That's Interesting!

Romeo: Nice to meet you, Juliet. Want to get married? Juliet: Are you crazy? Our families are enemies. It will never work. Romeo: Good point. Let's commit suicide together. The End. The idea that a six-second ad is as or more efficient than as a thirty or sixty-second ad is a joke. It's just not possible to generate quality impressions or feelings or have the same lasting impact. Snackable content, as it's often called, is an apt phrase. It's empty calories. It's not worth spending time with. Interesting things are worth spending time with and thinking about. That's what makes them memorable. If Shakespeare's plays were six-seconds none of us would have ever remembered any of them, or him for that matter.

The decline in advertising effectiveness is a result of the brogasm discharged all over the ad world by the unholy alliance of tech bros and finance bros getting together and convincing advertisers that advertising is math. You like efficiency? You like systems? You like data? Us too. In the world they have created, the six-second ad on YouTube and TikTok is seen as more efficient because your money looks like it goes a lot further than in thirty-second increments. You can hit more people by throwing quarters vs. dollars. A definition of efficiency that has to do with the number of impressions, not impact. This kind of thinking has become prevalent because it's easy to measure the quantity of impressions in digital media but it’s hard to measure the quality of impressions. BUT, increasing your impressions is not the same as increasing impact. Which is what really matters. In their quest for a definition of efficiency that's about reach, they have neutered what advertising is go...

Creativity is what the ad industry feels it *puts into* its best work. Interestingness, on the other hand, is what viewers *get out* of it. Clients don’t want to pay for what we feel we’ve put into it. They pay for impact. Interestingness has a business logic behind it based on the ideas of Field, Wood, et al.; that is, generating continued mental processing, particularly among non-frequent purchasers, is what drives brand growth. Creativity can be tied to business effects, but it has to generate interest in order to have an effect. Interest is what is actually doing the work, so why don’t we focus on that? Which is, in some ways, the point. It’s not that ‘interesting' and ‘creative’ define mutually exclusive categories of agencies, work or ways of working. It’s a matter of what goal you’re aiming for. When you aim for ‘creativity,’ you may produce a lot of stuff that’s new, beautiful, funny, different, heartwarming (i.e. what wins award shows) but doesn’t generate ...