What Is Boring Marketing Costing You?

Boring marketing is expensive.

If people don’t notice or remember your ads, you still pay for the media. You just get less back.

That’s Boring Tax.

And the data shows creative is one of the biggest profit levers marketers can control.

Creative can multiply profit by up to 12x

Paul Dyson's analysis of the drivers of advertising profitability found that creative quality can multiply profit by up to 12x.

It is the biggest profit multiplier marketers can directly control. Targeting, by comparison, came in at 1.1x.

That's worth thinking about for a second.

We spend hours changing audiences, tweaking campaigns and squeezing another few cents out of a click. All useful stuff.

But one of the biggest opportunities is sitting right there in the ad itself.

We may have become very good at finding the right people to show very average advertising to.

The duller the ad, the more you have to spend

This is where Boring Tax becomes an actual commercial problem. Research from System1, eatbigfish and Peter Field looked at advertising based on how dull it was, measured through the amount of neutral emotional response it created.

The pattern was pretty brutal.

As advertising became duller, its ability to generate growth dropped. To get dull advertising to produce the same growth potential as more interesting advertising, brands would need to compensate with significantly more media spend.

So two businesses could spend exactly the same amount on media and get very different value from it.

One makes something people notice, enjoy and remember.

The other makes a perfectly polished ad that looks like every other ad in the category.

Same media bill. Very different outcome.

Playing it safe isn't necessarily saving you money. It could be making your media more expensive. Note: If your ad is dull it is boring

Safe marketing isn't actually very safe

Nobody sets out to make boring marketing. It normally happens one sensible decision at a time. Make the headline a little safer. Add another product benefit. Make the logo bigger. Remove the joke because someone might not get it. Make it look more like the competitors because that feels familiar. Then twelve rounds of feedback later you've created something nobody particularly dislikes.

Unfortunately, nobody particularly likes it either. System1 found something interesting when it compared dull and more engaging advertising. As advertising became more neutral, positive emotions such as happiness and surprise dropped. But negative responses didn't disappear with them. So playing it safe doesn't necessarily remove the risk of somebody disliking your advertising. It mainly increases the risk that nobody feels anything. And that's a much bigger problem than it sounds.

Advertising needs to leave something behind. A feeling. A memory. A recognisable character. A line. A colour. Something that helps your brand come back to mind later.

If people feel nothing, there isn't much for the brain to hang onto.

Boring doesn't mean your creative looks bad

This is probably where boring marketing gets misunderstood. A dull ad can look fantastic.

Beautiful photography. Nice typography. Perfect spacing. Immaculate brand guidelines. Still dull.

Boring marketing isn't necessarily badly made marketing. It's marketing that gives people very little reason to care. And because so many brands follow the same category conventions, it becomes very easy to produce work that looks professional while also looking exactly like everyone else.

That's the danger.

Nothing is technically wrong with it.

There is just nothing particularly worth remembering.

So what does better creative actually look like?

The Creative Dividend groups creative quality into four areas: emotion, distinctiveness, showmanship and consistency.

In normal human language, make people feel something, make sure they know it's you, give them something worth paying attention to, and keep doing it long enough to build memory.

Emotion doesn't mean every ad needs to make someone cry into their Weet Bix. Humour counts. Surprise counts. Curiosity counts. The point is to create some kind of response rather than "Yep. That's an ad."

Distinctiveness matters because being remembered is only useful if people remember you. Your colours, characters, sounds, language, shapes and other brand assets should make the work recognisable without needing to whack a massive logo in the corner.

Showmanship is simply giving people something worth watching. A story. A character. A joke. An unexpected visual. An actual idea. Your audience didn't wake up hoping to see your advertising, so earning a little attention seems like the least we can do.

And then comes the bit marketers are often terrible at.

Consistency.

When you've found something good, stop bloody changing it.

Your marketing team will get bored of a campaign long before the public does. Repeating recognisable ideas and assets is how memories get stronger. Constantly changing everything means constantly paying to introduce yourself again.

So what do you do about it?

You do not need louder marketing. You need better creative. Creative that gets noticed, feels different from the category and gives people something worth remembering. Then you put enough media behind it and keep it consistent long enough to work.

That is exactly why we started Toasty.

We help businesses make marketing that is hard to ignore and easy to remember, combining strategy, creative and performance so the media and the message actually work together.

Because if you are already paying to be seen, you may as well make something worth seeing.

Think you might be paying Boring Tax? Contact us