Dean Oelschig, Founder and Managing Partner of Halo, says marketers need to be better at earning attention, and that mediocrity has never been easier or faster. It’s essential to stand out. Here’s how.
We’ve forgotten the ‘A’ in AIDA. The first thing we need to do with brands is grab people’s attention, then make them interested, then prove desire, and then get action. Because In the short-term performance marketing world, we’re all just trying to drive action, get the leads and the last mile clicks. But the data shows that if you’re not getting at least 2.5seconds of attention, you’re not creating any memory.
If you think about how quickly you can scroll through Instagram, your ad is very unlikely to get 2.5 seconds of attention. In fact in a study done recently of 130,000 ad views, it was less than two and a half seconds of attention.
We live in this attention economy. We all know that, but we’ve lied to ourselves about attention. We think attention is declining, when in fact attention is increasing. Just watch any adult scrolling through TikTok and you can see that they’re pretty good at paying attention. The problem is we as marketers aren’t good at earning it, and we need to get better because if we don’t, we’re not going to get any action.
So how do you do this? You have to look where no one else is looking. You have to stand out. You have to be different. Every category sticks to convention, and everyone follows it. Just look at watch ads – every single watch has the same time on it because some designer back in the day made this rule because they said it gives the watch a ‘smile’ and allows you to see the logo better. But then they started advertising digital watches and the time stayed the same for no reason, because that’s just the convention. It’s just how things get done.
But we’ve also been lied to about differentiation. We think differentiation is enough. It’s not. It’s about distinction in your category. You need to make things that are impossible to ignore. So the question you should be asking is: what are your competitors NOT doing?
Rory Sutherland said: ‘I’m not interested in my competitors, I’m just interested in what they are sh*t at’. Whether you’re doing a positioning piece or product, or whether you’re creating a campaign, you have to be asking what your competitors are not doing. You have to look where no one else is looking.
Do you know what Netflix considers their competitor? Sleep. And if you think about sleep as the competitor, you have to entertain your audience. Marketers and agencies are not doing enough to entertain their audiences. Learn to have fun with the work again, and then earn consumers’ attention.
An example is our Pineapple Insurance campaign that started running in 2022. If you search ‘insurance’ on Hello Peter, there’s thousands of results for brokers, intermediaries etc. So Pineapple had to stand out. And that was very much what we were trying to achieve. We first wanted to create something that was completely different, what we call ‘the most honest campaign’.
We had 106 sites and we challenged ourselves to make every single one different. We implemented the volcano technique: if something goes off in one place, everyone’s going to hear about it. We even thought differently around the media. We just tapped into the market and had a lot of fun with it. But we never said ‘get a quote’ in any of the campaigns. We never said ‘switch and save’ or gave the price of the insurance.
Instead, we tapped into nostalgia, insights and meme culture, and people loved it. Did it work? Yes.
The reality is that 95% of advertising is ignored. That means out of every 20 pieces that go into the world, only one gets remembered. Only one is getting the attention it needs and deserves. It makes sense because the reality is also that mediocrity has never been easier or faster.
Walt Disney said people can feel perfection and in today’s context they can feel effort. If we don’t have human beings at the other end of AI etc. who are driving the effort to try find something that hasn’t been done before, that feels different, that feels refreshing, that feels unique, then people are just going to ignore it.
Look where no one else is looking and you’ll find a lot more success. Also invest in the best talent you can find because the only way you’re going to stand out is by being truly creative.
Oelschig was a speaker at the Nedbank IMC. Modern Marketing was a proud media partner.
NEDBANK IMC CONFERENCE
www.imcconference.com
