Interview: Les Binet, co-author of The Long and the Short of It, on the secrets behind effective advertising

In this episode we talk with Les Binet, co-author of The Long and the Short of it about his research into effective advertising. We discuss some of his best-known findings, such as the value of emotional campaigns. But we also cover some lesser-known areas such as whether wear out is a myth, why music in ads should get more attention and finally what he calls the “dark matter of effectiveness”: price effects.

Transcript

MAF: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Behavioral Science for Brands, a podcast
where we bridge the gap between academics and practical marketing. Every
other week, we sit down and go deep behind the science of some of America's
most successful brands. And every so often, we have a visiting guest to join us.
I’m MichaelAaron Flicker.
RS: and I'm Richard Shotton.
MAF: ...and today we're visiting with Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness
- Welcome Les - Group Head of Effectiveness at Adam and Eve DDB. Let's get
into it.
So Les, welcome to Behavioral Science for Brands. We're very excited to have
you.
LB: Nice to be here.
MAF: Richard and I have been big fans of your work for many, many years,
and we're so excited to have you today. Les, I thought that maybe I could start
by doing my best at a main stage presentation, 20 minute introduction.
Okay, [00:01:00] maybe I should just do a very short introduction for those that
may not be as familiar with your work. And then maybe we can just have an
interesting discussion between the three of us today, if that sounds good to
everyone. Yeah. So Les, for those that may have not been exposed to your
work, you are a world renowned expert in the field of marketing effectiveness.
And according to the IPA, for our American listeners who may not know the
IPA, that is the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the UK's leading
association for marketers and advertisers, the IPA says, Les, that you have
probably won more effectiveness awards than anyone else. In fact, in 2014, they
awarded you the President's Medal in recognition of your contributions to
marketing effectiveness.
And as importantly, you've written extensively on how advertising works, how
to make it work better, and how [00:02:00] to evaluate it. And of course, your
work with Peter Fields has attracted lots of international attention. But really,
for Richard and I, reading about your work and watching you talk to other
leaders in the field has been a study of seeing how your interests have changed

over the years, how you've kind of pulled at a thread and continue to learn and
ask questions.
And so I thought before we got into specifically talking about behavioral
science and seeing where that takes us, I'm wondering if you could maybe share
some of, in two minutes, some of your biggest insights or reflections on your
work so that those that would be interested can get a little bit of a primer.
And then, of course, in our show notes, as everyone knows, we'll have links to
all of your [00:03:00] publications and for people to find more information. But
maybe you could start us off that way.
LB: Okay. Um, I'll probably go on far longer than two minutes. I think maybe if
I can, I'd just like to start by saying I'm not an academic.
You talk about the bridge between academia and practice. I'm not an academic,
I'm a practitioner.
LB: So I work for what is probably the UK's best advertising agency, Adam and
Eve DDB. I have to say that, it's in my contract. And my job as head of
effectiveness is to measure the effectiveness of our advertising, to understand
how advertising works and to make it work better.
And I've been doing that for 37 years for the company. I think it's fair to say I've
learned a thing or two along the way. [00:04:00] But I have this - I mean, Adam
and Eve are very generous in that they allow me to basically do semi academic
work as part of that job. So I've done a lot of work with the IPA, which is the
body that represents the UK advertising industry.
And they have a huge database of effectiveness case studies and data. And
together with my colleague, Peter Field, we've spent the last, I suppose, nearly
20 years analyzing that data, looking for general patterns about what works and
what doesn't. So I have my day job, which is just, you know, making sure that
the ads work, and my semi-academic job, which is to sort of try and understand
how it works in general.
The books are based on all of that stuff. And probably the most famous book
that Peter and [00:05:00] I've written - We've written five books together, and
I've written one with Sarah Carter - The most famous book is called The Long
and the Short of It. And it's about how advertising works in the short term
versus how it works in the long term.

The central idea is that short-term and long-term effects are quite different.
They work in different ways, over different time scales, and they require
different media, different content, different measurement systems. And that you
need to understand these short and long term differences if you're going to avoid
wasting money and maximize your profit.
So it's that tension between the short and the long term. And there is a tension.
That's the other thing, is that people assume that if you get the short term right,
the long term will look after itself. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. What we see in
the data is that when you [00:06:00] try to maximize short term effects, you
reduce the long term effects.
So much of what people are doing in marketing today is focused on maximizing
short term effects, and that is reducing companies’ profits. So that's the central
idea I think I'd like to get across to people. And I think during this conversation,
we'll tease out some of the reasons why.
MAF: I mean that sounds really great.
And maybe we can, for those that are new to the idea of the short and the long
term, we can talk just a little bit about when we talk about short and long - I've
sat in rooms where they've taken your original definitions, and then it's gotten a
little confusing, as it's been tried to be applied. So in the simplest of terms, the
difference between short advertising and long advertising would be described
how?
LB: Okay, well, it’s really a question of how long the effects last. So if you do
stuff that is, [00:07:00] you know, the, the traditional kind of performance
marketing, a lot of the digital marketing, direct response, stuff that is really
focused on getting someone to do something right now, to buy right now, you
want to get really close to the point of purchase and you want to influence
people's purchase behavior.
That's great. That's what they call that, you know, the hard working stuff. That's
great - But the effects are incredibly short term. They decay away to nothing
very, very quickly. You know, you hit people with an outbound email and you'll
get a surge of sales. And then when you turn it off, it decays away to nothing
very, very quickly.
You do paid search. That's great. You get a surge of sales, you turn it off, it
decays away to nothing. So it's great, it's immediate, but it's transient and short
term. The other approach is you talk to people, you talk to a much wider pool of

people who are not necessarily shopping right now. You [00:08:00] get them
when they're relaxed and receptive and kind of open to be, uh, seduced,
rather than persuaded. And you create lasting feelings and memories that will
last for years potentially and will influence their behavior for years. So this is
how brand advertising tends to work. So you're not - it's not about closing the
deal or giving them offers or telling them the specifications of the product or
getting them to click it on anything.
It's about planting associations and feelings and memories in their brains, which
will last tomorrow, the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year,
10, 15 years later. And that stuff, the sales effect in the short term, It does have
an immediate sales effect. You run a brand out on TV and some people will
[00:09:00] go to your website right there and then, but the effects in the short
term are much more modest, but they last for a very long time.
And we can all think of ads from our childhood, which in my case is uh, not
recently - we can think of ads where we can remember the songs and the
catchphrases and things from when we were kids, you know, these things
influence buying behavior over months, years, and sometimes decades. And if
you measure it in the right way, you can measure the cash flow that's generated.
So I worked on one recently where in financial services where we could see a
TV ad now, keeps generating additional cash for, for at least 15 years. So that's
what I mean about long term. And it's not delayed - It's not a delayed effect.
You're not doing an ad now in the hope that you, you know, that somehow – it’s
[00:10:00] not like a time bomb that blows up in a year's time, it's long lasting
and durable, and you need both of these kinds of, approaches to marketing and
you need them working in synergy.
MAF: Richard, do you want to maybe take us to, uh, some parts of the, of, of
the work that we talked about around emotional campaigns? Because I think
that connects to what Les is saying here.
RS: Yeah. So Les, you've talked about the split between the long and the short.
One of the most famous findings that you and Peter have found is that when
you're trying to deliver long term results, emotional campaigns tend to
outperform rational ones.
Now that's interesting language because I think sometimes people misinterpret
what you mean by emotion. They might think you mean heart wrenching or
deeply affecting. What is it that you actually mean by emotion? [00:11:00]

LB: Okay. Yeah, this is one of the things that gets misinterpreted. So what
we've done is within the database of several thousand campaigners that we have
access to, the influence mechanism is divided up into several different
categories. There's those that work by what you might call more rational
persuasive methods, you know, giving people information, telling them
something that's going to change their mind, you know, telling a truth and
making it matter, all that kind of thing.
So the, the kind of rational persuasion model. And then what we call the
emotional model is about, um, where it's not about rational persuasion, it's about
emotions, feelings and associations, [00:12:00] much of which is actually just
about whether or not people like the ad. Now that can go from, you know,
making someone burst into tears with a really emotional substory, which
Adam and Eve, we've done a few of those and they can work really well, but it
can really go right down to from that to, you know, make a wry smile, you
know, a little laugh, or just a sort of - I know with a poster, just a beautifully
divine design poster where people go, ‘Oh, I like that. That's nice.
Really nice piece of design.’ The key thing is it's not about telling people things.
It's not about making them understand a proposition. It's about making them feel
something. And I guess psychologists would make this distinction [00:13:00]
between System 1 and System 2 processing. You know, that System 1
processing, what, you know, Daniel Kahneman's, you know, thinking fast and
slow.
It's the fast part of mental processing. It's the quick, intuitive, immediate
response, not thought through, the ‘animal response’, if you like, that makes up
almost all of what goes on in the brain. Psychologists sometimes say maybe 95
percent of the processing in your brain is this immediate, associative, parallel
processing, rapid fire, intuitive response to something.
What we call emotional ads work at that level, whereas the persuasion,
information, rational ads work at the level of telling someone something and
getting them to think about it and believe it. Now, in fact, actually, most ads
work on both levels to some [00:14:00] extent. So if you go into our data, I hate
to overcomplicate this, but what we're actually talking about is campaigns that
work at primarily the emotional level, primarily the rational level.
And there's a third category, which is kind of, even emotional/rational. We have
over the years, toyed with talking about system one versus system two

processing, but the problem there is you've then gotta explain what you mean to
people. So we kind of reverted to talk about emotional and rational.
So when we first did this analysis in 2007, what Peter and I expected to see was
that the most effective campaigns would be the ones that had both emotional
and rational working together. That's how we've been trained as advertising
people. You know - yeah you need messages, yeah you need feelings.
Great advertising makes the two work together. And that is not what we found.
We interrogated the data. You know how you do, right? You, you've [00:15:00]
got a hypothesis, the data says you're wrong. We interrogated the data back and
forth and back and forth. And it would not give us the answer we wanted. We
found that in every category, in every medium, in every decade, in all economic
circumstances, et cetera, et cetera, that what worked least well was rational
advertising.
Rational and emotional together worked quite well, but leading with emotion
worked best. In every single subdivision of the data, except one, and that was
direct response, where it was the other way around. So that was in our 2007
book. And then what happened was in, in 2013, when we did the long and the
short of it, we started looking at short and long term effects.
And that's when it got really interesting, because what we found was if you
want to maximize short term direct response effects, go rational. If you want to
maximize long [00:16:00] term profit and growth., go emotional. And if you
want to make everything work best, lead with the emotions, support with the
rational. And a typical optimum balance is 60 percent long-term emotional
brand building, 40 percent short-term activation performance, call it what you
will. So we call that the 60 40 rule.
MAF: And Les, when I've read, when I've heard you speak about that, I have
interpreted that as overall media plan, look to have 60 40, but is that also
applied to any piece of creative? No, that would fall in the middle. That would
fall in the middle of one, which is both emotional and rational. So we're talking
about overall media plans here or overall exposure to consumers.
LB: Exactly. So, um, at the very top level of budget setting, you should devote
about 60 percent of your budget to the long-term stuff and about 40 percent to
the short term [00:17:00] stuff.
And again, what we've always said is that overall on average, it's about 60/40,
but it does vary depending on category and size of brands, stuff like that. So we

wrote another book in 2018, which then looked at how it varies for different
brands in different situations. So there are examples, for example, financial
services, you need to go brand heavy. B to B, you need to go activation heavy.
But an important gloss on that is within any particular bit of creative, what we
did find was attempting to do both jobs in the same piece of creative is
inefficient.
MAF: Right.
LB: And so of course that has real implications for you know, that people
produce lovely, gorgeous, emotive, creative brand ads, and then they think, ‘oh,
then we’ll put a 10-second sting on the end of it saying, you know, 50% off.’
[00:18:00] That's a great way to fuck your advertising up.
RS: I didn't know, there's a thing in the news for me that you had gone into the
process and the research thinking you'd find a different result. And I really like
that because I’m always skeptical of research that conveniently enough proves
the hypothesis.
LB: No, I mean, the whole process was a complete revelation to us because it
refuted all of our training.
And we, you know, we had been taught, because Peter - so Adam and Eve used
to be called BMP in the old days, and Peter worked at BMP as well before I did.
So we're both trained by the same people in the same tradition. And the whole
agency was trained in this belief that advertising was primarily a rational
communication mechanism.
But what [00:19:00] creativity did was to get people's attention and to sugar the
pill, if you like. So we used to use the phrase rational messages in emotional
envelopes. So the idea is you have the cartoon characters and the music and the,
acting and the jokes and things like that, which make people pay attention to the
ads.
You use that to then slip, you know, a rational proposition in and help to make
sure that people remember it. And all of the advertising that my agency used to
produce was based on that message. And what we came to believe as a result of
our analysis of the data was that was completely wrong - really good brand
advertising, you know, the music, the fluffy animals, the, the dancing, etc, etc.
that's what sells not the message. And in fact, we began to realize that for brand
advertising, a [00:20:00] lot of the time, the product points and the messages

and things that were inserted into the ads, sometimes were actually making
them less effective. And they were mostly there to keep the clients happy. Um,
so before we started this recording, we were briefly talking about music and I'm
going to be talking about music in the meeting after this one.
One of the things that we found is that for some ads, I mean, it's very hard to put
a precise estimate on this, but it looks like about 20 to 30 percent of the selling
power of the ads is due to the choice of music. You know, and that tells you that
it's not a rational communications message, you know. And we see this, you
know, the effectiveness of an ad could be massively changed by casting.
We had an ad that we ran, a campaign that we ran in the agency, and there were
several executions, [00:21:00] and we had two versions of basically exactly the
same script, but with a different actor in the lead role. And one worked way,
way better than the other. It's not the proposition, it's whether or not people like
the actress or the music, whether the lighting's good.
So all of this was a revelation to us.
MAF: And this is really a critical point. You used the word liking and Richard
and I were listening to you in a podcast recently on the On Strategy podcast
where you talked about an AARF research from the 1990s that showed that
liking was a rare predictor of success.
Maybe you could talk a little bit - if our listeners want to make a greater
impactful emotional connections, then they need a playbook. How are we going
to approach that? Everybody wants to be emotionally connected, but how?
[00:22:00]
LB: Yeah. So the advertising, the US Advertising Research Foundation, the
ARF, did this fantastic piece of research, which I think, I think it may have
taken them something like 15 years or something like that.
It was an amazing - and I think it's largely forgotten now, apart from amongst
old people.
RS: I'd never heard of it until I watched that podcast.
LB: Okay, so what they did, let me see if I can remember the methodology, um,
what they did was they looked for advertising campaigns in the U. S. where
advertising was run in some states but not others - which is much more common
in the U.S. than it is in many other countries. You know, because you've got 50

states, a lot of regional stuff. And they were able to do - they had a
collaboration with a research company. I can't remember [00:23:00] which one
or might have been a group of research companies, but basically were able to
use these as controlled experiments.
So the minute they discovered a brand that had done this, they looked at the
sales results, you know, like in advertisements sales like this in advertised
versus non-advertised regions. So, you know, a lovely direct experimental
measure of the sales effects. And what they did also at the same time was they
put those ads into pre-testing framework.
Well, I say pre testing, a testing framework. So they, they took the actual ads
that were being run. They showed them to audiences and they ran them through

a number of different pre-testing methodologies. So they got lots of the pre-
testing companies to all measure the same ads. So you said, okay, [00:24:00]

you know, how effective do you think this ad should be, based on how the
audiences responded to it.
So they had the actual sales results and they had a bunch of different pre-testing
scores. And the idea was to see, does pre-testing actually correlate with actual
business performance? So I think it took them about 15 years or something, a
very long time to finally get a decent sample together because the circumstances
were rare.
They had to move very fast in order to find audiences that haven't seen the ad
and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, the overall conclusions, there were several
papers published on this and it was quite controversial. I mean, one reading of
the findings is basically that pre-testing is about as good as tossing a coin at
predicting sales effects. At least it was then. [00:25:00] And that most of the
sort of dimensions and scores that people looked at, very little predictive power.
But one thing that did have some predictive power was liking. So in other
words, if you wanna know if an ad ad's gonna sell anything, just find out
whether people like the ad or not.
So, and of course there was a lot of political dancing around the results. 'cause
of course the pre-testing companies did not want them to say that openly, so you
have to read between the lines in the papers. But I think we, I think I actually
came to - went back to that research when we did our 2007 analysis.
You know, actually the answer was already there in the data. It's not about - So
for brand advertising at least, my overall conclusion is brand advertising is not a
communications mechanism. [00:26:00] It's a training mechanism. It's like

Pavlovian conditioning. You're conditioning the public to like the brand by
getting them to like the ad, broadly speaking, you know, you ring the bell and
the dog salivates.
So I think that's quite a radical finding. And I think probably Richard, you can
see how that shades over into behavioral economics, you know, because, you
know, I mean, if there's the overall big finding from behavioral economics is
that people are much less rational than they like to pretend. They don't think as
much as they think they think.
And therefore, if you're going to do good advertising, you have to take all that
into account.
RS: And I think it really fits with a principle in behavioral science known as the
halo effect. So you can go all the way back to the 1930s work of Thorndike.
And there's this finding that when we are weighing up our view of a [00:27:00]
person or a product, we don't judge all their attributes independently. We take
one element of their personality. Maybe they're particularly good looking or
particularly clever, particularly funny, and we use that as a guide to all the other
metrics. So if we think they're really intelligent, we'll think they're prettier or
funny. If we think they're really beautiful, we'll think they smell nicer and are
funner to have around.
So I think it's this idea of you can achieve a business goal quite obliquely.
LB: Yeah.
RS: Boost one metric really powerfully and the others will follow. And maybe
the easiest thing to do in an advert is to change liking. Because you can actually
be funny in an advert, whereas all the other things that you often want to
communicate, you can only claim them.
And people will be of greater weight to an action and a behavior than a claim.
LB: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I often forget which cognitive biases
have which names, because I don't spend as much [00:28:00] time as you do
thinking about these things. But definitely, I would say the halo effect is part of
it.
And I've seen some great examples of this. Um, so there's a famous case study,
for a brand of bread called Hovis in the UK, where they did this wonderful
emotional ad to celebrate their centenary, I think, around about 20 something

years ago, and it showed a hundred years of, you know, like the boy running
through a hundred years of British history.
But it was - it said nothing about the bread at all. So there's a little boy going in,
you know, a hundred years ago, goes out to buy a loaf of bread. He finds
himself running through London, and through scenes over a hundred years.
Actually, as I say this, I'm getting goose pimples on my arms because - and this
happens a lot, because it is, um, if you're a British person, [00:29:00] it's got a
lot of very emotional stuff in there.
You know, it's got Winston Churchill and it's got, you know, the 1966 World
Cup and all sorts of things, the Beatles, and it gives you a really visceral
emotional response. But it says nothing about the bread at all. Nothing at all.
There is no product point. There is a loaf of bread in the ad, but that's, you
know, I think the end line is something like as good as today as it's always been.
That's all. But people who saw that and compared with people who hadn't seen
the ad that did these tests, they said it was more nutritious. It was, it tasted
better. Um, it was more indulgent. It was better value. It was more premium. It
was, you know, any single dimension, every single dimension improved.
Even slightly contradictory ones, you know, that was more [00:30:00] premium
man, and it was better value. You know, any question you asked about that
bread, um, they answered more positively because they felt better about it. And
I've seen a similar thing years ago for John Lewis many years ago. We did some
research where - what we did is we told some people, because you know John
Lewis is - so John Lewis is a UK department store and it's mutually owned, I
mean, it's effectively a communist organization - All the staff share the profits.
All the profits are shared out to the staff. And most people don't know that.
And when you tell people that it's mutually owned, they say things like, the
clothes are more fashionable and the TVs are more reliable. You know,
absolutely no logical connection between these things, but basically [00:31:00]
you make people like the brand on one level and it improves their lives, their
perception on every other level.
RS: Yeah, I think it's super powerful. And in fact, it's that power that then poses
a slightly odd question, which is why are so many marketers resistant to that
idea of bleakness and indirectness? Yeah. And it persists with the rational
persuasion model of advertising.
LB: Okay, I think there are some historical things going on, possibly.

So Paul Feldwig, who some of your listeners and readers may know, is a UK
advertising guru, and used to be my boss at the agency. So another one of the
London Paddington Mafia - So his view is that this is [00:32:00] partly to do
with scandals in the US particularly around, like, the hidden persuaders and –
So, I think there were two books in particular - The Hidden Persuaders and The
Wantmakers were two books in the 50s and 60s, I think, which were about
advertising being evil, manipulative, and, subliminal advertising, brainwashing
techniques, et cetera, et cetera. I think the Hidden Persuaders came out in the
fifties, I think.
RS: I think 1957. Yeah. The Vance Packard. Yeah.
LB: So Paul says at that time there was a lot of paranoia in the U. S. about
brainwashing, which was a term that came into the public debate during the
Korean War, because supposedly [00:33:00] the communists were brainwashing
the political prisoners, you know, psychological techniques.
If you've ever seen the film The Manchurian Candidate, which is the, um - I
think it's set during the Korean War, isn't it? And I think a prisoner of war is
brainwashed and then becomes, a sort of mole in U. S. politics. Um, possibly
relevant today. So there was lots of sort of paranoia about communist
psychological techniques and evil psychological manipulation.
And at that time, if you, you know, in the early, in the, in the fifties, US
advertising was deeply into psychology, you know. So you have people like
Dictor. A psychologist who I think had come a German [00:34:00] emigre, you
had lots of these sort of German and Austrian psychologist emigres, some of
whom migrated into the world of advertising and marketing.
And then all of a sudden, there was this scandal about, you know, the evil
advertising industry that was manipulating people with this new medium called
TV. And there was a complete retreat from that. So now I've forgotten the name
of the guy - Rossa Reeves, Rossa Reeves, famous US ad man, said, you know,
there are no hidden persuaders.
Advertising works in the cold light of day. And he proposed this model of
advertising, which was all about, it's all about, very honestly putting rational
messages in front of people, giving people good reasons to buy, you know. The
USP, the [00:35:00] rational proposition. With no reason to feel, you know,
worried about advertising, no need to regulate advertising.

All we're doing is helping ordinary Americans make better decisions. And so,
we had decades of the advertising industry rowing back from any kind of
psychology stuff, particularly in the US. Because they were scared, I think, of,
um, the political consequences. So I think that's, that's part of the historical
model.
And then I think that's had a new lease of life in the last 30 years. Because the
digital advertising community has, I think, very much bought into this model.
Many people, you know, I may be making this up, but I think the culture of
[00:36:00] tech in places like San Francisco and, you know, Silicon Valley -
You've got to remember that Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley culture has its
roots in the 60s counterculture. There was often a lot of overlap. They were, and
you know, a lot of those early sixties and seventies programmers, you know, the
people that became the Bill Gates's of this world, you know, felt that they were
building a better world through technology, a world where, you know, the evils
of capitalism would be supplanted, but then people will be allowed to be able to
make rational decisions.
Finally, we would overthrow the cognitive biases and the computers would
make better decisions for us. I'm thinking of a song by Donald Fagan, uh,
[00:37:00] There's a song called I. G. Y. on his album, The Night Fly, which is
RS: Oh, I don't know this.
LB: So it's, it's a song about the naivety of the, of the 1950s American Dream.
I think it's set in international geophysical year 1953, I think. And it's got the
line. It's the fifties looking forward to the future and it's got the line something
like trust machines to make big decisions, program our fellows with compassion
and vision. So that so I'm really rambling off topic aren’t I, but people

underestimate the degree to which Silicon Valley has always had an anti-
capitalist, pro-rational, anti-romanticism sort of mindset. These people are

mathematicians and engineers and computer scientists, and they want to
[00:38:00] build a world, many of them wanted to build a world, where people
would make rational decisions. So there is a sort of thread within the digital
marketing community that says, brand advertising is obsolete and wrong and
evil. And what we should be doing is getting rid of all that advertising stuff and
allowing people to use, you know, online product ratings and referrals and
recommendation systems to make rationally-optimized decisions. So there's
these huge threads, you know, sort of 1960s advertising works in the plain light

of day, and the 1990s, when it finally surfaced, digital marketing is purely
rational and gets rid of all that brand stuff.
RS: Yeah. There was a - I can't remember if it was Bezos or Musk said
something along the advertising attacks that poor products pay. [00:39:00]
LB: Yes, exactly. So it was Bezos who said advertising is the tax that you, that
you pay for having an inferior product and somebody else has always said, you
know, advertising is a tax on stupidity.
But, and then Bezos in was it 2014? Said in one of his earnings calls, we have
fallen in love with advertising. Yeah.
MAF: You know, it's interesting. Uh, when I started my career in the nineties,
we were, uh, we started as a digital advertising agency and that emotion that if
we only give more rational choice, and right now, Amazon product ratings in
the Amazon system, the U.S. Is 1 out of every 2 spent on e-commerce, it felt
like that would make sense. But I think harkening back to earlier in our

conversation, the problem is that we don't have a ton of confidence in the pre-
testing, or people say they're rational, but they [00:40:00] act emotionally and

you only have to look as far as what you decided to put on this morning for
clothes or what you choose to eat that was much more emotionally driven than
rational that starts to, uh, disintegrate that idea.
LB: Yeah, I mean, you know, you start to interrogate it and you go, you know,
this doesn't make sense at all. I mean, when you talk about what people eat, this
is one of my favorite ones. When you do blind versus branded taste tests, you
know, the differences are huge. So, I've seen a good example of this with beer,
where you asked people to rank a bunch of brands, some of the most, the
biggest beer brands in the UK.
This was a while ago. And you get them to rank them on blind tests and you get
them to rank them branded. And the rankings are completely different, and in
[00:41:00] particular, the brand, which I won't name, which people think in
branded tests is the best tasting beer and the one that they pay most for, is the
one that on blind tests they think tastes disgusting.
Um, so, you know, people go, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, this is the best beer’. And then,
then actually when you do it blind, they don't like the taste of it at all. And this,
this applies to all sorts of things. So actually I had a little experience a couple of
days ago, so a friend came to stay with me from out of London, and we went to

the shop to buy some beer before dinner, uh, and she went to go and pick up -
again, I probably shouldn't name the brand, so I won't name the brand.
She went to pick up a particular brand, and we said, she's a great traveler. She's
a, you know, somebody who like goes all around the world and loves, you
know, backpacking and all this. [00:42:00] She went to pick up what she
thought was a brand from Country X. Uh, I'm mindful of not getting sued here.
And she was, you know, ‘yeah, I always buy this because it's the taste of
Country X.’
And I said, You do know that that's a fake brand that has just been created
within the UK, brewed in the UK, to have, you know, these Country X
credentials. And I later sent an article from a marketing magazine about how
they've done that. I bet you can now guess which brand I'm talking about.
LB: Yeah. She goes, ‘I'm never going to fucking buy that brand again!’ But you
know, she just totally, you know, she just bought into the image and you know
‘It's the best tasting’ and I believe you get similar effects amongst wine tasting
professionals. They don't know what they're talking about.
MAF: Well the brand, let's just put it that brand helps guide them less.
LB: Well, [00:43:00] there is another way of thinking about things, which is
that actually, if you think you're having a brilliant dinner, you know, with
wonderful wine and wonderful food - that's the real experience.
And, you know, so there was an academic who said, we taste with our minds,
not with our mouths. I can't remember who said that, but, I've learned this
myself. We're going to completely run out of time before we talk about any of
the things you wanted to do.
MAF: This has been wonderful.
LB: But I learned this myself in that, when I cook for my family, which I don't
much anymore, actually, because they hate my cooking, but I realized that
actually the way that I present the food - so how it's arranged on the plate, the
colors, and what I say about the food - affects how they'll [00:44:00] present it.
So, you know, if you sort of put it down on the table and it looks brown, and
you say, Yeah, this is probably not very good, I'm sorry, you know, it was all I
had time to. They'll hate it.

You know, it's the sizzle, you know, is the sausage to some extent,
MAF: We'd call that the illusion of effort.
But I would, you know, I think this does connect, to the topic of the podcast
because for us, behavioral science gives us some of the how to get to that liking.
It gives us some confidence that if we use these tactics, like the illusion of
effort, like social proof, it gives us some of the ways to better increase the
chances that they're going to feel that way when they go.
So I think it's very applicable and it directly connects.
LB: I mean, it has lessons for life beyond advertising and marketing. I mean,
like, for example, one of the, [00:45:00] behavioral economics findings, you
know, about cognitive ease, you know, that thing, for example, if something is
written in handwriting, that's easy to read, people are more likely to believe it.
So there's an immediate lesson for any kid that's, you know, doing an exam, you
know. That applies to everything in business, you know if you just make sure
your slides, you know, look, put a little bit of effort into making sure that they're
nicely legible and not too ugly, then you're going to have the audience on your
side a bit more.
RS: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there. There's a broad theme for
behavioral science, which is often when we're faced with a complex problem, a
complex question, you replace it with an easier question that gives us an almost
a good answer.
LB: Yeah. Exactly.
RS: The complex question might be, is this salesperson going to, you know,
trustworthy, deliver on what they say, [00:46:00] selling an amazing products?
That's all very hard to work out. What's easy to work out is, are they smartly
dressed? Do I like them? Are the slides put together really well? So sometimes
those simple questions are used as a proxy for the more deep and meaningful.
LB: And of course, when you're thinking about market research with
questionnaires, you know, these long questionnaires with, you know, which of
these brands do you think is most innovative and which, you know, is this good
value for money?

The real answer to those most of those questions is ‘I have no idea.’ I mean
value for money in particular I have a bit of a be in my bonnet about that
because I don't think people know how to answer that question. I mean what we
like to think is that value for money is a trade-off between the quality of the
goods and services and what you pay for them. I mean, asking people what the
price is, is hard enough.
Asking people about the quality is hard enough. Getting them to work out the
trade-off is [00:47:00] really hard. So I suspect a lot of the time when you ask
people about value for money, what they simply go is, which one's the cheapest,
I think. But in general, what happens is when they ask all these questions on a
questionnaire, they go, ‘I have no idea.
I have no idea. I have no idea.’ What's an easier question: Have I heard of it?
Do I like it? So we haven't really talked about the “Have I heard of it” bit, the
mental availability bit. So I said at the beginning, I'm not an academic. Um, but
the academics working in this space who are really hardcore are the ones at
Ehrenberg Bass in the University of Southwest Australia, Byron Sharpe and his
group.
And what they will tell you is that the biggest single influence is simply what
they call mental availability, which is how easy the brand comes to mind, the
cognitive ease [00:48:00] of thinking about the product in any given situation,
how easily the brand comes to mind, any relevant sort of buying situation or
prompt.
So what tends to happen is, if you've heard of a brand, if it's well known, you
know, you, you immediately think it's one of the big brands in the category.
You will tend to think it's good because it's big and it's well known and it's
good. You know, familiarity of a, with a product tends to lead to more, a higher
rating.
And then on top of that, if it comes to mind is the first thing. And if it comes to
mind with some positive associations, a funny cartoon dog, nice music, a logo I
like and stuff like that, that also influences people's decisions. And those two
things are also bound together because people tend to like things that are
familiar.

RS: So how does that link with your [00:49:00] and Peter's finding that fame-
driving campaigns are particularly effective.

LB: Absolutely. So, I mean, what we tend to find is that the more you move
awareness-type measures, you know, the better the effect. So, prompted
awareness is good, spontaneous awareness, even bigger, better. The more
awareness measures that move the better, and at the top level, fame, where you
know, I know this brand, I immediately think of this brand, I know, you know,
this brand and think of this brand.
We talk about this brand is one of the brands in culture. When you get to that
level of fame, it seems to be a multiplier. That just makes everything work
harder, by our estimates about four times harder.
RS: So fame isn't the same as awareness then? You're saying it's, ‘I know that
you know’, is that the difference?
LB: I mean, fame is like, I mean - [00:50:00] so awareness is really just first
base, you know, like, yeah, I've heard of, uh, I'm just looking around to see if I
can see a brand. Um, I don't know. Uh, I've heard of Kia cars, for example, you
know, of course I've heard of them. Everyone’s heard of them. When I'm
thinking about buying a hatchback or whatever, does Kia immediately come to
mind?
Maybe not. Um, when I'm thinking about, I don't know a sports car, does Kia
come to mind? Almost certainly not. Really famous brands would be the brands
that, you know, that like they’re the default brands in the category, but also
they're kind of, they're bigger than that - They're ones that people, you know,
people - Rolls Royce and Lamborghini and Porsche, and these sorts of brands
are brands that people think and talk about [00:51:00] when - even when they're
not buying a car, you know, and brands like Nike and Apple and Google, they're
part of the cultural conversation.
There's not that many brands that can get up to that level, but it's - I'd say mental
availability and salience is a higher level than mere awareness. And then there's
fame, which is when you really get to the level that people are talking about
you. I mean, I would like to say that the work, the best work that we did for the
John Lewis department store in the UK, that really was famous because people
really were talking about it. It doesn't happen very often. And it's the fame and
emotion all go together because it's almost impossible to do famous work.
without tapping into people's emotions. People don't talk about stuff that doesn't
make them feel or something.

You know, nobody goes to the, down to the pub and go, ‘Hey, I got this mailing
this [00:52:00] morning that had some great proof points’. No, they don't do
that, do they? No.
MAF: Les, as we're coming to the close on our time together, I was hoping that
you might do some lightning round things with us. Richard and I had a few
questions we couldn't live without asking you about.
So could we do maybe two or three lightning round questions, then we'll come
to a close? Okay. In ‘How Not to Plan’, you included a chapter on ‘consistency
matters’. And this really raises the idea about creative wearout. Can you share
your thinking on creative wearout? Is it exaggerated? Is it how should marketers
think about it? And what's caught on?
LB: Where research has been done, it suggests that most ads don't wear out.
Ads are rarely run for long enough for them to wear out. There [00:53:00] are
exceptions. So the exceptions are rational ads that are time limited, like new
product launch or sale on Friday. Most ads don't wear out.
MAF: And do you - and where will you get rational ads that wear out? There's a
time element that you just spoke about. Is frequency the other consideration
when you're thinking about wearout or there's just not enough exposure to be
concerned about it?
LB: Well, the thing is - rational advertising is about getting a message across.
And therefore, once you've got the message across, you don't need to do it, run
it anymore.
Brand advertising mostly doesn't work that way. It's about creating a feeling and
you can run it again and again and again. Having said that, there is an issue of
reach versus frequency. So, reach is more efficient than frequency.
And you should go for reach first, frequency second. And then [00:54:00] once
you've done that, I mean, most people don't have the budget - once they've built
up reach, they don't have the budget to run it enough times to piss people off.
MAF: Excellent. Richard, you're up. Thank you. Les.
RS: I heard you recently talk about price effects being the dark matter of
effectiveness, and I thought this was a wonderful phrase.

Can you, can you explain what you meant by that, please?
LB: Yeah. Almost everybody, when they're measuring the effects of
advertising, looks at it in terms of sales volume. I mean, a lot of the stuff is
measuring things like tracking measures, which is mostly bullshit. You should
be measuring the sales effects.
But the other thing that advertising can do, so advertising does raise your sales
level above where it would otherwise have been. But the other thing it can do is
reduce price sensitivity and enable you to charge more. And that's the other half
of the advertising effect, and that's rarely measured, [00:55:00] and where it is
measured, you tend to find that that's the more profitable half.
So, you know, it's like physicists say we haven't measured most of the
advertising, most of the matter in the universe, because of dark matter. We
have, we routinely ignore most of the profit that comes back from advertising
because it comes on the price side, not the volume side.
RS: So there's a real danger people are underspending on advertising if their
own, if they're judging what the right amount to spend on just based on half of
the effectiveness, volume uplift and they're ignoring price sensitivity. Yeah.
Fascinating.
MAF: And I think the last add on that is Richard and I have spent a lot of time
talking to marketers about thinking more broadly about their mandate. And of
course, price is part of the mandate of how you look at being effective
marketers. But as, you know, as brands have evolved, pricing has sometimes
become the discipline outside of marketing, but, you know, traditional four
[00:56:00] Ps, seven Ps, whatever the, you know, the number is, the price is a
critical, um, component of how we make sure brands are successful.
LB: Absolutely.
MAF: Final question, Les. And this one, we are now into things that interest
you. Things that you are, you're reading right now or watching that have got you
thinking. We ask every guest who joins us, what's got Les Benet thinking, and
excited or interested right now?
LB: Well, it wouldn't be about marketing or advertising because that's a trivial
subject.

I mean, what we, what we do for a living is really quite trivial. Now, uh,
physics. So, uh, I, I trained as a physicist, and my daughter, who's 17, looks like
she's going to become a physicist as well. And that has got me [00:57:00]
interested in physics again. So most of my reading, when I'm not reading The
Economist or whatever, is about, um, things like electromagnetism.
MAF: Fascinating. Amazing.
Do you think that your passion, your studying it as a young man had any effect
on her decision or she naturally came to this all on her own?
LB: Well, it is weird because it was unexpected and I certainly haven't pushed
her in that direction at all.
I think it might be, to some extent, sort of genetics actually. Her way of thinking
is very similar to mine. So the relevant thing is, I approach thinking about
advertising as a physicist.
And Peter Field, my co author, is an engineer, so when we think about
[00:58:00] advertising, we think about it with that kind of physics and
engineering mindset.
MAF: Listen, we can't thank you enough for taking time to be with us today. A
wide ranging discussion covering many, many topics. And what we'll do as we
always do is drop all the source material that we spoke about today, references
that Les made, that Richard and I made will go into the show notes and we'll
make sure that as folks are listening and watching, they're also able to do some
follow up learning on their own.
LB: Okay.
MAF: Thank you, Les. Until next time, I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
RS: And I'm Richard Shotton.
LB: And I'm Les Binet!
MAF: Thanks for being with us.
LB: Thank you. It's been fun.

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