Many years ago, when my dad was very young, he joined the police.
On the first day of training they gathered all the new recruits in a classroom for a test.
They sat them at desks with a sheet of paper and a pencil, the sergeant stood at the front of the room.
Before the test started a man came in and handed something to the sergeant.
As soon as he’d left the sergeant said, “Right, the test will be starting now.
Write a description of the man who just came in: how tall he was, how old, whether he had a facial hair, what colour his clothes were, was he wearing a tie, what colour his hair was, what sort of shoes, every detail. Off you go.”
Dad said everyone shifted nervously but no one started writing.
They hadn’t noticed anything about the man because they hadn’t been told to pay attention.
So they hadn’t noticed a single thing.
They hadn’t paid attention because no one told them to.
Eventually the sergeant said, “Right, you all failed because you’re all thinking like civilians. Ordinary people go about their lives not paying attention to anything that doesn’t concern them. You can’t do that. From now on you are policemen and that means you pay attention to absolutely everything.”
I think that’s a great lesson for people in advertising.
I wish they’d teach it to beginners, but the other way round.
I wish they’d teach people just starting out in our business that ordinary people don’t pay attention to anything.
They certainly don’t pay attention to advertising.
I think most people in our business believe ordinary people will notice every ad and study each ad carefully.
But years back, the numbers I was given were as follows:
Roughly £20 BILLION is spent on all forms of advertising in the UK each year.
That means we are each exposed to roughly 1,000 ads per day.
Of that, 4% are remembered favourably and 7% are remembered unfavourably.
But the important number is – 89% of advertising isn’t noticed or remembered.
So roughly 9 out of every10 ads are invisible, they’re just wallpaper.
That’s exactly the same lesson my dad learned in that first police training class.
Nobody is even looking.
All those trainee coppers thought they’d start to pay attention when they were told to.
The point was to demonstrate that no one is ever paying attention.
But a policeman has to be constantly paying attention. They can’t behave like civilians.
For us the lesson is the other way round: ordinary people aren’t paying attention like we think they are.
We take it for granted that people will notice our advertising, and we spend all our time fussing about the details.
Because no one ever taught us the truth: that people DON’T notice advertising.
Unless we make them take notice.
And we make them take notice by making sure that our advertising isn’t like anything else, it isn’t part of the wallpaper.
Because unless they notice it, then all that clever strategic thinking is never going to get seen.
All that clever strategic thinking is just a waste of time.
Unless the ads stand out from the rest.
We still haven’t learned what Bill Bernbach tried to teach us many years ago:
“If no one notices your advertising, then everything else is academic.”