Is the traditional advertising model, based on rational messaging, dead? Dominic Mills gets in tune with his emotions first to find out.
Toilet paper…is it a rational purchase, or an emotional one? I’m not sure. The Andrex puppies (CGI or not) are all about emotion. But I once met an agency planner who could bore for England about ‘poke-through’ and aloe vera, so there must be some people for whom it’s a rational purchase.
But here’s a thing. This French ad for Le Trefle toilet paper, below, has just been rated the top-scoring ’emotional’ ad for 2014 by those clever people at Brainjuicer. And not a puppy in sight.
It’s immensely likeable and I can see why it’s rated so highly. It’s all about a technophile guy who sneers at Emma, his technophobe wife. He likes tablets and paper-less technology. She likes books and magazines. But all the technology in the world won’t help when he’s run out of toilet paper. Watch it and see what emotions you feel.
For those who don’t know, Brainjuicer’s schtick is all about the power of emotion in advertising. It draws from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow work on how the brain functions. This posits that we think a) intuitively, using our emotions (i.e. fast) and b) rationally, or in a process-driven way (i.e. slow). Of the two, by far the most powerful is the emotional, even if we don’t realise it.
In Brainjuicer’s hands, this rewrites the rules of advertising. The traditional advertising model, based on rational messaging is dead, Brainjuicer argues, and should be replaced by emotion, which produces greater cut-through and the only currency that matters, fame.
Using the IPA Effectiveness winners database, Brainjuicer has plenty of ammunition to prove that the most emotional ads are also the most effective. Seduction, it says, trumps persuasion.
To this end, Brainjuicer this month published its FeelMore50 ranking of the most emotionally effective ads of 2014.
Of course, this is a difficult message to sell to clients. It flies in the face of received wisdom and established theories like the Unique Selling Proposition, and runs counter to typical client thinking, which is all about giving people rational reasons to buy their product.
“Sell the benefit,” a nameless client used to tell me in a previous life. Trouble was, they could only think of benefits in terms of price or product spec.
Naturally, therefore, to tackle clients like this you need a way to measure ’emotion’ and score it. Hence the Brainjuicer Emotion into Action (EiA) scoring system based on measuring consumers’ emotional reactions to the ads. This, when you think about it, is somewhat paradoxical because it depends on giving the client a rational basis for measuring the non-rational.
The Le Trefle ad, by the way, scores 86.81, which means bugger all in and of itself but, by way of comparison, John Lewis’ Monty ad came in 17th with a score of 82.52.
Never mind. Watch some of the ads and their power and memorability is undeniable. If you just watch a few, try Cardstore’s World’s Toughest Job ad; Dove’s ‘take an honest selfie’ challenge; Coca-Cola’s The Happiest Thank You from the Philippines; or Thai Life Insurance’s Unsung Hero.
In the case of the latter two, you don’t even have to speak Filipino Tagalog or Thai to be moved, such is their simplicity and impact.
I hesitate to fall into the trap of national stereotyping, but one of the notable things about this selection is that many are from Latin/southern hemisphere countries, while there are very few from us emotionally-stunted Northern Europeans (just three from the UK).
The US, however, is well-represented. In my view, though, this is not because they are in touch with their emotions, but because they are very good, Hollywood-style, at cloying, sickly sentimentality. Check out Budweiser, Doritos, Skype and Disneyland Paris (which is a little part of America trapped in France).
And while I think there is much in what Brainjuicer has to offer, this is where their theory worries me. It’s a thin line between emotion and manipulation. I don’t like being manipulated, and I hate myself when anyone succeeds. I transfer that loathing to the brand or product. It’s one reason – yeah, just call me Mr Misanthrope – why I am ambivalent about the John Lewis Christmas ads, and hate ads with puppies and anything with a winsome, nu-folk soundtrack.
Brainjuicer’s answer is that this doesn’t matter. Any emotion, it says, is more commercially valuable than nothing.
Can that really be true? And does it mean that there is no place for rationality in advertising? TV/cinema/video may be perfect for emotion, but what about the other media? Much of the best press or print advertising has a rational message at its core – think of David Ogilvy’s famous Rolls-Royce ad – ‘at 60mph the loudest noise is the clock’. Is online display best for emotion or rational?
Many people – rightly so – classed last Christmas’s Halfords ad as containing an interesting message in a clunky, overly rational, package. Brainjuicer rated it lower on its EiA score than even the Post Office’s shocker, and Tesco’s Wigan Lightshow abomination. Yet last week Halfords announced sales up 6.7 per cent – better than the market expected – over the Christmas period.
Computer says rational does work…sometimes
