Look at any media, any day of the week, and what’s the main takeaway from all the advertising?
Repetition, right?
The same ads every day everywhere, and it bores the living daylights out of everyone.
Why do we that?
Why do we run the same ads over-and-over-and-over again?
The answer is, clients and media agencies think it’s an efficient use of budget.
“We don’t need to make new ads, just run the same ad everywhere to save money.”
That seems logical until you think about it for 30 seconds.
Then you realise it’s the ‘Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility.’
People will pay attention the first few times, but then they’ll get bored, and then they’ll stop paying attention, and all that money is wasted.
Neurologist Dr John Turknett explained exactly how that works:
“Think back to what a summer afternoon felt like when you were 7 years old, it was an eternity, you could watch an ant walk across the driveway and it felt like the day would never end.
Now look at your life today – you wake up it’s Monday, you blink and it’s Thursday, you blink again and it’s Halloween, you blink and it’s Christmas.
Because your brain is running a ‘compression algorithm’ on your existence.
The real culprit here is your brain’s obsession with efficiency, it’s called ‘Memory Encoding Density’.
When you’re young your brain knows nothing about the world, it has to build a model from scratch, which it does by ‘constantly remodelling its synapses’, everything is a ‘data point worth saving’.
But by the time you’re 30 you’ve seen it all and your brain enters predictive mode, it only encodes something ‘when something happens that is new, different, or surprising’. So your brain looks at your morning commute and it says “This is all familiar don’t save it”, it looks at your weekly staff meeting and files it under generic-boredom.
This is called ‘the oddball effect’ – if I show you the exact same picture of a shoe 10 times your brain stops caring about it, but if the 11th picture is a flower your brain wakes up and hits record, because the flower was a surprise.
The takeaway here is that ROUTINE IS INVISIBLE TO THE BRAIN, ONLY NOVELTY GETS RECORDED.
So if you want the brain to pay attention you need novelty, you need to give your brain a reason to hit the record button again.”
Now we know that’s how the brain works we can apply it to advertising.
We can see that buying more media won’t increase memorability, we need less repetition.
In other words, make new and different ads: make what used to be called campaigns.
A campaign consists of different ads riffing off a common theme, so each ad is a new and different way of expressing the same strategy.
Instead of going to sleep, the brain wakes up when it sees a fresh take on the theme.
That way every ad you run has the same power as the first ad.
Each unit of follow-on media costs the same as that first ad, but unless you deliver something to wake people up, it’s wasted money.
And THAT is why I write a different blog-post every week.
That’s why I don’t run the same blog post over-and-over again, week-in week-out.
If I did, you’d read it once then get bored and you’d stop reading it.
I could run the same blog post every day, forever, but no one would be paying any attention after they’d read it once.
We all know that.
It’s just common sense.
But it’s not how we do advertising, despite what our common sense tells us.
Always a banger
True. Bots are now half of internet traffic however.
Half of the other half are indistinguishable from bots anyway.
Thinking is a lonely business. Creativity maybe more so.
Thanks, Dave. You’re a light in the dark.
Dave, as a former ad man, I’d push back on your opening premise: “People will pay attention the first few times, but then they’ll get bored.”
Most people aren’t paying attention the first few times. They’re scrolling, multitasking, or genuinely distracted. The brain’s filtering system kicks in immediately—not automatically after three or four impressions.
The “oddball effect” you cite actually supports repetition, not novelty. Your brain ignores the shoe because it’s seen it ten times. But that means it took ten exposures to register in the first place. The flower only becomes an oddball because the shoe became familiar.
The real issue isn’t repetition vs. novelty. It’s whether the ad has anything worth remembering to begin with. A brilliant campaign idea executed ten different ways still dies if the core concept is weak. And a genuinely distinctive ad needs repetition to break through the noise and connect with its intended audience.
People choose to read blogs. They actively seek them out. I see this firsthand with my newsletter UnStuck on Substack (@CreateUnStuck). Advertising has to interrupt and work hard to get noticed. And if the ad is clever and meaningful, it may actually get remembered.
The efficiency argument isn’t about saving money on production. It’s about whether seven mediocre executions outperform one great idea repeated seven times. I’d bet on the latter.
This is a great blog post explaining why the brain responds to the new and novel.
With respect to Brad’s comment.
You’re both right.
You need repetition if you’re not creative.
Creative ideas don’t look like ads. They’re more likely to get noticed and they’re more likely to cut through.
Rational ads tend to get ignore or filtered out. So the repetition helps them eventually cut through. Think of a boring ad you’ve seen that eventually watch and realise you’ve seen it 100 times before you’ve paid it any attention.
Then you go back to ignoring it.
Creativity helps with cut through. And changing the idea maximises the ability to take root and take share of brain space.
All in my opinion.
I have no formal quals in this area