The job of advertising is not to sell

David Ogilvy said, “We sell or else.” And it’s a hard position to argue with. We make ads, not art. Clients come to agencies for commercial outcomes.  

But the language “sell” can be problematic. It can lead us down the wrong path to deliver on that promise.     

Yes, the job of advertising is to deliver a lift in sales. But it doesn’t have to sell.  

When you say something must sell, you play to the misconception that advertising must be persuasive to be effective. This is not the case. We know most buyers are not in-market right now. Therefore, they are not interested in your message. Or your reason to believe. Or your feature. Or your benefit. They do not want their arm twisted because they do not want to convert right now. Attempt to persuade them, and they only shut you down.   

Les Binet and Sarah Carter, in How Not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up, wrote, “When you talk about functional benefits, you’re actually giving your shopper reasons not to buy, because you’ve engaged their rational brain instead of the more powerful gut instinct.” 

Instead, we should be aiming to build muscle memory. So, when these buyers do come in-market tomorrow, or next month, or next year, your brand is a little more likely to come to mind. And therefore, they’re a little more likely to choose you.  

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call it pre-suasion, not persuasion. Because people don’t buy the best brand, they buy the brand they’re most familiar with.   

Here’s a game-changing piece of research on how we achieve this, challenging conventional wisdom. Using the UK’s Institute of Practitioners of Advertising’s effectiveness case study database, ad testing platform System1, and Peter Field split the work into two categories—campaigns which achieve an emotional reaction, and campaigns which have a clear message take-out.   

And they found: "Campaigns which ‘landed the right message’ lead to fewer lasting and large effects, just more direct effects. Where campaigns with a greater emotional response lead to the opposite."   

Read the above paragraph again, then consider the implications.

Do we even need a single-minded proposition when we’re creating ads for the top of the funnel? Or do we just need something which elicits an emotional reaction, that is well-branded, to build muscle memory between your brand and the category need?    

Critically, my argument is not “brand ads don’t need to sell”. I often cite Jenni Romaniuk’s infamous quote: “If marketers could stop claiming it is a good thing to spend large amounts of money on advertising that is not aimed at generating sales (short or long term), that would help. […] One of the biggest own-goals of the advertising industry is the invention of the ‘brand-building' campaign.”  
  
Yes, we want to see sales growth. But generating sales and selling are not the same thing. 

Clearly, there is a role for messaging and rational persuasion. But it can’t be all we do. Paul Feldwick suggests adland could do with less salesmanship and more showmanship. Olando Wood supports this too, saying “the more people feel, the more people buy”.  

Be more entertaining. Be more interesting. Be more attention-grabbing. Hit people in the feels. 

This also explains why lots of great advertising fails in research groups. Respondents naturally think the role of advertising is to sell and therefore reject concepts which don’t persuade them. How many times have you heard a punter say, “It doesn’t make me want to switch or doesn’t say why I should buy them"? Consumers (and perhaps too many marketers) don’t understand we need different approaches for capturing existing demand versus building future demand.   
  
The new work from Allianz in Australia is textbook effectiveness. Building positive associations between care and the brand, eliciting emotion as a tool to encode it into memory. Killer soundtrack, beautiful story, and a concept which stands out from a sea of sameness in the insurance category. 

Personally, my only challenge with this work is attribution. I suspect local bank ANZ will get a free kick in the short term, who have a bird they’ve been using as a distinctive brand asset on and off for a decade. But hey, if you’re building something new, you have to start somewhere. 

So next time you’re building a brand, be less persuasive. Because the more you to try to sell, the less you actually will.    

Zac Martin is a planning director at TBWA Melbourne.