Andrex has become a great case study in modern marketing, because it represents the logical outcome of two dominant trends: the mission escalation trend and the conversation trend. Both are waves of brand thinking that have swept all before them in recent years, and it’s not exactly Andrex’s fault that they have been caught up in it. It’s just that the nature of their business means stretching both trends to breaking point. First, there’s the mission escalation trend. This is the homeopathy of marketing. It involves taking the functional purpose of any given product, diluting it to a slightly more abstract level, then diluting it again and repeating the process until you reach a level of abstraction so remote that any sense of specific purpose has been lost entirely. So if your product is a bar of chocolate, it’s not about giving people something chocolatey to eat, it’s about giving them a tasty treat. And it’s not about giving them a tasty treat, it’s about giving them a treat in a wider sense. And it’s not about the treat as such, but the enjoyment you get from that treat. And it’s not about the physical enjoyment, but the emotional enjoyment. And it’s not about the emotional enjoyment, but joy itself. And it’s not about experiencing joy, it’s about believing in joy. And now your brand purpose is more closely aligned to Buddhism than it is to chocolate.

It is now over 50 years since I read the famous conversation between Max Hart of Hart, Shaffner and Marx and his ad agent, Hart said he would never read long copy. His agent said, "I'll just give you the headline of a full page all-copy ad. You would read every word." "What is it?" asked Hart. "This is the truth about Max Hart," his agent replied. It reminded me of one of my favourite quotes, from Howard Gossage: "People read what interests them, sometimes it's an ad".

Our results show that 48% of people who were exposed to the ads made future searches for weight loss information, compared with 32% of those in the control group—a 50% increase. The advertisements varied in efficacy. However, the effectiveness of the advertisements may be greatly improved by targeting individuals based on their lifestyle preferences and/or sociodemographic characteristics, which together explain 49% of the variation in response to the ads. These results demonstrate that online advertisements hold promise as a mechanism for changing population health behaviors.

An August 2017 survey from CivicScience, a next-generation consumer and media analytics company, found that very few US internet users have made a purchase based on ads they saw on social platforms, like Facebook or Snapchat.

Bring your startup launch the boost it deserves with the proper PR. Qlearly brings you a curated database of 3850+ tech journalists, guests blogs and influencers

Bring your startup launch the boost it deserves with the proper PR. Qlearly brings you a curated database of 3850+ tech journalists, guests blogs and influencers

For review, “dark testing” is A/B testing on Facebook conducted by 1) building multiple variations of a single post by adjusting the message, thumbnail, image, etc., 2) serving these variations to different, similar audiences, and 3) measuring performance and designating a “winner.”

How long does it take to change someone's mind about your brand in a video ad? Should you rush to tell your story to avoid getting tuned out, or should you embrace a longer format to build a more captivating story? Google partnered with Mondelez International to find out. In fact, television ad research has established that 15-second TV ads are roughly 75% as effective as 30-second spots.1 And they're half the cost. This media pressure can lead brands to feel like everything needs to be faster, faster, faster. But, as this experiment showed, making ads shorter doesn't get them more attention—it may get them even less. With a great story, brands can take the time to create a connection and change a mind.

What if you were to invent a way of getting light buyers to recall your brand just as they are about to choose? Ideally, it would reach millions of people who aren’t particularly thinking about your product. You’d want them to see the same thing at around the same time, so that they can talk to each other about what they’ve seen, reinforcing each other’s memories of it. You would need to sneak up on them, since they have near-zero interest in hearing from you, indeed don’t want to. You’d need a form of content requiring negligible mental effort to process: one which comes in bite-sized chunks, but which is still capable of moving and delighting. It turns out there is an app for that: the TV ad.

Great example of sales/marketing methods to learn from

"What many viewers are looking for today is a more inspirational, aspirational message," she says. "Don't tell me what I need to worry about. I already know that."