Craig Mawdsley, founding partner, craig and bridget, referred to Robert Heath’s book “The Hidden Power of Advertising” and he said after reading the book, it completely changed his thinking about the role of advertising. He was trained in advertising based on the salesmanship model – you had to get someone’s attention, you had to tell them about why your product is better, you had to give them reasons to believe that message. That model is fine if you are standing in front of a person trying to persuade them to buy your product and they are going to be able to buy it right there and then.

But advertising is not really about persuasion, it is not really about attention, advertising is all about memory. And it is mainly about memory because in the vast majority of purchases, there is a big, long gap between exposure to a brand message and a decision to buy a brand. Advertising is about trying to embed memories, and the best memories are about emotion.

Brands are there to make decision making quicker and easier, they are there to enable people to complete their shop without having to think a great deal about it. The famous Bill Bernbach said, “If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic”. But Craig says he is wrong. The sector struggles to hear that the work of the advertising sector works better when nobody notices it. The fame that works for advertising is the low attention process of having been exposed to a brand over a long period of time, a kind of fame that is not being noticed, but rather it is a fame that is about seeping into someone’s life day after day, gradually making an impact. The key objective is to get brands noticed without noticing how you are doing it, without needing attention.