Boring and Dull Poisons Your Media Mix

There’s a really crucial component of your media mix that impacts its efficacy –  the emotional connection elicited from the audience. A recent marketing study from Peter Field, System1 and eatbigfish titled, ”The Extraordinary Cost of Dull,” showed that UK brands spend 10 million more pounds on media to get dull ads to work as hard as interesting ads.  

The worst emotion your brand can elicit is neutrality. And, sadly, 50% of TV commercials yield just that – nothing.

There were a couple of other interesting insights in the white paper. Feel free to “get in touch” for a copy:

• Intense emotion of any kind increases brand buying in the short-term, i.e. within the buying window.  But positive emotion, especially surprise, builds long-term mental availability.
• While 50% of TV ads in both the US and UK elicit a neutral response, B2B marketing is even worse. B2B marketers tend to cram a lot of rational information into ads, and, in reality, these ads don’t lead to long-term growth.
• Digital ads tend to be more “short-termist,” transactional and with neutral emotionality. And since Meta’s ad revenue nearly mirrors linear TV – all the money is flowing to “dull”.”
• Why do we see TV driving incrementality and synergy so often in our MMM models? Perhaps because it garners greater attention, trust and a bigger emotional punch. Yet it is consistently a channel with underinvestment.
• The most interesting thing is that as ads get more dull. negative emotion about them stays consistent. In other words, you can’t “dull” your way out of negative emotion.
• In a bit of irony, apparently “performance”  and “optimization” are two of the biggest contributors to the dull-drums. This is because performance metrics are short-term and transactional.