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If advertising is a battle between the right and left sides of the brain, it seems the right, rational side is the one currently under the spotlight. With the need for all parts of the marketing equation to be measured, categorised and proven, it seems the profession once ruled by intuition and gut feeling, is increasingly governed by hard facts and a focus on ROI. And nothing gives a more solid backing than science.
Marketing science isn’t anything new, but it is certainly gaining traction. From behavioural economics, neuro-marketing techniques and university research such as the University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science’s science of making ads – and the promise of making ads better - is very much in vogue, especially with marketers.
Does this mean the future of advertising is people in white lab coats? Paul Fishlock, who recently launched Behaviour Change Partners, an agency that has behavioural economics at its core, is adamant it shouldn’t be. But he does have a saying when it comes to the matter:“Advertising is not a science but it’s more science than most of the people working in it probably realise”.
The issue is that while there is much talk in the industry about the application of all sorts of marketing sciences there seems to be much less in the way of action.
“I think all agencies will need to be across it, especially if there is a new generation of marketers who are interested in it,” Fishlock said.
Fewer happy accidents
The dialogue for marketing sciences might be increasing, but Cummins&Partners’ global chief strategy officer Adam Ferrier, one of Australia’s leading voices on the marketing application of behavioural economics, says much of the interest he’s seeing is coming from the client side, not from agencies, because creatives don’t like it when science intrudes on their art.
“I don’t think scientific method and creativity have been effectively joined up by many organisations at all, especially most creative agencies,” Ferrier said.
“Most creative agencies are somewhat avoiding the scientific process and principles, so I don’t actually think it has begun. The king in most agencies is normally the ECD and they are the executive creative director not the executive science director; their skill set is often intuitive."
That’s not to say agencies aren’t interested. Ferrier said behavioural science is baked into much of the internal processes at his agency, and pointed to the recent move of Steve Coll, a somewhat traditional creative, to data-driven agency WiTH Collective as an “interesting signal of where the communications landscape is heading”.
Ogilvy is one example of an agency that made a big move into marketing sciences in Australia with the launch of behavioural economics arm OgilvyChange last year. It’s headed up in the UK by Rory Sutherland. Australian lead, Sam Tatum, said the aim of OgilvyChange is to find “fewer happy accidents”.
“What is driving us when it comes to creativity is interrogating the behavioural challenge or the business challenge with a range of different questions that might come up with a response that we didn’t know otherwise,’ Tatum said.
“And those are the responses that might help us dig deeper than rational understanding.”
Fishlock says there is a lot of groundswell and he would be surprised if there wasn’t someone in most of the big agencies in Australia at least interested in behavioural economics as a discipline - but marketing science needs to get more creatives on side.
“Creative people are always going to be the hardest sell but to my mind probably the most important people that behavioural science needs to get on side,” Fishlock said. “If the people who ultimately design the inventions - whether they’re campaigns or whether they’re other ideas - if they don’t have the same enthusiasm and passion for it as the clients then it’s never going to be as powerful as it could be.”
Head of sales and marketing at neuromarketing research institute Neuro-Insight, Peter Pynta, said his business tends to work with agencies on a regular basis, but often to execute the work for a brand client.
“We’ve found quite a lot of success working with creatives that see neuromarketing for what it actually is,” Pynta said. “Traditional research hasn’t made very good friends with creatives. It’s the same old story, it’s killed more ideas than it’s actually helped and we would agree.”
Neuro-Insight has been providing AdNews with a neuro-analysis of campaigns that won at Cannes for the last four years, but it attended for the first time this year to network with more creatives and pitch neuromarketing alongside the art of making ads.
“The more creative an ad is, and the better it works, the harder it is to actually pre-test that using conventional methods like question and answer,” Pynta said. “The ads are often indirect, they’re quirky, they’re different and the traditional sort of methods struggle to capture that. I think that’s going to become more and more the case.”
Speaking the language of the boardroom
As a broad discipline, marketing sciences aren’t anything new, but OgilvyChange’s Sam Tatum says what is new and what has probably fuelled the growth of interest is the increased codification of behavioural science.
“Different models are making it easier for people to use and to understand, so taking away some of the mystique that sits around it,” Tatum said.
“It’s funny, if someone was to ask me what our elevated statement to industry is: there is not a single approach of how we add value to business and marketing more generally.
“For a long time we were focused on shifting attitude to shift behaviour but a lot of the work from clinical physiological and cognitive behavioural psychology has shown the power of just getting someone to do something and then their attitudes will form an alignment with that.
“So that might be the overriding sort of paradigm that behaviours might actually key to what we’ve been seeking for a long time with attitudinal shifts.”
Tatum’s team at OgilvyChange is small but taps into the global resources of the group, including the work of its UK head Rory Sutherland. It also works broadly across Ogilvy’s suite of businesses with Tatum noting it recently finished working with STW multicultural agency Etcom on a client brief.
Tatum said the unit is being pushed hard internally and, at only 10 months old, is starting to see a lot more paid jobs coming through as well as increased client interest. Paul Fishlock’s agency Behaviour Change Partners works on a similar principle but said as a process it starts by breaking down every problem in its briefs into behaviour change problems.
“In theory, it should make bold thinking easier to sell,” Fishlock said. “Because it should make it less of a leap of faith for agencies and clients because it is grounded in something that is credible and proven rather than ‘this is a good idea because I think it’s a good idea’.”
Ferrier said the short answer that more marketers are looking at behavioural sciences is “because we can”. “Previously we weren’t able to, but technology is allowing us to be more scientific in our marketing communications; therefore, why wouldn’t you, if you could.”
Speaking about the use of Ehrenberg-Bass, Kellogg CMO John Broome recently told AANA’s Marketing Dividends program that it makes ideas easier to sell because work grounded in proof and science speaks the language of the boardroom.
Foxtel’s Ed Smith said getting the CEO to sign on to creative marketing ideas tends not to be too difficult at Foxtel, adding he tends to use Ehrenberg-Bass as guidelines, or a way to inform thinking rather than a strict, rigid methodology.
“Ehrenberg-Bass has been doing work for more than four decades; there really are some things that are incredibly consistent,” Smith said.
“You will always be able to find an aberration - one particularly brilliant campaign that didn’t follow the rules that will always achieve its objective - so they’re guidelines more than rules that you wouldn’t say it’s impossible to achieve your objectives unless you follow this.
“They can tell us that if you do this you’re more likely to see that. And that’s what it is, it’s more likely.”
However, Neuro-Insight’s Pynta sees a key benefit of using neuroscience in an ROI-driven world and that it can be used across the entire marketing process, from the bedrock of an idea right through to execution. He says it’s this point that makes neuroscience so valuable for marketers.
“It’s used in all stages of the pipeline,” Pynta said. “In the early stages you’re looking to identify the fundamentals of the campaign, what we call proposition testing - does a certain idea actually work or resonate at all?
“If you look at the other end of the spectrum where you’ve produced an ad, it’s all about the executional triggers in the storytelling itself.”
Cummins&Partners’ Adam Ferrier thinks the future of advertising is one that has a lot more science built into it. But he said it’s becoming more and more important for agencies to look into its practice.
“We’re getting briefs now from clients that are almost framed very much in scientific principles and they’re expecting a more scientific response, or a stronger rationalisation rather than ‘just trust me’,” Ferrier said.
“Behavioural science will be able to help and is starting to be able to inform what is the right= thing to do and how to do it, and the style and the type of advertising that is right for your particular brand or marketing problem.”
Haydn Northover, however, thinks part of the take-up of neuro will be hinged on it developing further to be much faster and a lot cheaper.
While he said it’s not deficient in either area, other methods, including survey tools like SurveyMonkey, are quicker with many marketers taking “it’s a close enough” approach when it comes to testing.
It’s a “real barrier” to its take-up, Northover added, despite other methods not having a quick change or ‘temporal resolution’ response, which gives the findings that granularity. And he said the same is true with different types of neuroscience.
“Not all neuroscience is equal,” Northover said. “I think because the industry is fairly new, there are a couple of cowboys out there. New people borrow the language as well so there is a lot of that still going on as well.
“In time, it will probably develop to be a lot faster and cheaper so it will compete on those levels as well as being a granular predictive technique.”
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