Humorous ads work: The funniest ads drive 5X more market share growth than the least funny ads

English author G.K. Chesterton famously said, “Humor gets under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.” Recently, System1 organized creative tests by the funniest ads to least funny ads based on the consumer humor response.

System1 found the funniest ads generate a much stronger 3.4 average star rating compared to only a 2.2 for the most serious and solemn ads.

The greater the humor, the greater the long-term market share growth. The funniest ads drive 5X more market share growth than ads that are the least funny.

The most boring ads generate only 0.2 points of long-term share growth. The funniest ads generate 1.03 points of long-term share increases, a 5X advantage.

To be interesting, use showmanship and salesmanship

Good advertising tells its a story in an entertaining and emotional way.

Advertising legend David Ogilvy said, “You can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it. If you’re selling fire extinguishers, you’d better start with the fire.”

In his book Why Does the Pedlar Sing? What Creativity Really Means in Advertising, Paul Feldwick says, “Embrace the idea that advertising is at least as much showmanship as it is salesmanship. It is time to rediscover the fact that advertising builds brands best when it is entertaining, popular and memorable, when it is not just a pitch, but a performance.”

Key findings:

• Neutrality, the absence of emotion, is the most common reaction to ads
• Advertisers have to spend 2X to 2.6X more on dull ads than on interesting ads to achieve the same very large market share growth, profit growth, and large business effects
• Les Binet: “Emotion is the most powerful selling tool we have”
• System1 star ratings: The more you feel, the more you buy
• Five questions to ask to make more interesting ads: Are we meeting them [the audience] where they care, and speaking to them in their language? Are we using the real bar to judge what’s interesting, or some invented one of our own? Are we showing real distinctiveness and character? Are we using emotion, drama and storytelling? Are we denying one of their key assumptions, and surprising them?
• Humorous ads work: The funniest ads drive 5X more market share growth than the least funny ads

Click here to download System1’s Another Dull Whitepaper: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull.

Click here to view a 14-minute video of the key findings.

Pierre Bouvard is Chief Insights Officer of the Cumulus Media | Westwood One Audio Active Group^®.

Contact the Insights team at CorpMarketing@westwoodone.com.