What We Get Wrong About This Strange Thing We Call Advertising

By Vincent R. Pozon

Advertising is haunted by two naïvetés—one that gives it too much power, and one that grants it too little. You could say they are poles apart:

On one end is the starry-eyed marketer who believes in the sorcery of words, expecting supernatural power from a well-wrought sentence. He assumes that a clever turn of phrase, or a brilliant pun is sufficient—that a spirit will rise, unbidden, from the page and infect the public, moving hearts, shifting opinions, and driving sales with little further effort or expense.

And on the other is someone guarded, cautious —less convinced of advertising’s value, more inclined to see it as a cost than as fuel for the engines of marketing. It is not disdain but fear: unease with intangibles, discomfort with what cannot be measured immediately.

In my more than half a century in the advertising industry, I have dealt with both, parleyed with both.

Expecting the Idea to Do It All

Consent and consensus is a crucial pair in advertising, "you can't have one without the other", to misquote Sinatra.

A good idea earns consent. But until it is shared—until it finds itself in conversations, in comments, in copied phrases—it remains small and huddled in the corner it was born. But when the idea is shared, passed from hand to hand or screen to screen, it bulks up, gains strength.

I have met marketers who believe that once a good idea is found, the battle is over—that the message will simply take flight on its own. And so they underinvest. But even the best ideas need to be launched—well, widely, and with weight. Advertising is not just invention. It is insistence. Repetition is not redundancy; it is how memory is built.

Of course a powerful, aberrant idea can minimize costs. When something is compelling, when it resonates, it travels farther with less. With a substantive story, one can reach the level of “To die for”, a description we grant to brands that capture fervid allegiance from customers or supporters.

Whether that devotion reaches critical mass is where advertising’s other role comes in: to create the environment where consensus can form.

William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate, understood this with exquisite clarity.

While traveling aboard the famed Super Chief to California, Wrigley was reviewing quarterly figures with a young accountant from his firm. The accountant, seeing how dominant the company was, asked, “Sir, Wrigley’s gum is known and sold all over the world. We have a larger share of the market than all our competitors combined. Why don’t you save the millions spent on advertising and shift those into the profit column for the next quarter?”

Wrigley paused, then asked, “Young man, how fast is this train going?”

“About sixty miles an hour,” came the reply.

Wrigley nodded. “Then why doesn’t the railroad remove the engine and let the train travel on its own momentum?”

Fear of the Invisible

Then there is the marketer who approaches advertising with trepidation. He wants results, of course, but feels anxious about the intangible. He needs reassurance.

And so, in the meagerness of trust—in the idea, in the process —he reaches for what feels safest: he will let research decide. And research will give him what is most known, what attribute is most expected, what claims are most repeated by others in that industry. And he will allow this to override his gut-feel, his years of experience.

Research is welcomed because it is more comfortable and safer to do so.

And then he will rely on consensus

A brave idea will always have difficulty surviving the approval process. It will run into gunfire at the lowest level of the marketing hierarchy. That sparkling germ of an idea is on the ground, squirreling around, getting peppered by criticisms from the young in marketing.

The larger, the more aberrant the idea, the bigger the target; criticism will be harsher, opposition will be louder.

As I wrote in another article (linked below), when an idea is subjected to a search for consensus, to panels and reviews, "what survives is an ad shorn of stark and strong features. There will be attempts to shave or smoothen what juts out, to make it be more regular, more acceptable, to remove what is abrupt or surprising".

Thus is born tepid advertising: predictable, polite, and forgettable. I call it a "ship in the night": a nice, expensively wrought ad, wending its way in marketing waters, making hardly a ripple.

It’s understandable, especially when the budget is substantial and the stakes are high. But often, this fear crowds out the very things that makes advertising work: aberrancy, the creation of empathy with the consumer, a material that draws attention, with dramatic pauses to draw the viewer in, the restraint that creates curiosity, the clarity that leaves room for belief.

There is, I recall, a quote that captures the fundamental tension in how advertising is perceived by some. It expresses their discomfort with impalpable value.

‘If I spend ten million on advertising, it's gone by morning. If I spend ten million on a car, it’s in my garage the next day.’

He wasn’t wrong—but he wasn’t right either. The car depreciates the moment you drive it. An ad, done well, keeps working even while you sleep.

To those who ask, ‘Where did the money go?’ after an ad campaign is launched, the answer isn’t a garage—it’s in minds, in murmurs, in markets. Good advertising doesn't park itself in your driveway. It embeds itself in the culture, gleams in the dark of the night. Influence is an invisible asset.

The Bravest Line Is the Signature

I tell students and colleagues: when they come across an aberrant, hardworking advertisement, they shouldn’t just ask who made it. They should ask who approved it. And who, among the brand people, had the courage to bring it forward—and fight for it up the ladder.

It is the client’s astuteness that becomes the spring for breakthrough work, their courage that allows millions to be placed behind an idea, and their marketing judgment that sustains the campaign for years, even decades.

You could say the strength of an advertisement is a quality that is either permitted or withheld. And the client’s yes is never a small thing. It comes with cost, with scrutiny, with risk. To greenlight a bold campaign is to place faith in something not yet measurable.

The story behind many great campaigns is not only brilliance. It is bravery—the decision to back aberrancy. The judgment to say, “This may unsettle—but it will be remembered.”

Often, the boldest thing in a successful ad was the yes behind it.