The forgotten arts of memorable marketing

The hardest job in marketing, if not life, is simply to be noticed.
People in the West are exposed to anywhere between 300 to 1,000 marketing messages per day, depending on where they are and what they are doing. And, of course, what research house you believe the most.
There have been many studies over the years, leading to much debate. None can ever have the ‘answer’, but considered together an alarming consensus emerges.
Media Dynamics, a research firm focusing on more conservative methods of delivery, has reported that less than half of the adverts someone sees are even slightly noticed for a few seconds. And while the amount of opportunities to see brand messages almost doubled from 1945 to 2014, the number anyone is aware of for more than a split second has gone up by less than 20%.
Greater choice has meant more media consumption — but all the ways messages can be avoided and a default of consumer disinterest means that little has changed here in generations — except perhaps the amount of money spent to get the same sad results.
In a controversial but still much cited study from 2007, Yankelovitch suggested that city dwellers may have well over 5,000 bits of brand shilling in their eyeline daily. The same research asserted that the number of messages has more than doubled in the last 30 years.
Almost all are wasted. Why?
The sometimes ‘too dinner party’ talking point oriented world of behavioural science does not agree on a lot. But one truth never in contention is the fact that out of 5,000 messages:
- Around 150 are noted even slightly
- Just 80 are noticed in some vague form
- Barely 12 are remembered
Taking 5,000 as our base, that means just 0.24% of this stuff comes anywhere near being memorable.
How many of the barely remembered 12 are memorable enough to affect behaviour in any way, no-one knows. But we can hazard a guess.
If we keep monkeying with the numbers, it gets worse.
By taking that little 0.24% and comparing it to an average click through rate on an untargeted Facebook ad unit, which is often around 0.02%, we can safely assume that one, or maybe two, of these messages are memorable enough to provoke some kind of behaviour. On a good day.
John Wanamaker, the great retailer and marcomms pioneer, said something we have all heard so often that it is worth repeating again:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Words barely exist to describe the level of value destruction and cancerous creation of worthless clutter content that is happening today.
“Waste” and “half” come nowhere near the scale of the stupidity, which is best described using collections of colourful metaphors, usually four letters in length.
Technology has not just accelerated the trend away from memorable marketing, it has helped to mask the extent of the miasma.
Spray-and-pray ‘AdTech’ means that so many units can be scattered over so many eyeballs, and fraudbots for that matter, it looks like there is some kind of result. Keep on carpet bombing, and sometimes you will hit a valid target — quite by accident.
The profusion of Digital and Social channels have merely created more space and speed for bad marketing. Just like electronic instruments helped more people make bad music, faster.
Explore the Owned channel estate of many big brands and you will see deserts of consumer disinterest.
Videos with so few views each one probably cost a lot more than the product being advertised itself.
Facebook ‘content’ cut and pasted from above-the-line assets, seen by far fewer people than it took to make the stuff, and remembered by even fewer.
How did we get to this bleak juncture? When and why were the ancient arts of memorable marketing forgotten? What can be done to help them revive and thrive?
That is precisely what this blog will explore. Stay tuned.
