Year ago, at a parents’ evening, my daughter’s math teacher said she had a problem.

I thought she was pretty good at maths so I asked him what was wrong.

He said she always got the right answer, but she didn’t show her working-out.

I said, as long as she got the right answer what’s the problem?

He said: “50% of the marks are given for getting the right answer, but 50% of the marks are given for showing the correct working-out.

She could have guessed the right answer, without showing her working-out we wouldn’t know.

But if she shows her working-out and it’s correct, even if she gets the wrong answer she still gets 50% of the marks.”

This was difficult for me and my wife to process, we both went to art school where what matters is the end-result.

But maths is a university subject, and at university the method seems to be more important than the end result.

As long as you’re following the rules for correct thinking, as long as everyone can clearly see you used the right methodology, the final answer is subservient to that.

In advertising, all marketing people are products of university thinking.

This is what Rory Sutherland means when he says marketing people would rather be wrong by conventional thinking than right by unconventional thinking.

To put it in Rory’s words: “All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.”

In other words, the brief is more important than the advertising, because the working-out is more important than the actual result.

This is how university graduates are trained, their brains are hard-wired when they enter the marketing department as trainees.

This results in the carved-in-stone belief that the brief is all-important, because the brief is the working-out.

So an idea is not judged on how good it appears, but whether it’s on-brief.

This is backwards thinking: the so-called ‘creative’ department is at the mercy of formulaic thinking: the means justifies the end – function follows form.

Because creative work being subservient to the brief suffers from a serious flaw – the consumers haven’t read the brief.

So, unlike the marketing team, the consumers won’t be judging the work against the brief.

The consumers will be coming to the ads with a completely open mind.

Which means they may not be coming to the ads at all because, as the numbers show, 4% of advertising is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively,  89% isn’t noticed or remembered.

This is because the average consumer is exposed to roughly 2,000 advertising messages a day and they CAN’T remember that many.

That means 9 out of every 10 ads is completely ignored, because ‘impact’ is not a feature of any brief.

So roughly 90% of ads fall at the first hurdle: they’re invisible.

But this is never addressed in any brief, because all briefs assume the consumer will notice the ad.

So all briefs concentrate solely on the small remaining part, the part that’s known in economist terms as Diminishing Marginal Returns.

But why do marketing people keep doing it if it obviously doesn’t work?

Well, to quote Rory Sutherland again, “It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.

The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”

In other words, you keep your job by doing what everyone else does, even though it doesn’t work.

Which explains why every ad we see looks exactly like every other ad we see, and  it’s all just so much wallpaper.