Nerd Alert: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull

Summary

The Marketing Architects Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Marketing Architects
• Host/Author: Marketing Architects
• Episode: Nerd Alert: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull
• Release Date: February 13, 2025
• Description: A research-first podcast that delves into the latest marketing trends and news, grounded in marketing, psychology, and economics research. Hosted by a team of experienced marketers, the podcast focuses on building revenue through proven marketing strategies.

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Episode Overview:

In the episode titled "Nerd Alert: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull," hosts Alina Jasper and Rob Demars explore the significant financial and strategic implications of dull advertising. Drawing insights from the study "The Extraordinary Cost of Dull" by Peter Field, Adam Morgan, and John Evans, the discussion sheds light on how uninspiring ads not only fail to engage audiences but also drain substantial resources from brands.

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Defining the Problem: The Prevalence of Dull Ads

Alina Jasper introduces the central question of the episode: "What is the cost of dull advertising?" She emphasizes the importance of understanding how much extra money brands are spending on unengaging ads compared to those that are interesting and emotionally resonant.

The study reveals alarming statistics:

• Neutral Responses:
  • 52% of UK ad responses are completely neutral.
  • 47% of US ad responses exhibit complete neutrality.

Rob Demars reflects on these findings, referencing John Wanamaker's famous quote:

“I know half of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which half.” ([03:46])

He connects this to the prevalence of dull ads, suggesting that the lack of engagement may contribute significantly to ineffective advertising spend.

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The Cost of Dullness: A Financial Drain

The study quantifies the financial impact of dull advertising:

• United States: Brands would need to invest an additional $109 billion in media spend to make extremely dull ads as effective as their non-dull counterparts.
• United Kingdom: The equivalent cost is £7.9 billion, surpassing the entire industry's TV advertising spend.

Alina Jasper highlights the gravity of these numbers, stating:

"Dullness isn't just boring, it's a massive drain on resources." ([06:20])

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Why Do Brands Persist with Dull Advertising?

Rob Demars explores the underlying reasons why brands continue to produce dull ads despite their high costs:

• Fear of Offending: Companies often play it safe to avoid potential backlash.
• Fear of Looking Stupid: The vast stage of television advertising intimidates brands, leading to overly cautious messaging.

He cites a quote from the Bob Dylan movie:

"You can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can't be plain." ([07:06])

This underscores the idea that taking creative risks can lead to more memorable and effective advertising.

Alina Jasper adds that decision-making by committee often results in bland, middle-of-the-road ads that fail to stand out.

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Investment in Creativity: A Silver Lining

Despite the prevalence of dull ads, the study offers positive insights:

• Higher Investment in Interesting Ads: In both the US and the UK, the least dull quartile of ads receives the largest share of media spend, indicating that marketers recognize the value of creativity and emotional engagement.

Rob Demars speculates on industries most susceptible to dullness, mentioning sectors like banking and health insurance due to their highly regulated nature.

Alina Jasper concurs, noting that functional categories such as financial services, non-food consumer packaged goods, and technology often produce less engaging advertisements. Additionally, B2B advertising is highlighted as a significant area of concern due to its highly informational and consequently dull nature.

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Key Takeaways: Emotion as a Driver of Effectiveness

The authors of the study argue that emotion is pivotal in advertising effectiveness. Emotional ads are more likely to:

• Capture and retain attention in the short term.
• Build long-term brand equity.

Alina Jasper underscores the strong positive correlation found between positive emotions (like happiness and surprise) and advertising success. Conversely, risk-averse strategies that avoid eliciting emotions often result in dullness, wasting media dollars and missing opportunities for meaningful audience engagement.

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The Role of AI in Advertising Creativity

The study touches upon the impact of AI-generated content on advertising:

• Potential for Increased Dullness: AI tends to produce average content based on its training data, which can lead to more boring advertisements.
• Creative Opportunities: Conversely, AI can also serve as a tool for enhancing creativity, allowing marketers to experiment with novel ideas that may have been previously inaccessible.

Rob Demars defends the role of AI, emphasizing its potential when combined with human creativity:

"If you combine that with human thinkery and say, I want a horse running on the moon that grows a pair of wings and flies around the world, you can now have that." ([11:10])

Alina Jasper concurs, highlighting that the outcome depends largely on how marketers leverage AI technologies:

"It probably depends on who's wielding it, because you could use AI to create a lot more dull crap or you could use it to create." ([12:09])

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Conclusion: Moving Towards Engaging Advertising

The episode concludes by reiterating the exorbitant costs associated with dull advertising and the imperative for brands to prioritize emotional and creative engagement in their campaigns. By investing in emotionally resonant and innovative ads, marketers can significantly enhance both short-term effectiveness and long-term brand equity while avoiding substantial financial drains.

Alina Jasper wraps up with a call to action:

"Now go forth and build great marketing, essentially." ([12:40])

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Final Thoughts:

Nerd Alert: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull serves as a crucial reminder for marketers to evaluate the emotional impact of their advertising strategies. By embracing creativity and leveraging emotions, brands can avoid the pitfalls of dullness, ensuring more effective and memorable campaigns that resonate with audiences and drive meaningful results.

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Connect with The Marketing Architects:

• LinkedIn: Marketing Architects
• Reviews: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review!

Transcript

[Rob Demars]

Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?

[Alina Jasper]

Yes, exactly. But a bunch of nerds.

[Rob Demars]

Nerd alert.

[Alina Jasper]

Right. Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alina Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. And I'm joined by my co host, Rob demars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines.

[Rob Demars]

Hello.

[Alina Jasper]

Hello. We are back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week, I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob, and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?

[Rob Demars]

Elena. Nerds rule the world. Let's do this.

[Alina Jasper]

That they do. Right? Let's get into it. As always, we'll link the research we cover in the episode notes. This week, I read a study titled the Extraordinary Cost of Dull by Peter Field, Adam Morgan and John Evans. But before we get too far into this, Rob, let me ask you, do you think ads are getting more boring or are we just maybe getting harder to entertain as consumers?

[Rob Demars]

You actually think I'm going to cut the marketing world a break when it comes to where things are going? I think we're actually going to be entering into more of a renaissance of really cool, interesting ways that ads are delivered to consumers that are going to make them more engaging. I think technology is really helping, making them more interactive. So I think there's actually a lot of possibility for us to continue to make ads more interesting and not less.

[Alina Jasper]

So you're saying they're boring now, but they won't be?

[Rob Demars]

I think there's a lot of boring ads out there, but I'm optimistic. I think we're going to be having a renaissance of really interesting ads and new formats and ways of telling stories that are on the horizon. Yeah, I kind of answered your question, but I. Yeah, not really.

[Alina Jasper]

But it's okay. It's okay. Because I would agree with you that I think advertising is going through a bit of a creative renaissance. And research like this is bringing to attention the challenge of boring advertising, which I don't think has been as much of a topic of conversation in the past.

[Rob Demars]

True.

[Alina Jasper]

So these authors, they wanted to understand how dull advertising, the kind that leaves you feeling a whole lot of nothing, affects not just creativity, but the bottom line. The findings are eye opening and slightly painful for anyone who's ever worked on a safe, boring campaign, which, if we're being honest, is probably all of us. But before we get to the results, let's talk about why this matters. The authors wanted to answer a simple but crucial, what is the cost of dull advertising? In other words, how much extra money does a boring ad cost a brand compared to one that's interesting and emotionally engaging? And they weren't just looking for creative critiques. They wanted this hard data. So to get there, they used a few different sources of information. First, they pulled emotional response data from System One's testier ad database. And that database has tested over 100,000 ads globally. Their platform measures how audiences feel about ads, tracking emotions like happiness, surprise, anger, and neutrality. And neutrality is that absence of any emotion. And. And unfortunately, it is the most common response to TV ads in both the US and the UK. In fact, 52% of UK ad responses and 47% of US ad responses are completely neutral. So we won there, Rob, by a couple percentage points. We did it. So if you've ever sat through an ad and just felt absolutely nothing, you're not alone. And that's a pretty big problem. So, Rob, how surprised are you by that? By that fact that about half of ads we see in the US on TV leave people feeling just nothing at all?

[Rob Demars]

You know what's funny about, I don't know, maybe I'm making a correlation that doesn't exist here, but there's this famous quote from, I think it was John Wanamaker where he said, I know half of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which half. And I think that in some ways you go, okay, yeah, maybe it's because all of half of all the ads are dull. You know, I don't know, maybe this is bad math I'm applying to your quote there. But I just think it's interesting that it's half, but I'm actually surprised that it's just half. I'm gonna actually go the other way. I think there's just so much just boring content out there right now. I even saw some one stat that said something like, 1 in 5 campaigns actually achieve measurable success. And I don't know if that's a valid statement or not. I have to be careful on this podcast. But when you think about that, you go, I'm surprised that it's actually only half.

[Alina Jasper]

I don't know. I go back and forth on this one because there are times when I feel like it's a lot more than going through a commercial break. And almost every single ad.

[Rob Demars]

Right.

[Alina Jasper]

Doesn't seem very interesting. But then this weekend, my mom had CNN on and those ads, it's just non stop Despair with these like nonprofit ads that are just so sad. Like every single one is just so. I don't know. Then I go the other way. I'm like, oh, so much advertising is just like for some of these sad causes. And so that probably skews things too. But either way it ends up to be about half. Well, let's keep going. Cause they didn't just stop at this emotional data. They paired it with Nielsen's media spend data to figure out how much money brands are pouring into ads of varying levels of dullness. So they looked at industry case studies from the IPA database, digging into the effectiveness of emotional fame driven campaigns compared to more rational transactional ones. And then they layered on additional insights. Some categories like B2B, struggle more with dullness than others. So what did they find? Well, first I want to talk a little bit about how dullness is defined. So ads were categorized into four quartiles of dullness. And those were based on how much of their audience responded.

[Rob Demars]

Neutral quartiles of dullness.

[Alina Jasper]

Yes.

[Rob Demars]

Never thought I'd hear that in the same sentence.

[Alina Jasper]

Yeah, it makes some sense because the least all ads that's like that top quartile, they still had some neutral responses, but generally they had some more positive emotions like happiness and surprise. And then on the flip side, the most all ads those were in the bottom quartile were almost completely neutral and they just had little to no chance of sparking sales or brand growth. Because you can imagine that not everyone is going to think the exact same ads are dull. It would vary a little bit by the person. Um, so here's something that probably won't surprise you too much at this point. Dull ads are expensive. To make an extremely dull ad as effective as a non dull one, brands would need to spend a staggering $109 billion in extra media spend in the US alone. So that's more than the annual spend on US TV advertising. And in the UK it's just as bad. Closing that gap would cost £7.9 billion more than the entire industry's TV spend. Essentially, dullness isn't just boring, it's a massive drain on resources. So Rob, dull. It's extremely costly and clearly ineffective. But brands, they still create dull ads all the time. Why do you think they keep doing that?

[Rob Demars]

Fear. You know, I think that especially when it comes to television, it is the world's biggest stage and there's just fear of looking stupid on that big stage, you know. But it's funny though when you think about it, because God There was the Bob Dylan movie that was just out with Timothy Chalamet. I can't say his last name, I'm sorry. But I loved the quote from the movie when he's playing Bob Dylan. He goes, you can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can't be plain. And I think that's like such a great message for marketers. You know, it's like, I'll be ugly on the world's biggest stage. Like that actually will probably give you a better business outcome than a boring ad.

[Alina Jasper]

That was a great line from that movie. I feel like Bob Dylan is a great example of effective advertising actually based on the Persona he put out there. And he realized that his best chance was it being kind of offensive and he didn't care. So I agree with you. I think the same thing that dull ads are mostly the result on avoiding offending people and playing it safe. And maybe decision by committee too leads to stuff that's more straight down the middle. But I wanted to share some more positive news from the study. So the authors, they found that brands, they do invest more in interesting ads. So in both the US and the uk, the least dull quartile of ads receives the largest share of media spend. It's a good sign. It shows that marketers recognize the value of creativity and emotional engagement. And here's something really interesting. While dullness can affect any category, some sectors are especially vulnerable. So Rob, any guesses what categories produce the dullest advertising?

[Rob Demars]

Well, I'm going with banks. I've never called up a friend and said, man, have you seen that Wells Fargo ad? Like that just has never happened. And then health insurance. And I think they're two highly regulated categories. So they probably are so scared to say anything in advertising beyond show. A horse running through the bridge prairie with a wagon behind it.

[Alina Jasper]

I think that, yes, you're right. Actually, I was just thinking because financial services was a category, all those sort of functional categories were found to be very dull. So some examples they gave were financial services, non food, consumer packaged goods and technology. However, one that they called out was B2B advertising. Our poor B2B marketers. Yeah, they, those ads tended to be highly informational, which led to those worsening scores. So for B2B marketers, they were called out as a big part of the problem. They also mentioned though, that some industries are more prone to sameness than others, like telecoms or tech, where their brands as a whole start to look eerily similar. But of course, no category has to be dull. They do see Interesting ads from all sorts of categories. Some are just more likely to produce them than others. So let's talk about the takeaway. The authors argue that emotion drives effectiveness, and that applies to both the short term grabbing your attention and the long term building brand equity. Ads that make you feel something, joy, surprise, even anger. They're far more likely to be remembered and drive results. One thing that I liked from this study is they found a strong positive correlation between positive emotions like happiness and surprise and advertising effectiveness. If you try to play it safe and avoid risk or controversy, that often leads to dullness, which not only wastes media dollars, but also you lose that chance to make a meaningful impact. Now, they do touch on AI generated content in this study, and they believe that's going to actually increase the amount of dull ads because AI tends to produce the average of what it's trained on, and average advertising often equals boring. But of course, AI can also be used as a tool for creativity that many marketers wouldn't have had access to otherwise. So they do add that too. So it seems like they have kind of a lot of perspectives on AI. Quickly are. Rob, GPT this study shows that dull ads are like lukewarm coffee, easy to make, but they leave no lasting impression and cost a fortune to keep reheating for people who still won't care. All right, Rob, what do you think?

[Rob Demars]

I definitely disagree, and I know I'm a bit of an AI fanboy, but when you think about, I, I, I think it's absolutely correct that even today we were just experimenting with the latest Google video generation model called VO2, and it's remarkable. It can create, like you said, you can create something that's very boring, like a horse running in a prairie. Right. And that's just kind of like that's the average of whatever. But if you combine that with human thinkery and say, I want a horse running on the moon that grows a pair of wings and flies around the world, you can now have that. And so I think it's dependent upon how you, you leverage the technology. Sorry, that's just that that poked me when you said that, so I knew.

[Alina Jasper]

It was, I knew that you would have something to say about that. But I agree. I think it's all in kind of the, the hands of who's wielding it, because you could use AI to create a lot more dull crap or you could use it to create.

[Rob Demars]

Can be a huge unlock. Yeah, yeah.

[Alina Jasper]

So it probably depends on who's wielding it. Result you're gonna have. That's it. For this episode of the Marketing Architects, we'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing, essentially. Oh, sorry. There's someone on the side of my house. That scared me. That freaked me out.

[Rob Demars]

I could hear him. I can definitely hear him.

[Alina Jasper]

That scared me. I was like, there's a person he's taking down, like, the house Christmas lights. Marketing Architects.