In an interview on The Future of Advertising

How did you become interested in advertising? ­­­

When I was in college, I was writing for the college newspaper and I found that I really enjoyed when local advertisers would ask us to create our own adverts. That was the start of it – I now have 26 jobs on my resume. I opened my own company in 1990 because nobody else would hire me any more: I was a troublemaker and I found that companies don’t hire you to be the owner! I opened my agency PS Insights with my partners Norm Siegel, Paul Kurnit and Jeff Woll about 20 years ago.

The industry is different now to when you started. How has advertising been affected by ‘the digital revolution’?

The effects are enormous. The advertising business was based on the agency commission model which is dead because the media don’t carry commissions any more. Agencies need to become true partners with their clients again. The industry has been here before, though. The revolution that we are seeing, from television to the media of the 21st century, matches the transition from radio to television in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950 televisions were in less than 10 per cent of American homes whilst radio was in 97 per cent of American homes, but within 15 years most people owned a television, and the radio had been displaced. Television advertising in these early days was just radio commercials with pictures, because advertisers didn’t understand that television was a different medium. What happened then was that a revolution came about headed by a man called William Bernbach. He decided to team up the writers with the art directors: this came to be known as the creative revolution. Nobody has yet done that with the digital medium. Nobody has figured out what the new digital medium is and how people and customers will accept advertising in this new form. Now we are waiting for our next hero to show up.

Let’s talk about your first book, Made to Stick.

Made to Stick is about what makes a message memorable. Why is it that we can all say ‘Call me Ishmael’ and remember this opening line to Moby Dick, and yet none of us can say the second sentence. Made to Stick is a thoughtful, fact-based empirical study about this idea of stickiness.

And what is it that makes a message memorable?

In all of the books I recommend we find the common theme that I believe advertisers should focus on, the customer end benefit – what’s in it for the end user. You can put out a message that says doughnuts are fattening and no one will pay attention to that. But if you put out another message which says that eating two doughnuts is the equivalent of having a breakfast of three eggs, two pieces of bacon, three pieces of toast and a glass of milk, suddenly people see the same fact in a different light. In this example, we see how it is possible to translate vague statistics into meaningful and real imagery.