AD International
Advertising is widely judged by whether it made someone buy something this afternoon. That is the smallest part of what it does, and the part it does least well. The larger part is
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Advertising is widely judged by whether it made someone buy something this afternoon. That is the smallest part of what it does, and the part it does least well. The larger part is quieter, slower and easier to overlook.
Ask most people what an advertisement is for and they will say it wants their money. That is true in the way that saying a bridge wants your car is true. It is the eventual purpose, but it describes almost nothing about the structure. The overwhelming majority of advertising a person encounters on any given day is not addressed to someone who is about to buy. It is addressed to someone who is not thinking about the category at all, will not think about it for months, and may not think about it consciously even then. The advertisement is not making a sale. It is leaving something behind that a future version of that person might pick up.
This is the distinction that runs underneath almost every argument about advertising: the difference between building a memory for later and prompting an action now. Both are legitimate. They are not the same job, they do not use the same techniques, and they cannot be measured with the same instruments. A message designed to be recalled in eight months looks like failure if you judge it by what happened in the next eight minutes. A message designed to capture someone already halfway to a decision looks shallow if you judge it by whether anyone will remember it. Confusing the two produces most of the bad work and nearly all of the bad arguments.
Almost every disagreement about whether advertising works dissolves once you ask which of the two jobs was being attempted.
One survives being retold badly by someone who half remembers it. The other does not survive at all.
Also more influenced than they believe, which is why the argument never resolves.