AD International / Persuasion And Its Limits

A good product with poor advertising beats the reverse

Over any length of time, the thing being sold does more of the work than the selling.

The most reliable observation in the field is also the one least useful for selling advertising services. If the product is good and the message is clumsy, the enterprise usually recovers, because satisfied users repeat, recommend and forgive. If the message is brilliant and the product disappoints, the message accelerates the discovery of the disappointment. Advertising is amplification. It makes whatever is true about the offering true to more people, faster, and it has no capacity to make a poor thing good. This is not humility for its own sake. It is what repeatedly happens.

The implication runs against a lot of professional instinct. It means the most valuable contribution the craft can make is often upstream of any message: telling whoever is responsible that the thing itself is not ready, that the claim being requested is not supportable, or that the problem is not one advertising can solve. That advice is rarely welcome and is not what anyone is engaged to provide. Practitioners who give it anyway are the ones worth listening to, and the ones whose work tends to hold up over a decade rather than a season.

It also offers a way for readers to judge the industry's claims about itself. When advertising is credited with an outcome, the useful question is what else changed: distribution, price, the product, the alternatives, the conditions in which people were choosing. Sometimes the answer is genuinely that the work made the difference. Often the work arrived alongside a change in the thing itself and took the credit. Both the industry and its critics have reasons to skip that question, which is why it is worth asking.