The Pitch: Ads must be better, not more frequent

by PHILIP O'NEILL

When it comes to the effectiveness of advertising, there's a mindset at work in many quarters that, I believe, leads inevitably to mediocrity. Let me explain.

Many media and advertising people subscribe to the theory of effective frequency. Essentially this means that in order to be effective, an ad needs to be seen a number of times. The experts say that three exposures should leave the viewer, reader or listener with some basic understanding of whatever it was you wanted to tell them.

But effective frequency confuses me. I understand the argument that an ad needs to run a certain number of times to achieve reach. There's not often a media solution that reaches an entire target audience in one hit. So, in all likelihood, an ad needs to appear a number of times.

I also buy the argument that recency has value. If you're in the insurance business and a certain proportion of your audience is always going to be coming up for renewal then it makes sense for you to aim to be consistently in the market.

If your advertising has been seen most recently, then you have a greater chance of being considered when the renewal rolls around.

But my question is this: why should an ad need to be seen more than once in order to be effective?

Apparently there are two schools of thought.

One has it that people don't sit around all day waiting for you to tell them something via an advertisement. Their lack of interest in your interruption, therefore, means that you might have to repeat yourself.

But this argument seems bereft of logic. If people aren't interested in your message the first time, why on earth would they be interested in it a second or third time?

And if people aren't interested in what you have to say, then the reality won't be an effective frequency of three, it'll be an ineffective frequency of one.

The second school of thought suggests that there are three distinct phases of psychological response (which in turn means that an ad needs to be seen three times in order to be effective). The first stage of response recognises a message as "new information". The second stage asks "is this information relevant to me?". The third stage invites a response - "what am I going to do with this information?"

But don't these three stages sound rather like an effective ad working - the ad arrests you, tells you something relevant and gets a response. Why should it take three exposures to achieve that?

My argument is that we should be working harder to make ads that work the first time.


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