5 Minutes with… Orlando Wood

Orlando> Full disclosure: no, I haven't. I am an advertising researcher. I know a lot of people from advertising agencies and have worked closely with them in the creation of what's between the covers of my books. I've got a bit of distance from it, you could say. But that's not not to say that I don't have my own creative projects.

I've always been interested in advertising from a very early age and enjoyed watching advertising, thinking and talking about how it works, but it was since I joined BrainJuicer, which is now System1 that I’ve worked around it for 18 years. 

We started developing an approach that might measure emotional response. I had lots of conversations with Peter Field around 2007 when they'd [him and Les Binet] written 'Marketing in the Era of Accountability' and they were then moving on to write 'The Long and the Short of It', which would come a few years later. I remember in particular working with Peter Field on a project that involved the IPA's data, looking at real emotional response from real people to advertising and some of the IPA's business effects. That was an early exploratory piece that sort of set the tone and direction for everything that followed.

Looking at behavioural science, psychology and what that might tell us about how the brain works – and therefore how advertising might work – that's always been a very important part of my study. Of course System1 takes its name from [Daniel] Kahneman and others who I referenced relatively early on. That's been an important part of my interrogation of advertising, knowing a little bit and reading about that kind of thing. 

Orlando> Yes, I suppose there is. 

Really, there are two broad schools of advertising. One of them is created to get a direct effect, it's very direct in its style and pretty product-centric – me at you. And then there is another style of advertising, which I think is more important. That's more oblique, holistic, charms through an emotional appeal, is more long lasting, more human centric, drawing on human motivations, humour, music and all those sorts of things that are less literal. That sort of advertising has been gradually disappearing in the digital age and has had an impact on effectiveness. 

Peter [Field] talks about the decline in effectiveness. I think this is one of the reasons why effectiveness has declined because that kind of advertising has given way to the more direct style, which is easier to do on digital platforms and encouraged by digital platforms. So we've seen this shift in style. 

What I'm trying to do is highlight not just the benefits of this other, more important, kind of advertising (typically called 'brand-building advertising' or 'general advertising') but to describe how it works, what it looks like. That's what my books, 'Lemon' and 'Look Out', have been focused on – to give a voice and a language to a kind of advertising that doesn't lend itself to easy description.

We can't explain why it works, how it works and why that might be. And that's what I try to do. I don't want to explain the joke, but I want to describe how it works so that people can use that in their own roles, to explain to others and their colleagues why this works and why it's important, to be able to know it when they see it, to relate to it, to be able to brief it, to be able to receive it from agencies, respond to it appropriately. And just to give triumph a chance.

Orlando> It has its role, of course, that type of advertising, but it does already assume an interest in the product in some way. And it seeks to just nudge you towards a purchase because you're in the buying window or you've already been warmed up in some way to the brand. There is a very important role for that. But to create the interest, to attract and hold attention and to generate that emotional response, lodge the brand in memory, that's a bigger task, and [results in] a more sophisticated, complex range of opportunities that present themselves in a greater range of advertising styles.

Orlando> I trace in my books when this happened. It was around 2006 that you start to see, in TV advertising, this wholesale shift from a sort of advertising that is based on people – that has scenes unfolding in lived time, dialogue, humour, music, character, 'incident and place' as I describe it – towards this more direct style, which is short, sharp cuts, words on the screen telling you what to think, very rhythmic, often this sort of unilateral me-at-you stare, facial frontality just staring at you, a little bit coercive if you like, which has become particularly marked in the last five or six years. It's quite scary, actually. This shift started to happen about 2006 and it's got more and more pronounced over time. 

I think it's broader than just a shift in advertising because you see similar shifts in other things too – in programming, in the type of films that are being made, the move away from the romantic comedy towards the thriller. There's an underlying cultural shift in this digital age. We moved to a culture that's more direct, more literal, less understanding of metaphor and humour. 

In the books, I draw parallels with other periods in history where you've seen these technological shifts like the printing press and the Reformation that happened afterwards. Also the late 19th century and first two decades of the 20th century, where you see in art, science becomes the thing. To Picasso and others, everything is flattened, abstracted. It's kind of the same in advertising today. 

By the way, it happened in advertising too in the first 20 years of the 20th century, you get this shift towards a more scientific style away from the characters and the narratives of the 1890s. So we're repeating what we've seen before.

Orlando> I tried to explain it by looking at the work of a brilliant psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher (and philosopher, really), Iain McGilchrist. He talks about the different modes of attention that the two halves of the brain bring to bear on the world – a more open, broad, global attention associated with the right hemisphere and a very narrow, close-up kind of attention associated with the left hemisphere that seeks to manipulate what the right hemisphere presents to it. It was the moment when I first started reading Iain McGilchrist's work and looking at the ads on television that something just clicked. I thought there's something going on here that is bigger than just advertising. In this digital world, we've become very direct, immediate, close up. It's like we're looking at our bibles and primers in 1500 for the first time and locking everything else out.

There are lots of reasons for this. The digital platforms that have emerged lend themselves much better to trying to draw a link between an ad that is seen and what happens next, even though that can be very limited and limiting in the way that people think about effectiveness. Those tools have shaped advertising. And we've ended up with work that looks very different from how it did 25 years ago.  But it's cyclical. You get these shifts back and forth between these two schools of advertising.

Orlando> There are lots of lots of things we've been involved with. I wouldn't say it was down to us, but we've hopefully been helpful and encouraging and have worked with lots of clients. A couple of examples come to mind. Working with McCann and Aldi on the Kevin the Carrot Christmas campaign. From an early stage in the process every year, we've worked through scripts to try to help. 

We've worked recently with Tourism Australia to get their campaign out. As I understand it, our results were shared with the Australian prime minister to justify the spend behind it. It performed extremely well in System1's testing. 

And I think we just help more broadly to remind people what this kind of advertising can do and also put a measurement behind it because a lot of measures are geared towards the other type of advertising. How do you measure this broad, emotional type of work? We put in place something that we think helps people to do that. And is directly associated with big, broad, lasting effects – share gain for a long period.

Orlando> They do in a sense, because when you bring something into being, you realise what's involved. Sometimes you've just got to start, you're not always sure what's going to emerge at first and you have to work a little bit more at it. It's the same with composing something on piano. You might start with a chord or two chords, and then you think about how can you make that sound more interesting texturally. Then something else emerges and suddenly you might be onto something. The business of creativity, as Iain McGilchrist describes, is like nurturing a plant – you can't make the plant grow, but you can prepare the ground for it, water it, nurture it and encourage something to happen. I think it's the same with with with any creative endeavour. If you read widely, if you feed the mind with research that might not have any bearing, but you might just have a gut instinct or an intuition that there's something here, you often find it sparks an idea or a thought and you suddenly can associate it with something else. You have to prepare the terrain by looking much more broadly than just your field of inquiry.

Orlando> Look at the Baroque period in art. It is rich in human gestures, communication, people talking, drama and ‘moto e azione’ (movement and action). You really see that in a lot of the ads of the 1970s and '80s, people relating each other, connecting with each other on screen. We've lost that a bit. These artistic principles are pretty important to understand because that was a broad and popular art in that period that everyone could understand. It was deliberately so – so that the Catholic church could communicate ideas in the Bible to people who couldn't read. Similarly, I think today a much more visceral understanding comes from imagery and the moving image in a way that the literal word doesn't always capture. So how do we draw on that thread for advertising?

Orlando> Well, that's interesting, isn't it? Because you do you get these extremes. So you start with a Baroque and then things gradually get more and more out of hand and you end up with something really elaborate and ornate. It's seen to be too much. Then suddenly, there's a snap, you get the French Revolution and everything in Enlightenment terms, [which] is pretty austere, a lot of symmetry, you lose the movement, the human connection in some ways. I think we've seen something similar in our world, actually. The late '90s and early '00s were quite extreme in some ways. You think about the culture of the time. It was a bit of a riot. And then suddenly, things have snapped back and we're in a much more austere, serious kind of period. There are amazing parallels really between those two.

There's always a push back. And similarly gradually from austere periods (and it's less marked this way) but you tend to get things developing out of that austerity. So the Dutch Golden Age came out of a period that was the Reformation, but it gradually emerged, whereas when it goes the other way, it tends to be quite abrupt.

Orlando> The literalness and loss of humour I find fascinating, but also very worrying. Also fear about using humour. When you trace searches for humour on the internet versus searches for things like anxiety for instance, you see them overlapping, humour disappearing and anxiety on the up. And I don't suppose that's going to change very much. That's a worry because humour helps to keep us flexible, pokes fun at rigidity, and it keeps us all ticking along. When you see it disappearing, it suggests that something's gone awry. Rigidity starts to take hold. We should be very suspicious of rigidity.

On the positive side, I've been quite intrigued by looking at TikTok recently, at the energy that you see there and some of the ways in which brands are using it playfully, slightly self-mockingly, but in a way that would have been familiar to people working in the creative revolution of the 1960s. So signs that there are brands not taking things too seriously out there. And I think there's an increased understanding now that on social media, it's not enough just to be relevant. You have to entertain, you have to be interesting if you're going to connect with people. There is an undeniable energy there.