How Short Should Ads Be?

Ads keep getting shorter, but not subliminal.

Way back in TV advertising history, there were 60-second ads. Some people still remember those; there was even an article in The Atlantic looking back on them, wistfully.

Ads used to be longer

Like most GenXers, I grew up with :30s and :15s on TV. Conventional wisdom, after I joined the industry but before bandwidth permitted online video, was to run :30s until awareness reached some level when :15s could take over as reminders or reinforcement.

Miller High Life ran 1-second ads in
the 2009 Super Bowl, featuring
the late, great Windell Middlebrooks

During my international career, I became familiar with :20s and even :10s. In Argentina, where I lived and worked for three years, ads could be any length client and agency wanted, because media time was bought and sold on a second-by-second basis. So, we made :17s, :36s, :52s, etc.

Maybe that Argentine flexibility is going global. 30-second units are still common on linear TV, but audiences can be reached on other platforms that allow for all sorts of possibilities. Bandwidth has improved and the shift to mobile devices and mobile-friendly formats, like YouTube and TikTok, permits shorter ads and new rules for what makes effective communication. The six-second format is common.

But does the six-second format work?

Shorter ads can work, but...

Magna Global, the IPG media research hub, has studied ad lengths across different video platforms. Their 2015 study found that even 5-second ads could build awareness, but it took :15s or :30s to drive brand favorability and purchase intent.

A lot changed in Magna's more recent study, just published in the last few weeks. This time, they found :06s and :15s to be similar in their ability to drive search intent, brand preference, and purchase intent. Why would that be?

One reason may be the platforms on which they ran the test: Snapchat, a video aggregator (i.e., YouTube) and a Full Episode Player (FEP, perhaps a streaming app like Hulu). Audiences are already accustomed to short ad lengths in these environments, and there were no :30s tested for comparison.

The Snapchat part of the test was interesting because more people watched :15s all the way through, but they were all placed mid-roll, about ten seconds into the content, so perhaps viewers were really staying for the content, which might explain the other finding that these ads were slightly less convincing.

YouTube was different. Viewers didn’t like the :15s, which were skippable after six seconds, but keep in mind that all of these were pre-roll ads, meaning that they were a barrier to the selected content. On the FEPs, :15s were better-received, but may also have been more expected during a 20-minute TV program.

None of these findings should surprise us, especially when you consider:

• Linear TV wasn’t part of the test and neither were 30-second ads. It would be instructive to have these points of comparison.

• The three viewing platforms in the test give individualized watching experiences, which may improve the ability of short copy to get across its messages, and also lead to less patience for longer ads.

• We don’t know the quality of the ad creative shown. There were four brands included (Clinique, Mini, Lego and a “major CPG brand”) but we can only assume their ads were adequately memorable and persuasive.

On that last point, not only do we not know the quality of the ad creative, we don't know if it took full advantage of the format. Traditionally, :15s were (mostly) just shorter versions of :30s, both seen on linear TV. Newer formats, like a six-second pre-roll on YouTube, are seen by an individual person watching a very small screen. That calls for a different creative approach, and opens creative avenues instead of closing them.

It's always nice to have more time to get your message across, and :30s will continue to run on TV. But newer formats may prove to be a useful piece of your overall plan.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Genuine Creativity

Will Artificial Intelligence replace Creativity?

No, but it might help it, in a roundabout way.

What is AI? What can it do?

Nearly all AI work today is based on successes in machine learning. Think of machine learning as having enough data and enough processing power to think through analyses that would take humans too long to do. Imagine a mountainous, time-consuming task that needed to be done, however slowly.

Here’s one example. For half a century, scientists have been mapping the three-dimensional shapes of proteins that are responsible for diseases like cancer and Covid-19. They refer to this mapping as “unfolding,” and doing it for just one protein takes a long time and a lot of money. Up to now they’ve “unfolded” only a fraction of the 200 million known proteins. The work done so far was recently fed to an AI program called “AlphaFold” which used it to do decades of work all at once. The results have been published online for review by the scientific community.

Did AI cure any diseases? No, but it advanced the work of scientists trying to do so.

Can AI advance the work of creativity?

How to approach AI

Some AI experts will tell you to approach AI with three questions in mind:

1) Is the task genuinely data driven?
2) Do you have the data needed?
3) Do you need the scale that automation provides?

On that last question: If you have a decision that needs to be made more than once per minute, then yes, you need the scale; if you have a decision that needs to be made only once per year, then probably not.

Does creativity answer “yes” to all three questions? What kind of creativity are we talking about? A painting, a sculpture, a novel? An advertisement? Let’s focus on advertising for the moment.

Advertising, Big Data and AI

We can’t say the task of creating ads is “genuinely data driven.” Sure, advertising ideas for a particular client or project may entail data or feature a data point, but even that isn’t a matter of computation. Nor is the task so routine that we create ads at a rate of more than one-per-minute. (OK, it feels that way sometimes.) Variations on an ad, however, might drive that kind of scale. Personalization of ads, for example, might be accomplished with AI that considers not only the recipient’s name but their past purchase history and other data. That’s already happening in most online marketplaces, and don’t forget that direct mail is personalized. But these are all variations on an ad created by humans.

It's a protein,
not a creative brief

There have been attempts to create at least one kind of advertising with AI: movie trailers. The first experiment was back in 2016: someone wrote a program, based on consumer reactions to movie trailers, that could lift scenes from a movie and sequence them in 30 seconds that would effectively convince people to see the movie. Judge the results for yourself and see here a more recent experiment from 2018. More recently, Netflix invested in technology to automate trailers for their content, while adding personalization for its subscribers, which makes sense for an individualized setting like your Netflix account.

Setting aside the irony that movie trailers are already quite formulaic, we see that AI made an ad. But does anyone really think that the studio marketing head won’t ask the machine for revisions? What about the movie itself? Could AI create a full-length, cinematic feature?
 
This may depend on one’s world view.

Keep AI in perspective

AI can certainly enable a human being to see new possibilities. For example, large amounts of data may help us predict future changes in consumer behavior. Knowing these possibilities may lead to a new insight on how to position a product or service. There’s great value in AI when it comes to aiding our thinking process. It can give us insight that inspires creativity. But that creativity is human, not artificial.

At an AI conference, a very intelligent professor of computer science said, “There’s no aspect of human cognition that can’t be modeled on a machine.” At the next break, I sought him out to learn more. He explained his world view that humanity – the human mind – is essentially physical, part of the physical world, and therefore can be modeled. Yes, he explained, machines will gain the ability to make cinematic features when AI develops enough to mimic every function of the brain. I asked, does it follow that humans are essentially machines? Incredibly, he said, “Yes, that’s a fair statement of how I see it.”

I see it differently. Creativity takes judgment, and human judgment comes from each person’s uniqueness, and their interaction with other people’s uniquenesses, to create something with passion and imagination. Perhaps, like me, you believe that we are more than machines. We have a spirit, a soul if you will, that animates us and gives us the ability to create sculptures, novels, choreography, and advertising. No machine can ever replicate that.

Two rules of effective advertising

What makes effective advertising?

There are classic volumes and numerous listicles that purport to answer this question.  There are numerous research methods to pre-test advertising or measure it in-market.

Data only help us make well-informed decisions; data can't write copy for us.  Despite the advent of language-generating programs like GPT-3, data won't drive creativity, although it can (and perhaps should) help us formulate strategies.

How do I know if advertising is effective?

These are not rules for how to write effective advertising.  Every copywriter has rules and methods that work for them, as it should be.  Very few will consult a 12-point article when sitting down to create an advertisement and a 2-rule blog post would be no less presumptuous.  These are rules for the rest of us to keep in mind when writing a creative strategy or evaluating creative work.

Rule 1:  Impossible to tell someone about it without mentioning the product.

You know advertising is memorable when someone is willing and able to describe it.  The retelling will only be as accurate and complete as the ad's story was compelling.  But the retelling doesn't matter if the product isn't part of the story.

Two ads that make the product part of the story are Amazon's tale of two friends, a priest and an imam, who order the same gift for one another, both using Amazon's mobile app, and Metamucil's "The Regulars," in which three co-workers visit the restroom at the same time daily, due to the, uh, product benefit.  (This latter example also shows you what a product demo can be, as well as offering a pack shot that goes with the story.)

Rule 2:  Impossible to forget what brand created it.

You know advertising is persuasive when the recipient remembers the brand as well as the product. Common ways to improve the odds of success are a brand name linked to the product benefit (Chapstick, although they've let people use the name generically), a brand associated over the long-term with a clear positioning or benefit (Nike, athletic performance) or campaign elements consistent enough over time that they're easily recognizable (IBM, still using the blue letterbox treatment for almost 20 years).

Rule #2.

The two ads cited above follow this rule, too, mainly because the brand and product are so closely linked.

Be careful, however, because the degree of difficulty goes up if you're launching a new product that would take your brand into an adjacent category or even segment.

DO try this at home

Be a consumer.  Try this as you encounter advertising during the day, even/especially banner ads, billboards, any form of ad.  See if it's impossible for you to tell someone about the ad without mentioning the product, or impossible to forget what brand created it.

If you try this experiment at work -- well, be careful.  Look closely at messaging strategy and product portfolio.  Almost every time, advertising that breaks these rules came from business strategy that failed to consider them in the first place.

Automatic Advertising: We Take Spotomate for a Test Drive

Software can make your 30-second TV commercial.

You knew this would happen.  Not just because technology makes the software possible, but because newly-available media makes it necessary.

There's the first screen (TV), second screen (computer), third screen (mobile), fourth screen (digital signage) and all of them are hungry for content -- and advertising.

Technology has been busy democratizing the science of advertising.  Small business is able to do SEO, SEM and Social Media without an agency, as did my friend the garage door expert.  So why not video advertising creative?

Along comes Spotomate, which via its partner Shakr, offers a service allowing small- and medium-sized businesses to make "your own agency-quality video advertising spots".  They're targeting operators of digital signage networks (see industry coverage here and here), but I decided to experiment with it myself during a free trial open until Thursday.

Voilà… Ad Majorem's First Ads

How it works:  You pick one of their pre-set templates, it runs you through the places where you must write copy or provide a visual asset, and automatically sequences these with graphics and a music bed.  So here were two attempts using our masthead copy and experimenting with different visuals.

Here's What I Thought About Spotomate

Agencies, for the most part, shouldn't worry.  True, I did once have a colleague who believed in "campaign construction", i.e., every 30-second TV commercial for a brand had to have the same sequence of scenes, but most big advertisers want customized treatment.

Small- and Medium-sized businesses will love Spotomate, though.  In fact the templates may help inexperienced advertisers to organize their thoughts and force decisions as to what should or shouldn't go in the ad.

In other words, one still needs a smart brief, and I'm not sure that will ever be automatic.

What do you think of Spotomate?  What did you think of my, uh, "ads"?  Go ahead, hit me with your best shot in the comments section below.

Mobile Devices Are a Way for Consumers to Reach Brands -- Not for Brands to Reach Consumers

Here's something advertisers and agencies seem slow to understand:  Mobile devices are not a way for brands to reach consumers; they're a way for consumers to reach brands.

Consider that the mobile device — the smartphone especially — is a very private zone in a person's life.  They don't necessarily want ads of any kind invading that personal space.

But the smartphone is wonderful tool for consumers to invade your space as a marketer.  Via Internet searches, shopping apps, social media and conversations with friends, they do it whether you invite them or not.

So why not invite them?

Use Mobile to Invite Customers and Prospects

Customers and prospects can contact you via certain smartphone apps.  The most-maligned is QR codes.  In the picture below is a QR code I saw this past weekend on the back of a service vehicle in Chicago.  I can't think of any better example of consumer-UNfriendly QR codes than this photo from WTF QR Codes which also sums up why I avoid them.

Not much of
an invitation

At the other end of the customer convenience spectrum is Messaging — SMS, MMS, P2P and other emerging tools.  Most of these are built in to a smartphone and very familiar, but there are also newer apps like Kik that would be handy reaching a younger audience (like Ad Majorem's teenage children).

There's also social media, of course, but only invite people to "Follow Us On Twitter!" if there's a darn good reason.

If you are extending an invitation to consumers at retail, it may be time to look again at NFC.  Could it be coming back thanks to the iPhone 6?  I've been bullish on NFC ever since my first project back in 2012 but it's been traveling a stubbornly slow adoption curve.

Ask for an R.S.V.P.

Sorry to torture the "invitation" metaphor a bit, but using "R.S.V.P." as an abbreviation, here are some principles to keep in mind:

• Response is the goal.  You're not going to rack up millions of "impressions" via Mobile (you might) but you may invite millions of customer interactions.  In other words, the quality of your audience, not the quantity, is what matters.  Think app dowloads, not ads served.

• Start with your consumer.  When and where might they be looking for something useful, informative or entertaining?  That's your chance to engage.  This Forrester video describes how American Airlines designed their mobile app around their customers' travel experience.

• Voice must be …inviting.  This past year during a radio interview, a local political candidate invited people to text him for more information — which I did, only to get an auto-reply asking for donations.  Since when do you invite people over and then ask them to pay?

• Perpetuate the relationship.  The old way of thinking is to stage a marketing or advertising event, but the kind of dialogue marketing both permits and requires today is a process, not an event.  The beauty of Mobile is that consumers can reach brands — and brands can keep that conversation going.  

Related: Who "Owns" Mobile?

Why Signage Is a Modern Medium

Advertising may or may not be the second-oldest profession, but signage is surely its first-oldest form.  It all started with signage.

The History of Signage

It all continued with signage, too — literally for centuries.  Sure, the production of signs evolved from stone cutting to wood cutting to paint to ink and paper and eventually electric signs, but it was all the same thing:  a one-way message from advertiser to consumer.  Even if you check Wikipedia's definition of signs, that's about as far as it goes.

Signage Suddenly Evolved

Suddenly, in the past decade or so, signage evolved.  Screen technology made signage digitized, scalable and interactive.  After centuries of signs that featured only one-way messages, suddenly signs were really screens that offer two-way communications:  advertiser to consumer and vice versa.  As these technologies developed, signage became a way for consumers to reach advertisers.

Back to the Future

Blade Runner and Minority Report both had futuristic signage technology, but Blade Runner was made in 1982 when advertising still had a (mostly) one-way mentality (advertiser-to-audience), while Minority Report, made in 2004, featured interactive ads, probably because the advertising business had already started becoming interactive.  Similarly, this past year at Cannes there was a Grand Lion for Innovation awarded to an interactive billboard at Sochi.  Passers-by could take photos with their smartphones and project them as a 3-D image on the billboard.

Why Signage is a Modern Medium

Signage is not only ubiquitous, it's been modernized.  Here are some tips to make the most of it:

• Elicit an immediate response.  In many cases it's sufficient to remind people to drink Diet Coke or tune in to tonight's reality TV show. But why stop at awareness?  If your message is compelling enough, the audience will respond to you via SMS, toll-free call, mobile Web, social media or an app download.  But you have to offer something useful, informative or entertaining.

• Make it relevant.  Screens give signage the ability to increase relevance to the consumer.  The most basic example would be to rotate messages according to the time of day (a QSR client advertises breakfast until 9 a.m., switching to lunch messages after that), which isn't possible with ink and paper.  You can also place messages according to where the screen is located, e.g., in an elevator or a doctor's office waiting room.

• Plan ahead.  Screens make signage flexible, but paradoxically that requires advance planning, not the least of which might be convincing a client to try something new and taking the time to develop creative that's relevant and elicits an immediate response.  Once you have a game plan, you're much more prepared to make adjustments.

Book Review: Creativity, Inc.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

By Ed Catmull

Random House, 340 pages

I hate business books because they are usually very long memos that could have been written in 14 pages.  You suspect they started as memos or even power point slides.

I love books that tell good stories.  Creativity, Inc., by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, tells a good story and in the process teaches us a lot about how to tell a good story.

Not Just a Story about Toys

Ed Catmull was a kid with a dream, to produce animated movies using computer technology.  He wanted to work at Walt Disney.  They turned him down at first, but he kept on following his passions. 

Catmull’s path led through some interesting places and people.  He studied computer technology at University of Utah, one of the four original institutions on ARPANET, the precursor to what we now know as the Internet.  His early, groundbreaking computer animation work led to a job offer from George Lucas.  While at Lucasfilm, Catmull hired Pixar’s other co-founder, the animator John Lasseter, and what they built was spun off to Steve Jobs in 1985.  The new company’s main business was selling the Pixar Image Computer.  They were in the hardware business. 

As we all know, they eventually joined forces with Disney and became the animation studio that produced Toy Story and many hit films since.  Like those films, the book tells compelling stories.  Inner-circle, name-dropping – jaw dropping – stories of how these hit films made it through the creative process and the business process. 

And as this story unfolds, you see Catmull evolve from a technologist to the head of one of the most creative organizations ever built.  Every chapter illustrates a Pixar mantra, “Story Is King.”

Trust the Process.  Not!

Pixar had another mantra, “Trust the Process”, which meant Pixar’s process, very different from the corporate one at most Hollywood studios:  “Pixar was a place that gave artists running room, that gave directors control, that trusted its people to solve problems.”  To me, this sounded more like “Trust the Culture”, not “Trust the Process”, but it seemed to work for Pixar.

Indeed, it served them well making Toy Story, but not so well when simultaneously working on A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2.  They had grown.  Suddenly more people were involved and Catmull and Lasseter were pulled in different directions.  The mantra lost meaning; it “morphed into ‘Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us’.”  Unfortunately, Toy Story 2 lost meaning, too, and they realized they had to rewrite it just nine months before theatrical release.

What did they learn from that experience?  The process only works if the people are working well together, and while that was Pixar’s biggest superpower, they weren’t using it at this critical, early stage of their maturation as a company.  They got back on track by establishing a “Braintrust” that regularly reviewed how a story – a film – was coming together.  They didn’t go back to Process so much as they went back to Culture.

They also learned that words can be empty.  “People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning,” he writes.  Tellingly, he uses this occasion to criticize our industry:  “Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself.”  Ouch.

So is process good or bad?  When we think of “process” in Ad Land, it’s often a linear, stage-driven timeline, which isn’t how creativity really works.  You need a process, of course, because the alternative is chaos, but how to let it roll?  The Toy Story 2 experience taught them how to strike a balance by returning to their natural strength in collaboration.  It makes sense to “trust people to solve problems” when they’re doing it in a group, not in separate silos.

Three Lessons Advertising, Inc. Can Learn from Creativity, Inc.

Although this book can teach a few things to any creative enterprise, here are three lessons for Ad Land.

• Story trumps Technology.  Catmull’s childhood dream wasn’t to bring new technology to animation; it was to make animated movies using technology.  Everything he invented was in service of telling the story.  His biggest satisfaction in the success of Toy Story was how audiences and critics loved the story so much they barely mentioned the use of computers to tell it. 
• Feedback diagnoses, not prescribes.  You’ll appreciate the many vignettes of Pixar’s “Braintrust” meetings to discuss films in development.  They built such a strong culture of mutual respect and focus on the work that every session was about what to address – not how to address it.  (In the last chapter, “Notes Day”, we see how this culture improved the company as a whole.)  In contrast, they discovered that Disney’s Michael Eisner didn’t even discuss; he just issued lists of “mandatory notes”.
• People create Ideas.  This sounds obvious but Catmull points out that many leaders confuse the need for Great Ideas with the need for Great People.  He concludes:  “Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”  (This reminded me of the only business book I ever liked, Good to Great, which made exactly the same point in its first chapter.)

Which brings us to Steve Jobs, the deus ex machina in this story.  Jobs was smart enough not to push his way into scripts, storyboards and edits, though he certainly had that right.  He invested heavily in Pixar – and he believed in it and he stayed loyal to it.  Catmull mentions Steve when he’s relevant to the story, and that was often enough that I planned to mention it in this review.  Then I got to the end of the book, and saw Afterword: The Steve We Knew.  It’s a beautiful tribute to Jobs and an appraisal of his impact on Pixar.

Read this book, people.  At minimum it’s a good story you won’t want to put down.  But it also teaches us a lot about how advertising people can work together and tell a good story.

Typography: From Sublime to Ridiculous

Not everything in advertising has changed.  Typography is still an art.

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, typography was a labor of love as art directors worked with typographers and keyliners to put the copy in exactly the right font, size and placement.

Here in the 21^st Century, of course, all this can be edited on a screen.  But it still has to be done, and done well.

Here are two examples from the Out-of-Home advertising medium – one sublime, one ridiculous.

This Is Your Typography

I’ve admired the Colorado tourism billboard, shown at right, for the past couple of months.  It’s a beautiful snowy landscape that dramatizes the Centennial State’s natural beauty.

What really struck me, though, was the typography.  The line of copy separates its six words in a way that further dramatizes the landscape and – if I may – the benefit.

How.  Sublime.  It.  Is.  To.  Be.  Small.

Bravo.

This Is Your Typography on Drugs

Our next example might have been forgivable coming from the state that just legalized marijuana, but ironically it comes from the product whose original recipe included the coca leaf.

Diet Coke’s new campaign has had a lot of negative publicity, and I don’t mean to pile on.  The point is that typography mattered a lot.

“You’re On” could have been a terrific line for Diet Coke if it wasn’t adjacent to the brand’s logo, which in and of itself is very intricate typography.

Both ads, unfortunately, wound up giving the white stuff a starring role.

Super Bowl XLVIII Advertising: Fumbles, Turnovers and Stats

I'm still trying to decide if yesterday's Super Bowl game was a metaphor for the advertising, or the other way around.

Both had fumbles and turnovers.  The Seahawks dominated the Broncos.  TV sales teams ran up the score about $4 million at a time.

Then there were the stats.  Did you know that losing quarterback Peyton Manning set a Super Bowl record for most completions?

In the same way, some advertisers won popular opinion surveys, or earned the most Likes, but failed to move the sales needle.

The Rules for Great Super Bowl Advertising

This was an ad for Pepsi, not pistachios

Every Super Bowl commercial has to be memorable, persuasive, well-executed and epic.  Ask yourself two questions:  Did you remember the advertiser?  Did you remember what they told you?

This year the ad industry disappointed the audience (and perhaps clients) on all these measures.  It's hard to pick clear winners and losers, so here are some group dynamics among some of the commercials you saw.

My Strategy's Showing!  No, It's Not

Early in the game we saw two carmakers take two totally opposite approaches.  Ford Fusion's "Nearly Double" was obvious and clear, practically hitting us over the head, while Maserati's Ghibli "Now We Strike" was pretentious and muddy.  Ford, a mass appeal car with a mass appeal message, surely got more for their money than Maserati, a car for the 1%.

Don't Tell Anyone, But That Was a DEMO!

Product features can be communicated with great drama, and even smart product demos can work in the Super Bowl.  None of these were "epic" but all three pass the two-question test -- you know Hyundai has an auto-emergency brake, that Jimmy John's is easy to order, and that Beats earphones sound great.  Among all the auto advertisers, do you think people remember Brand Hyundai today?

Tug at the Heartstrings

Super Bowl audiences expect emotional ad moments, and four advertisers did a credible job.  MetLife's Peanuts, a licensing deal I never understood, made sense for once.  Coke's America Is Beautiful continued an E Pluribis Unum ad tradition.  Chevy surprised us with a strong tribute to cancer survivors.  And Cheerios brought back Gracie -- I hope they keep that series going.  None of these were truly epic, however.  They could have been turned up to... well, given the Seahawks win, they could have been turned up to 12.

Pistachios and Pepsi

I have a sick fascination with bad Super Bowl advertising about nuts (see here and here).  Wonderful Pistachios -- Gangnam Style last year, Stephen Colbert this year -- understands that pistachios are green, but the branding still gets lost.  Having a generic name surely doesn't help.

Pepsi's halftime show was an ad.  The game and the advertising were boring, but Bruno Mars validated Pepsi's long experience working with celebrities and judging talent.  The show will turbocharge Mars' career, and surely helped Pepsi build their brand.  They need the help.

Lastly, a wise word from beer advertising expert Dan Fox, who tweeted this about the new Bud Light campaign:  "Crazy night for one guy.  Which beer?"

What About You?

Let me have it:  Which commercials did you think were memorable, persuasive, well-executed and/or epic?  Comment below.