April 22, 2025
Apparently, those extraordinary people called human beings love life to be familiar.
While we might book two weeks in Borneo or Bali, as my Dad used to say, after a trip to Benidorm, it’s nice to be home. And now I’m a Dad myself; it is indeed nice to be home.
It’s also nice to know my job will be there tomorrow, and the only bomb site I wake up in is the one created by my five-year-old. Predictability makes us feel safe and comfortable. It reduces uncertainty, stress and strain on the brain. Given the current craziness in the world, that’s not a bad thing at all - but does it change anything?
Being expected in business has its upsides, too. McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Starbucks seem to do alright - you get what you ge,t and you don’t get upset. Efficient, standardised and no surprises. Much like advertising and marketing generally.
The other side of the expected coin is that we also tolerate a lot of expected shit - just because there’s so much of it.
I’m no longer angry with Qantas when my expensive flight, with a shit service, is cancelled. I’ve just come to expect it.
I’m no longer scratching my head when Woolies wangs up my shopping bill every month. I’ve just come to expect it.
I’m no longer surprised when I vote for a politician and nothing changes. I’ve just come to expect it. That’s the way of the world these days.
But when the way of the world in marketing is so expectedly boring, underwhelming, and shit - that’s amazing news. That means it isn’t hard to be unexpected and half-decent. Check out this billboard. Why just look at it when you can smell this guy's nuts? It is hardly the most innovative way to build a brand, but it gets attention, which is part of the job.
So how can you make things more unexpected?
For some reason, a lot of big cheese creative directors and marketing directors I’ve worked with over the years turn their noses up at novelty. It’s like the poor cousin of a pithy slogan that can be chopped up into banner ads and passed off as a big brand platform.
However, sometimes needs (and budget) must. And whether it’s a big idea or not depends on what you are drawing people’s attention to and how you use it, rather than the novelty itself.
Novelty works because we’re wired to distinguish between the familiar and the new. It helps us see dangerous situations and discover new things that might give us an advantage - like nice-smelling bums and balls.
One of my daughter’s favourite books at the moment is ‘The Book with No Pictures’. Because all kids' books these days try to emulate the genius of Julia Donaldson, a novel book with no pictures breaks the familiar patterns.
Novelty isn’t always just a bit of fun, though. Throughout history, creative people have used it to draw attention to important issues we still remember today. From Rosa Parks to Tank Man and Banksy, the list is endless.
Novelty doesn’t have to be a one-off, either. It could be a series of novel executions that communicate the big idea in different ways - a genuine brand platform, you might say. Heinz Ketchup has nailed this. How many ways can you communicate the idea ‘It has to be Heinz’? Hundreds, it would seem.
So, if you want to break familiar patterns, novelty isn’t a bad way of getting more attention than 99% of boring advertising.
Given how logical and analytical marketing tends to be, anything counterintuitive is a hard sell, but it works. There should be heaps more of it.
The thing is, when we discover information that contradicts our mental models of the world, the brain wigs out. It has to reconcile the conflict between new information and established beliefs.
I know it’s a yawn, but Liquid Death is probably the poster child of a counterintuitive brand. But if we’re honest, a lot of the best creativity is counterintuitive. The first Mac, electric cars and flat-pack furniture were all pretty counterintuitive once upon a time.
Science also reckons ideas that challenge our expectations lead to stronger memory formation, encoding unexpected concepts better than expected information. It’s not unsurprising then that people can’t remember the majority of marketing that gets machine gun fired their way.
In John Grant’s book After Image: Mind-altering marketing, he calls this a branded concept. Personally, I prefer to call it a new truth. Mostly because a lot of agencies are obsessed with uncovering and telling clients the truth about how consumers really feel about their brands. But does that really matter when you can just create a new one?
In After Image, John Grant recounts the story of the ‘Chuck out your Chintz’ campaign by Ikea. Rather than trying to persuade middle England that Swedish design is better, why not get people to think their English taste is a bit chintzy?
New truths definitely take a bit of lateral leaping, but they have the potential to completely change the way people think about a brand or a category. B&Q’s Build a Life is another cracking example of getting people to think about DIY differently.
According to a study in 1971 by Murray S. Davis, the difference between an interesting concept that spreads and a boring one that doesn’t, all comes down to challenging people’s assumptions versus affirming them.
Again, when our assumptions are challenged, our brain requires more mental effort to work out what on earth is going on. Do we reject the new way or accept a new reality and change our beliefs? Sometimes this takes a bit of time, but it wasn’t that long ago Uber caused a right old stink challenging our assumptions about getting a taxi. Heaps Normal is doing a phenomenal job of challenging our assumptions about alcohol and the taste of non-alcoholic beer.
Challenging assumptions wins the highly unscientific level four categorisation for two reasons. Whilst one, two and three are great, four feels more powerful. It doesn’t just get attention, it causes debate in society and genuine shifts in culture.
In the right hands, of course, this unexpected way of thinking doesn’t just trump the tedious algorithmic crap that fills our feeds, it fundamentally changes the direction of how we live.
So, now we’ve reached the end, if you want to go on, you can. Apparently, I’m already over the arbitrary 800-word limit of your attention, so call it part two, an appendage or a simple request.
Can we please stop talking about attention as if we’re experts?
We like to label brands in very bombastic terms. Unicorns, purple cows, disruptors, pirates, and growth hackers, to name a few. But I think it’s more appropriate to call them sea cucumbers - feeding on the bottom of The Great Barrier Funnel. A moody marketing ecosystem where sea cucumbers fight it out for punters as they reach the depths of its bum hole.
Don’t believe me. The facts are pretty mind-bending.
Nearly 75% of all advertising goes into digital.
30-35% of that goes to search.
15-20% goes to display and programmatic.
10-15% goes to retail media networks.
25-30% goes to social media advertising.
15-20% goes to video advertising.
5-10% goes to other stuff like email.
That doesn’t feel like the behaviour of a purple cow, pirate or a Hopeful Monster. But when the vast majority of advertising spend goes here, it’s no wonder the majority is ubiquitous and expected.
Ultimately, it's all low-rent advertising and not much brand.
Marketing isn’t a sexy industry anymore, but it is a moody one. Moody in the buying of dodgy goods sense. You know it’s probably a rip-off, but everyone does it, and who will know?
If marketing was more important to people, you could probably make a documentary about the dodgy, crazy stuff that goes on - it’s grifting at the highest level. But because it isn’t important, no Louis Theroux or Michael Moore is lifting a lid on the madness.
While you can’t make this stuff up, it’s bonkers, and nobody is doing anything about it.
75% of all advertising isn’t seen by a human and watched long enough to be remembered. Billions of dollars and hours are spent doing things people don’t remember.
Then there’s adfraud. It’s growing 14% a year, and by 2028, it’s going to hit $172bn. 18% of ad impressions served programmatically in the US were fraudulent.
That doesn’t happen to us I hear you say; we have a reputable media agency objectively giving us the best advice. Really? Like a game of whack-a-mole, there’s always a way of making more media money at your expense. Introducing the wonderful world of ‘arbitrage-based principle trading models’. That’s bull shit for media agencies buying media before they know the solution and then selling it back to their clients.
Lastly, attention is a far more serious and complex concept than the industry treats it.
It’s serious because as Dr Iain McGilchrist says: “Attention isn’t just a spotlight we direct - it’s a way of being that shapes our reality. The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world”.
The Netflix smash hit Adolescence is a good example of this. If you have a young lad whose attention is drawn to incel culture, that changes his world, but also the world we all live in.
Attention is complex because it deals with the human brain, but also our mental environment. McGilchrist also says: “We live in a world where our emotions are so heightened, we are desensitised to a lot that happens in the world”. Unfortunately, our emotive spot, or thumb-stopping content doesn’t stand much of a chance in this context.
Of course, there have been awesome brains making a dent in measuring paid attention, but it’s a slither of how people attend to the world, and therefore brands. If you want your paid advertising to be more efficient, it’s an advancement not to be ignored, for sure.
But attention in its totality simply cannot be measured, it’s too hard. As a result, we lean on simplified mental models to help guide the way to a slightly more efficient type of boring.
To cut a long story short, an obsession with low-rent, low-quality media, combined with a view that a brand is just the sum of its paid media parts, leads to unimportant and uninteresting brands.
Let’s be honest, this is one fine mess we find ourselves in. But fuck it, we can all put up the good fight and see what happens. So, if you want some practical, Hopeful Monster type tips for being anti-expected, go back to the beginning.
