A few months ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival.
Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend £10m more a year in media on average to get the same results as a campaign that’s “not dull”.
Yet the majority of ads are dull. System1 collects how people feel about more than 100,000 ads to predict their long- and short-term potential. When Jon sorted the System1 database of ads by emotion, the most common emotion in these ads wasn’t Happiness, Surprise, or Anger; it was Neutrality, the absence of an emotion.
I thought about this in the context of how the creative sausage gets made — the internal process of making any sort of creative work. It’s frequently dull by design. Creative work is usually not a Darwinian survival of the most interesting ideas; it’s survival of the safest ideas. And safe ideas tend to be neutral.
Some of this I think comes from the creative review by committee. Creative work is inherently subjective. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. A creative review by committee leads to a peace treaty rather than interesting work.
To carry over the emoji metaphor in this week’s cartoon, trying to make everyone happy can lead to everyone feeling neutral.
I think we have to apply as much creative rigor to how we manage the creative review process as the creative itself.
Creative projects require an editor — someone who can sort between frequently contradictory feedback, listening to some, ignoring others, and making the final call.
A handy rule of thumb for creative reviews I heard early in my marketing career: “everyone should have a voice — not everyone should have a vote.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
