Advertising doesn’t work. Please buy my advertising.

If you listen to Tim Harford on More Or Less (of course you listen to More Or Less if you’re reading this; apologies for doubting you), you will be familiar with the concept of Zombie Statistics.

Those facts that just seem to stick around, despite rarely being properly sourced and often not even being true (or at least not meaning what they are assumed to mean).

They ping around from article to article, deck to deck, speech to speech. Often sourced only back to the person who said it last, not actually the data itself and where it originated from.

We saw one of these in a big training presentation this week – the speaker proudly announced that IT WAS A FACT that only 4% of all advertising is positively recalled, which of course means that 96% of advertising DOESN’T WORK.

Blimey.

96% of advertising doesn’t work.

Global media spend is around $500bn, which means that global business is wasting $480bn EVERY YEAR.

This is extraordinary, isn’t it?

That 4% stat must have come from someone who’s trying to DESTROY the advertising industry. Maybe it’s an anti-capitalist pressure group attempting to advocate a whole new basis for the economy. Or someone with a clever new marketing channel trying to encourage people to try it instead of using advertising.

No.

This stat is mainly used by…wait for it…PEOPLE WHO OWE THEIR LIVING TO THE CONTINUED PROSPERITY OF THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY.

Creatives love this stat.

Clients who pay for the advertising seem to love hearing this stat.

Even media owners sometimes like talking about this stat.

Now of course, at craig+bridget, we are not really in the advertising industry anymore, we’re advertising-adjacent at most, so we don’t have a dog in this fight, but this is a Zombie Statistic that needs to be decapitated.

There are a whole number of problems with it, but the main one is the erroneous assumption that advertising needs to be positively recalled to work.

Guys, we thought we had been over this.

Ehrenberg Bass, Paul Feldwick, Robert Heath, Low Involvement Processing, it has all proven that this is really not how advertising works. The main thing advertising does is to reinforce long term brand associations. This doesn’t happen when people pay active attention (brains don’t do this much anyway, to anything, as it takes a lot of energy), they happen when people aren’t really paying attention. They don’t remember seeing the advertising, but they do feel good about the brands. They can’t tell you why, because when you ask them why, they’re engaging a different part of their brain.

Advertising might actually do its most important and profitable work when people don’t realise it’s there (maybe this is why ‘subliminal advertising’ has been banned in many countries because of its potentially sinister effects).

Even if you don’t want to spend much time thinking about how advertising actually works, the data doesn’t even pass a simple credibility test. How likely is it that an activity that is a constant and colossal waste of money would continue to be invested in by almost every good business in the world? Maybe once or twice, or for a few years, but EVERY YEAR, EVERYWHERE? 

No.

Our conclusion from observing the behaviour of businesses is that it is more likely to conclude that most advertising works, rather than that almost no advertising works.

Does the 4% that is positively recalled, work BETTER than the other advertising? Maybe. Perhaps even a lot better. But the other 96% probably still works, just a little less well, but well enough (and we would love to see some data to prove this one way or another, rather than just going with the rhetoric).

A word to our colleagues in the advertising industry.

We’re not totally convinced that the best way to encourage serious business people to continue to invest in advertising is to tell them that they only have a 1 in 20 chance of getting any of their money back. 

It’s probably not wise to imply that advertising is a crazy crap shoot with much, much worse odds that betting on black on a roulette wheel.

Maybe not ideal to sell your industry by implying that the vast majority of the people working in it and their clients are absolutely, totally incompetent (because if this data is true, then they must be – would you fly a plane, or be operated on by a surgeon that proudly declared a 4% success rate?).

We get it, we realise that maybe what you’re really trying to say is ‘hey, I’m the clever ad person who knows how to deliver the 4% and you’re one of the great clients who buys 4% work’.

But maybe what everyone is hearing is ‘I have no idea what I’m doing and I don’t think any of my clients do either’.

Best of luck with that.