AD International / What It Is Trying To Do

Why most advertising is not trying to make you buy today

At any moment, the overwhelming majority of people in a category are not in the market for it, and the work is written accordingly.

In most categories, only a small fraction of possible buyers are actively considering a purchase at any given time. Everyone else is between decisions, sometimes for years. A message written as though every reader were ready to act is therefore written for almost nobody. The people who are ready will find their way regardless. The far larger group is not resisting the sales pitch, they are simply not in the conversation, and shouting at them produces irritation rather than sales. The sensible response is not to shout louder but to accept that today's audience is mostly tomorrow's, and to write something worth carrying forward.

This is why so much advertising appears indirect to the point of evasiveness. It is not evading anything. It is depositing a small, distinctive, pleasant impression in a mind that has no immediate use for it, in the reasonable expectation that a use will eventually arise. The measure of success is not what the viewer does next. It is whether anything remains after the viewer has entirely forgotten where the impression came from, which is the normal and expected condition. People routinely remember the feeling and the name while losing every trace of the encounter that produced them.

There is a discipline hidden in this that outsiders rarely credit. Writing for someone who will not act today means giving up the satisfactions of urgency: the countdown, the deadline, the closing offer. Those tools work on the small group already in motion and do nothing for the rest except make the sender look desperate. Work aimed at the future has to earn its place in memory on other grounds, which usually means being distinctive, being consistent over long periods, and being pleasant enough that a person does not actively push it away. That is harder, and it is also the reason the craft exists.