Are We Over-Analysing Advertising?

It can often feel like the advertising industry is split between commitment to short-term versus long-term thinking. Amidst a challenging economic backdrop, it makes sense that ‘quick wins’ - which translate to revenue boosts - look more attractive than a more holistic investment in brand-building. After all, that’s effectiveness, right? Well, not quite - and certainly not when it comes to advertising in the platform age. 

For Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer of the System1 Group, an obsession with all things measurable - and its often-clumsy stand-in for ‘effectiveness’ - is a symptom of a wider disease in our culture which he diagnoses as the overall turn to the ‘analytical’. “In the last 15 years, or what we might call the digital age, advertising and culture has changed significantly,” says Orlando, echoing the research he’s conducted in his two books, ‘Lemon’ and ‘Look out’. 

He locates the beginning of this shift in 2006, the same year of Twitter’s (now X) launch while Facebook, launched in 2004, was slowly infiltrating people’s lives too. Broadly, this is the start of the ‘platform age’ and the beginning of the division of our attention from broad to narrow-beam. Drawing on the work of the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, Orlando posits a theory of attention whereby broad-beam attention appeals to the right side of our brains, responsible for alertness, vigilance, and sustained attention, compared to the left brain-guided narrow-beam attention, defined by a preference for directness and goal-orientedness. 

“We see this massive swing of advertising style away from broad-beam, right-brained advertising towards very left-brain dominant advertising, the sort of advertising you might describe as performance advertising,” Orlando says. 

Whilst that might not necessarily seem like a problem for marketers on the surface, it really should. That’s because, as Orlando explains, “this sort of advertising is inherently not very interesting unless you're in the market for the product or you’ve already been primed to like the brand.”

It’s no wonder that the digital age has precipitated an explosion in narrow-beam and left-brain advertising, in Orlando’s view. “One of the features of the digital age is that it gives you feedback. There’s a lot of data on engagement and views, on data points that are easy to capture but that won’t necessarily give you an indication of how well something will be working in the future”, he says. “That data doesn’t tell us if the piece of advertising is creating long-term memory structures and leading to mental availability. A lot of this guidance is given by platforms to advertisers and geared towards a short-term view of effectiveness.” 

At the heart of this problem is a conflation between what is memorable and what is effective. “This is a subject I’ll be raising during my presentation at this year’s EffWorks, to remind everyone of the basic principle that emotive advertising that elicits an emotional response is the best indicator we have of mental availability gains”, adds Orlando.

System1’s chief innovation officer traces what this actually looks like by scrutinising the style of the ads that dominate digital screens. “The left hemisphere likes things to be fixed, replicable, and scalable. It can't deal with ambiguity, it likes what is measurable and to quantify things. These kinds of ads are cut up into parts, they’re direct, words on the screen, it’s mechanistic and rhythmic advertising.” 

Vitally, this kind of advertising only transmits information - great if the consumer is looking for a specific product or already has interest in a brand. What it doesn’t do is capture the consumers’ imagination, inspire a desire, or spark the ‘mental availability gains’ that make brands aspirational or coveted. The opposite of this is “people, connection, movement, flow, space, time, music,” per Orlando, “it's the right hemisphere that presents the world to us with broad-beam attention”.

But why should marketers care about the mental availability a brand creates? In a digital world, most brands are interacted with in digital spaces first - and sometimes exclusively - rather than physical ones. This lack of physicality leads to a dearth of mental availability, so brands must work on establishing and maintaining it unless they want to be dissolved into the ether of digital noise. 

Orlando says that a lot of advertising in the platform age mistakenly reaches for narrow-beam attention when it should be making an appeal to broad-beam attention instead. “We’ve long known that a print ad needs to be different to a TV ad which now needs to be different to a digital ad; there’s simply not a lot of time online to make an impression”, he says. “That’s why you want to be reaching for high-attention media with emotive advertising, investing above your size, and excess share of voice to create mental availability gains and those lasting brand building benefits.”

“There’s a connection between an emotive response to an ad on whatever channel or platform and mental availability gain. It’s a general principle that holds true, and I’ll present new evidence to support it at EffWorks.”

We ask whether Orlando thinks this left-brain narrow-beam culture continues to dominate culture and advertising. He notes that covid made things a lot worse but we may be turning a corner, albeit slowly. “I have seen a flicker of hope in effectiveness cases in the IPA database, and I was very encouraged to see a humorous ad winning the Cannes Lions Grand Prix this year, Apple’s ‘RIP Leon’. We haven’t seen that for a long time and I’m hoping that it’s a sign of life.”

However, this isn’t a case of simply harking back to the simpler times of the past. “If we're going to capture that broad-beam attention, we need to create a different style of advertising, the advertising of brand building, essentially, that generates future earnings because it continues to work into the future,” he adds. 

With medium-specificity in mind, Orlando’s research shows that advertising which involves the living or elements of the unexpected is the style of advertising that resonates with broad-beam attention and contributes to brand building. “The right brain hemisphere really latches onto social context, it’s interested in decoding what’s going on in a situation whether it’s assessing for threats or opportunities for connection and collaboration. It’s movement, expression, and emotional turning points.” TikTok immediately comes to mind as a platform through which people engage in the recognisable tinged with the odd, like attempting dance routines while delivering something silly or informative. Whatever the precise alchemy is, it has us hooked. 

Quoting the philosopher, author, and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, Orlando says “a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself,” adding that “as a culture and in advertising we’re all guilty of analysing ourselves too much.” With this in mind Orlando isn’t against effectiveness - he’s very much all for it while encouraging us to deepen our understanding of what effectiveness can really mean. It’s not the simplistic, the measurable, the reproducible; it’s often the intangible that appeals to the very essence of what makes us social beings and creates mental availability in a way that resonates long after the ad is over. 

Orlando didn’t want to give any more secrets away for now. “At EffWorks, I will set the stage for our brand building show in the digital world and give some guidance as to the kind of show that works on each stage, whether your media choices are the equivalent of a theatre or a soap box, and how to create a show that's right for each.”