How You Can Know Which Half of Your Advertising Dollar is Wasted

Well, Super Bowl 40 is now history as is a plethora of ads crafted just for the Big Day in American football for which ABC charged up to $2.5 million for a 30-second spot. In a telephone conversation a few minutes ago with my Firms of Endearment co-author Raj Sisodia, he raised the question, “But do those big marketing outlays pay off for advertisers?”

That’s the perennial question in marketing, famously marked by department store magnate John Wannamaker’s famous words, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I just don’t know which half.”

The first rule of advertising is “Be relevant.” Without relevance, we should all know which half an ad falls into.

I would confidently hazard a guess that more than half the advertising dollars spent on second half markets – markets consisting of people 40 and older – is wasted. Read Gene Cohen’s new book, The Mature Mind and you’ll get a good idea about why that is.

Relevance does not depend just on whether or not a person needs or desires the product you advertise. Your ad must also be relevant to a person’s worldview (how he or she connects to the world) and values (what is important to a person). Making matters a bit more complicated, an ad must have cognitive relevance.

Cognitive relevance isn’t something much talked about in marketing. Yet it’s where ads directed to second half markets most frequently fail. Cognitive relevance is about synchronizing an ad’s message content and style with consumers’ cognitive processes and patterns. This is where Dr. Cohen’s book offers valuable insights.

Dr. Cohen, a geriatric psychiatrist, describes what he calls developmental intelligence. For a long time, I have felt like a lonely wanderer in unexplored territory with my assertions that the human brain is designed to become a better cognitive instrument in some quite meaningful ways in the second half of life. Dr. Cohen validates that positive image of the aging mind with reports of new findings via new brain imaging technologies.

It seems that, as I have long proposed, the right hemisphere of the brain takes on a larger role in later life for many people. Some people may not experience this maturational progression for a variety of reasons, including years of low-level intellectual activity and the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. However, this seems to be the natural evolutionary course of developmental intelligence in later life.

The worldviews, values and cognitive processing styles of people in advanced states of developmental intelligence are decisively different from those of the younger people who typically create advertising.

For example, until around the mid-30s, the adult mind parses reality figuratively in black and white images. In contrast the person who has achieved a high state of developmental intelligence factors reality figuratively in shades of gray.

Putting these ideas to work in practical terms, ads directed towards young adult minds should generally be lean on nuance and strong in absolutisms. Don’t hint at something important – say it or show it in a clear, unambiguous way. On the other hand, putting statements in absolutist terms for older markets works against the natural cognitive processing styles of people in advanced states of developmental intelligence.

Comments

[Michele Miller]

I couldn't agree with you more, David. Thanks to your writings and other studies I've been immersed in, cognitive relevance in humans is the most ignored and the most important aspect to future marketing. I've found myself more and more involved in projects using cognitive relevance and while I'm pleased there are a couple of companies starting to listen, there's plenty of room for improvement.

I, too, just received a copy of Dr. Cohen's book - had to order it after reading his article in Newsweek!

[David]

Michele,

Perhaps through your teaching you can help transform the term -- the idea -- of cognitive relevance into a new watchword in marketing. As I've said, it's the first rule of marketing. Nothing else matters -- no level of creativity, no amount of novelty, no measure of technical wizardry in forming a message -- if the message lacks relevance to a person's circumstances, needs, emotions and motives. Those elements, by the way, are the core of the dictionary definition of "empathy." Thus to be relevant is to inform the customer that the people behind the message likely have an empathetic understanding of her.

DBW

[Rick Resnick]

Superbowl ads are strictly for mass eyeballs. Most marketers are still locked in a mass-market mentality and don't consider their messaging long or hard enough to relate to anyone or anything but their deadlines and paychecks. In any other society in history, our elders would be revered. Older eyeballs will be considered when marketers have no choice, when their major revenues come from that source and not before.

[Marianne Richmond]

The FKF Applied Research Superbowl advertising brain scan study which measured viewer engagement http://snipurl.com/me0t
provided an interesting contrast to the "best superbowl ad" opinions...the brain scan data which found an overall lack of viewer engagement provided support for the importance of relevance.

[David]

All,

I thought it telling that the "lustre is fading from Super Bowl ads" as Advertising Age headlined after the game. Americans are being "sported" to death as well as "ad'ed" to death. Saw in the papers this morning that American Idol outdrew the Olympics last night. This reflects part of a trend in sports watching: the more have to to watch, the less interest in watching. Oh well; that's what happens in a land whose people believe that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. That's why so many of us (me included!) are shamelessly overweight.

DBW