The Power of Precision Guessing — Or Why There’s No Algorithm for Great Advertising

We know that consumer behavior is often irrational. That’s why there are large market share differences among products that are essentially the same.

We also know that consumers tend to be pragmatic and don’t like to throw their money around on crap. That’s why so many new products fail.

So how do we reconcile these two seeming contradictions? How can consumers be both strangely emotional yet essentially pragmatic? We can’t explain it. That’s what makes advertising so interesting. It’s like physics. There are two equally reliable, yet contradictory ways to explain the physical behavior of matter.

General relativity describes the world one way. Quantum physics describes it another. They are completely different, and often contradictory theories. And yet each is equally capable of explaining and predicting the behavior of matter -- general relativity on a large scale and quantum physics on a small scale.

We face a similar (and far less important) enigma in advertising. If you ask an advertising expert “what makes a great campaign,” he/she will provide you with a list of adjectives -- beautiful, persuasive, funny, entertaining, convincing ... but the truth is, nobody really knows what makes a great ad campaign.

I can show you a hundred campaigns that were all of those things and failed, and you can show me a hundred that were none of them and succeeded.

The thing that drives ad people crazy, and makes advertising such a fascinating endeavor, is that there is no algorithm for great advertising. No one has been able to define the proper proportions of the emotional and the practical, the nonlinear and the utilitarian, the entertaining and the convincing.

And that leads us to the point of this piece. The present obsession with media delivery systems may help our media people locate a certain type of person more easily, but is never going to provide the spark of brilliance on how to motivate this person.

Understanding motivation still comes from the brains of talented people who somehow know what the right combination of ingredients is to motivate a certain type of person in a certain category.

They don’t know how they know it, and sometimes they don’t even know that they know it. But they do.

That’s why there are a few people who consistently create wonderful, successful advertising and others who create consistently mediocre advertising.

It’s a gift that some creative people have for precision guessing. That’s all it is, but it is the amazing gift that separates real advertising talent from the rest of us.

This article is an excerpt from Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey. It is published with permission from Type A Group.