Branding Between the Ears summary

What is it that makes an ad effective?

A lot of times, what we think will work – an idea that feels sensible, or a classic advertising strategy – actually ends up sabotaging what we’re trying to do.

Here’s an example. The advertisers working for the arthritis drug Enbrel thought they’d found a great strategy.

Their TV ad highlighted the biggest danger of leaving arthritis untreated. They showed this adorable little boy telling his young mother that he was afraid she’d end up in a wheelchair if she kept ignoring her arthritis symptoms. He’s confused, he’s scared, and he’s worried about the person he loves most. The ad then told viewers how people with arthritis could avoid that fate: by taking their medication. 

The advertisers did this because they knew that people are more likely to remember something if it triggers their emotions.

But, when the whole thing aired, they noticed a problem: while people remembered the ad itself, no one remembered the brand.

Now, it is true that people remember things more when their emotions are triggered but it’s not the whole story. 

When people have an emotionally charged experience, like watching a sad commercial, they’re more likely to remember the central element of the experience. But – and this is the caveat we have to keep in mind here – they are also more likely to forget any peripheral information surrounding that experience.

In the case of this Enbrel ad, the peripheral information was the brand itself! The problem was that viewers were so busy with their emotional experience, that the overall message – to buy the arthritis medication – didn’t get through. 

This little debacle shows why it’s so important to keep a balance between an ad’s emotional content and its branding message.

This is a balance that Steve Jobs – you know, the famous founder of Apple – understood really well.

In the early 2000s, Apple shot hundreds of ads for the Apple Mac, but only a handful of them ended up airing. And it’s interesting because the ads that didn’t make the cut were actually the funniest. They depicted this ongoing battle between an uptight PC user and a laid-back, cool Mac user. Fun, catchy, cute.

But Jobs somehow knew that viewers would be so busy laughing at the ad’s characters that they’d end up paying little attention to the overall message of the ad: to buy the computer.

If you’re a marketer, you probably think a lot about store shelves and billboards, or TV ads and product placement. But how much thought are you giving to the only real branding space that matters: your customers’ brains. We now know that the human brain is where all important branding takes place. 

And still, we see countless examples of these concepts that have been used in marketing forever – like that emotion triggers memory – still being used. A lot of times these are outdated, or, like in this case, only part of the truth.