Going to advertising conferences nowadays, I feel a bit like a man who has signed up to attend a poetry festival, only to find that most of the talks are about bookbinding.
The discussion is scarcely about advertising at all – or not as David Ogilvy would have recognised it. It has abandoned any discussion of persuasion, psychology and human insight to focus exclusively on delivery – treating advertising as though it were a branch of logistics. Like the beaches at Cannes, what was once creative territory has been invaded by the Martech Industrial Complex.
Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Will Lion recently gave a name to this phenomenon that I urge you all to adopt. He calls it “the efficiency bubble”.
These words convey a very important thought. In many parts of business, efficiency and effectiveness are fairly closely related; in manufacturing, logistics or in the more mechanistic business disciplines, the pursuit of efficiency is valuable. In marketing, however, not so much. Marketing is one of those complex fields of human activity, like military strategy or sex, where efficiency and effectiveness are poorly correlated.
Had we put procurement people in charge of the D-Day landings, they would have insisted that the landings took place at Calais to minimise fuel costs; this would undoubtedly have proved efficient, although I might now be writing this article in German.
Economic irrationality
In many settings, economically illogical behaviour is advantageous because it is unexpected. Likewise in relationships, humans instinctively shy away from people who are “economically efficient”. A few years ago, the uncle of a friend of mine gave his (now former) wife a huge bunch of roses on 13 February. “But Valentine’s Day is tomorrow,” she remarked. “I know,” he explained. “That’s why I got them today – they’re much cheaper.” She threw them in the bin. Economic rationality simply isn’t very attractive in evolutionary terms; this is why male strippers are more likely to dress up as firemen than accountants.
Interestingly, when humans market themselves, they understand this efficiency/effectiveness distinction instinctively; give them a spreadsheet and a desk, however, and they become completely blind to it.
The absurdity of the efficiency bubble was brought home to me in a recent meeting with an online travel company. The conversation repeatedly included the mantra “the need to maximise online conversion”. Everyone nodded along. Clearly, it is much more efficient for people to book travel through the website rather than over the telephone, since it reduces transaction costs. But then someone – not me, I’m ashamed to say – said something revelatory: “Ah, but here’s the thing. Online visitors to the site convert at about 0.3%. People who telephone convert at 33%. Maybe the website should have a phone number on every page.”
Now obviously I am not claiming that the telephone is 100 times more effective than the web; prospects who call are warmer than those who browse. But it does raise a serious question – perhaps the most efficient way to sell travel is not the most effective way to sell travel? What, in short, is the opportunity cost of being efficient?
Nobody ever asks this question. Opportunity costs are invisible; short-term savings earn you a bonus. That’s the efficiency bubble at work again.
And what, I wonder, is the creative opportunity cost of spending all this time obsessing over efficiency? After all, for 10% of the money that many companies are now paying charlatan consultants to install a doomed-to-fail tech stack, they could have hired David Abbott for his entire working life.
If I am relatively unaffected by the efficiency bubble, it is only because I acquired immunity to the virus early. Remember, I was – still am – a direct marketer. For the first half of my working life (until around 2003), I would have welcomed this new focus on targeting and efficiency.
Back in the day, we direct marketers thought above-the-line advertising people were weird for paying so little attention to defining audiences. But we always saw “who to talk to” and “what to say” as interdependent. To suggest that you should decide one in isolation from the other was like suggesting that when you complete a crossword, you should always solve all the “across” clues first. We never thought it was all about the creative. But we never thought it was all about data analytics either.
In any case, the best targeting is often psychological, not technological. “I never read The Economist. Management trainee. Aged 42” is a magnificent example of microtargeting, even though it appeared on a poster. Why try to identify your target audience in advance when the right creative gets them to identify themselves? In mass media, the targeting takes place in the mind. And to suggest that the ad is wasteful because lots of people see it is dumb. Efficient advertising identifies potential customers; effective advertising can create them.
What about creativity?
