Category: General

Adam Morgan started out with ad effectiveness luminary Peter Field at the same London agency in the same week. Forty years later, rather than moaning about endless “dull and mediocre” ads taking over the world, he tapped his old friend to gauge whether the IPA database harnessed by Field and Les Binet to create ad effectiveness heuristics for brand and demand investment ratios could be used in Reverse.

“If we know from Daniel Kahneman that the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining it, let’s not talk about the upsides of being more creative, let’s talk about what you lose by being dull,” was Morgan’s pitch to Field.

“Could you flip all that [IPA effectiveness] data upside down and look at the cost of being dull? If we could put a concrete cost for a brand owner on what it costs them to be dull, maybe that would wake us up a bit more,” said Morgan.

Field thought it could be done. But first they had to develop proxies for dullness.

“The proxy for ‘dull’ that Peter used was cases that succeed through rational, logical facts and information,” says Morgan. For ‘interesting’, Field used ads that are “engaging, that seek emotion and fame”.

Then Field ran the numbers across both dull and interesting ads that had delivered large market-share growth, examining how much more the dull ads had spent on media to get the same result.

The findings?

“Effectively, they had to buy over seven points more excess share of voice,” says Morgan.

“What that meant in terms of money was that a single dull campaign in the UK had to spend £10 million more than an interesting and engaging campaign to achieve exactly the same commercial growth.”