BoSacks Speaks Out: When Advertising Became Something We Pay to Avoid

This article hits the nail squarely on the head.

Sir John Hegarty, the legendary co-founder of BBH, says advertising has become a product that people are willing to pay money to avoid. That is not merely a clever line delivered at Cannes. It is a devastating diagnosis of an industry that has somehow managed to turn interruption into a business strategy and annoyance into a performance metric.

Think about it.

Millions of people pay extra for streaming services without commercials. They install ad blockers on their browsers. They skip, mute, swipe, scroll, fast-forward, and flee. The advertising industry measures impressions, clicks, views, reach, engagement, conversion, attribution, and attention. It measures practically everything except the most important thing:

Did anybody actually like the ad?

I have spent more than 50 years in media. That training has undoubtedly distorted the way I look at advertising. I do not watch an ad the way most people do. I notice the construction, the placement, the production, the audience, the message, the missed opportunity, and sometimes the breathtaking waste of money.

So, yes, I admit my view is somewhat biased.

But biased does not necessarily mean wrong.

Most television commercials today annoy me at best. Far too many feature supposedly stupid people doing stupid things so that a product can rescue them from their own manufactured incompetence. Husbands cannot load dishwashers. Parents cannot operate a washing machine. Drivers cannot choose insurance without talking animals. Human civilization apparently survived thousands of years only to be defeated by laundry detergent and snack food.

Who decided that the best way to sell products was to portray the customer as an idiot?

Advertising once aspired to charm us, surprise us, persuade us, and occasionally delight us. Now much of it seems satisfied simply to stalk us.

Look at a pair of shoes online, and those shoes will follow you across the internet for the next three weeks. They appear in your news feed, your email, your weather app, and perhaps in your dreams. The system knows you looked. It rarely seems to know that you already bought them.

That is not persuasion. That is digital loitering.

Hegarty argues that advertising has replaced persuasion with promotion. I think he is exactly right. Promotion pushes something in front of us. Persuasion gives us a reason to care. One creates exposure. The other creates desire.

There is a very large difference.

The advertising industry became intoxicated with data because data offered certainty, or at least the appearance of certainty. Creativity is difficult to quantify. A click is easy to count. A great idea requires taste, judgment, courage, patience, and the willingness to risk being wrong. A digital campaign can produce a dashboard before lunch.

So the dashboard won.

The advertising business learned how to locate us, track us, interrupt us, retarget us, and measure us. Somewhere along the way, it forgot how to entertain us.

Hegarty’s advice is almost embarrassingly simple: “Do stuff people like.”

What a radical concept.

People do not avoid entertainment they enjoy. They do not pay to escape a gripping movie, a great television series, a memorable song, a brilliant photograph, or a powerful story. They make time for those things. They discuss them. They share them. They remember them.

Advertising should not be exempt from that standard merely because somebody bought the space.

The best advertising never felt like an obligation. It felt like part of the culture.

Which raises an interesting question: What is the last truly great advertising campaign you remember?

For me, one of the first that comes to mind is Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign.

The original commercial aired on January 10, 1984. It featured 81-year-old Clara Peller inspecting an absurdly oversized hamburger bun containing a painfully small hamburger patty. She looked at it and demanded, “Where’s the beef?”

Three words.

That was all it took.

The phrase escaped the commercial almost immediately and entered American culture. People used it in conversation, comedy, business, and politics. It became shorthand for asking whether there was any real substance behind a claim.

The campaign was funny, distinctive, memorable, and strategically precise. Wendy’s wanted consumers to compare the size of its hamburger patties with those of McDonald’s and Burger King. Rather than presenting a chart or shouting about percentages, the agency created a character, a visual joke, and a line that an entire country repeated.

The campaign reportedly helped boost Wendy’s sales by 31 percent in 1984.

That is what advertising is supposed to do. It created entertainment, cultural relevance, brand distinction, and sales.

It did not need to follow consumers from website to website. It did not need to harvest their personal data. It did not need to trick anyone into clicking. It earned attention because it was worth paying attention to.

There have certainly been memorable campaigns since then. Apple told us to “Think Different.” Nike told us to “Just Do It.” The California Milk Processor Board asked, “Got Milk?” Mastercard reminded us that some things are priceless. Dos Equis gave us the Most Interesting Man in the World.

We remember those campaigns because they had ideas at their center.

Too much advertising today has technology at the center.

That is the fundamental problem. Technology should distribute the idea, improve the idea, test the idea, and help the idea reach the right audience. It should not replace the idea.

The same warning applies to artificial intelligence. Hegarty argues that corporate leaders are using AI primarily to reduce costs rather than expand creative possibilities. That criticism should sound familiar to anyone in publishing.

We have seen this movie before.

A new technology arrives with enormous creative potential. Management immediately asks how many people it can replace. The tool that might have helped people produce better work is instead deployed to produce cheaper work.

Cheaper is not always better. Faster is not always smarter. More is not always more.

Sometimes more is simply more clutter.

Publishers should pay close attention to Hegarty’s argument because advertising remains part of the financial foundation of much of the media business. When audiences dislike advertising, they do not merely reject the ad. They may reject the environment carrying it.

A bad advertising experience damages the publisher as well as the advertiser.

Intrusive formats, autoplay video, pop-ups, screen takeovers, slow-loading ad technology, and repetitive retargeting train audiences to associate advertising with irritation. Then we wonder why readers install blockers, refuse tracking, abandon pages, or pay for ad-free experiences.

We should not be surprised.

We taught them to do it.

Advertising was once understood as a creative partnership among advertisers, agencies, publishers, broadcasters, writers, photographers, illustrators, directors, and designers. The objective was not merely to insert a sales message into someone’s field of vision. It was to create something powerful enough to earn a corner of the audience’s mind.

Hegarty calls that corner the most valuable real estate in the world.

He is right.

A brand does not live in a database. It does not live in a media plan. It does not live in an algorithm. It lives in human memory.

And memory does not respond well to boredom.

The advertising industry does not have an attention problem. It has a quality problem. It does not have a data problem. It has an imagination problem. It does not need another targeting platform nearly as much as it needs a reason for people to stop scrolling.

The business has become extremely skilled at finding audiences and increasingly poor at rewarding them once found.

That is not progress.

The challenge for advertising is not to become louder, more frequent, more personalized, or more unavoidable. It is to become better.

Advertising must once again be clever enough to quote, funny enough to share, beautiful enough to admire, and persuasive enough to change behavior.

It has to become something people do not immediately want to escape.

Sir John Hegarty says the industry will have to be loved more to succeed.

I would settle, at least as a starting point, for being liked.

So let me ask again:

What is the last great advertising campaign you remember?

And why do we have to think so far back to find it?