The hidden power of (good) advertising

Advertisers face a dilemma: people are bored by informational advertising and irritated by intrusive advertising, while enjoyable advertising lacks a “call to action”. So what is the best approach? It may surprise you to hear that the most successful advertising is enjoyable and not necessarily either attention-grabbing or very informative.

Our understanding of the effectiveness of advertising has been helped hugely by the IPA databank which contains 880 advertising case studies . This evidence base shows that enjoyable advertising which engages the emotions tends to be the most effective (in terms of commercial impact). Even where a campaign requires informing the audience or raising awareness, an emotional dimension tends to improve its effectiveness.

While the clarity of the idea and quality of the execution is always going to be crucial, the basic finding that a positive emotional dimension to a campaign can increase its impact is highly relevant to many emergent transport policies. Four examples are used to illustrate this:

Marketing public transport, particularly rail and bus services, provides us with a good example of how advertising success can achieved by addressing our emotional side. The Virgin Trains “Return of the Train” campaign is a winner of an advertising effectiveness award, and a worthy winner too. This campaign came at a time when perceptions of Virgin Trains were at their lowest ebb, despite the recent introduction of new trains. The TV campaign which utilised clips of classic films (the Railway Children, Some Like it Hot and others) provided no real information and did not try to gain attention. Instead, it engaged people at an emotional level without them really being aware of it. The result is that for every £1 spent on the campaign, £4.20 of additional revenue was generated (£29.6m additional revenue on West Coast services alone). For a campaign like this, traditional measures of success like awareness and “persuasion” are largely irrelevant, though these still dominate the research and advertising worlds, which are reluctant to give up the comfortable world of the rational, analytical human.

A Smarter Choices programme involving personal / individual, school, workplace and destination travel planning, the information provision which is often the primary element would benefit from a less direct, emotional element which makes people more open to receiving and acting on the information, and probably helps make them feel good about having made a change. This can be achieved through subtle branding devices, advertising (radio, outdoor, press, TV if it can be afforded), PR, and sponsorship of events (“experiential marketing”).

The same is true of promoting a lifestyle which helps climate change by reducing someone’s carbon footprint. The main differences are that the motive is narrower (helping the environment) while the aspects of behaviour are broader (including home energy use, waste, and recycling as well as travel). So, presenting facts about the environment and the problems of climate change is not enough and is likely only to reach those already environmentally aware. People need to be able to feel pleased about their efforts, and encouraged to do more through these feelings. This approach is somewhat in contrast to many of the messages which seem to be prevalent which are quite negative and seem to berate people for not doing enough, the result of which is likely to be feeling of “why should I bother?”.

To gain broad public acceptance for road pricing requires addressing people’s emotional attachment to their car and the perceived freedom it brings. This does not mean trying to argue against this, even if it is a misperception, because such arguments will largely fall on deaf ears (apart from those that are already anti-car). The trick will be to find a positive message to put across in a way which does not invite counter-argument or knocking the car. For example, focussing on the vision which road pricing and its complementary measures is aiming to achieve, including emptier roads, cleaner air and attractive public transport.

While it is perhaps up the advertising ‘creatives’ to come up with the solutions, they can only do this given the right brief and the on-going belief and support of the transport professionals.