Mark Nutley writes…
In 1947, as part of his resignation letter from Grey Advertising, Bill Bernbach wrote the following: “There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort [sic] or that long.
“They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art”.
Bernbach went to establish Doyle Dane Bernbach, later simply known as DDB, and his agency essentially redefined creativity in advertising. His resignation letter was and is filled with gems but on reading it again recently it’s the extract above that hit me again. It’s not just as true now as I’m sure it was in 1947, it’s truer and more prescient.
In 1947, Bernbach was looking to strike out and develop a new, more sophisticated, emotionally connected kind of advertising. Today, I think we need to remind ourselves of the power of emotion. Someone once defined a civilised society as “The triumph of persuasion over force”. Maybe by reminding ourselves and rededicating ourselves to the art of persuasion we can make our media, our advertising, and our society more civilised and ultimately, more successful. In all the ways success can be measured, scientifically.
Experiment
We do not live our lives as a scientific experiment. The idea that there’s someone out there that’s right for you. A life partner. Not a lot of science there. And we keep doing it. We make the biggest decision of our lives on little more than a whim. Because of love. Intangible. Unmeasurable love. We do it because we are emotional creatures. Our purchasing decisions are not that much more educated.
Every brand is built on the belief that it can transcend the rational and appeal to that other side of us. The one that says, “I don’t know why, I just like it”. So, it follows, logically and kinda scientifically, that when creating marketing communications to sell those brands we trust in the art of persuasion over the scientific. We accept that, try as we might, we are endeavouring to tap into a range of emotions. Emotions that have about as much to do with science as dancing does with architecture.
Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out, it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one
It’s well over half a century since Bernbach wrote his letter, and we’ve been trying to turn the art of persuasion into a science ever since. Entire industries have grown up around it. And they have given us some very valuable tools. Tools that use a scientific approach and that help us make better, more informed decisions. And yet, a formula for success remains elusive. Probably because as soon as anything becomes a formula it becomes, by definition, predictable, unsurprising. It becomes everything that a piece of creative work, designed to arrest somebody’s attention, hold it and deliver a message worthy of their consideration, shouldn’t be.
My daughter, 13 years of age, was watching TV recently. A commercial came on. “I don’t like that ad, Daddy,” she said. “Why?”, I asked. “I don’t know, I just don’t like it,” came the reply. She can’t explain it. Science can’t explain it. Data can’t explain it. I can’t explain it. Although, I have a suspicion, I do know why. There’s a particular way the actors perform in the commercial that I think she found… a bit pretentious. But that’s just a suspicion and if I question her on it I really can’t be sure she’d really be able, or be bothered enough to explain it. It was an emotional response, not considered, not over-thought.
And then it was gone.
In 2025, advertising and commercial creativity is reaching yet another crossroads. Ai is going to be a game-changer. Of that there is no doubt. I have one simple appeal. Use Ai to free up more time to create better ideas. Use the science to release, not replace creativity. Because creativity, an idea, are still the most powerful thing we have. Ideas are the real game-changer for the brands we work with. We are the persuaders. Aim for the heart and you’ll hit the head. It’s as unscientific as that.
Mark Nutley is a creative partner at Goosebump. He is a former IAPI board member and a past president of the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD);
mark.nutley@goosebump.ie
