In an interview on The Future of Advertising

On to your next book. Tell us about What Sticks.

What Sticks covers some of the same territory as Made to Stick but they have a more interesting point of view. The authors Rex Briggs and Gregg Stuart believe very strongly that, in order to make any advertising campaign sticky and produce any kind of results, everyone involved must agree on the measurement of success. Time and again advertisers start to do ad campaigns without clear agreement on how to measure how the campaign is working. What Rex Briggs and Gregg Stuart propose is that there be a project leader who is in charge of getting everybody into agreement over what the goals are before the campaign starts. That way everybody knows what they are doing and why they are doing it. The masters of this approach are Procter and Gamble. They don’t put a campaign out to the public until they’ve thoroughly tested it. The minute their campaigns go out, they turn to their agency and say, ‘Start working on the follow-up and back-up campaigns in case the campaign that’s running stops working.’ They are very clear about what a campaign should do and how to measure whether it’s ‘working or not’, and how to measure this. This is the approach that What Sticks is all about.

This seems like an obvious approach: why is it that advertising teams neglect it?

The fault lies with the client who accepts work from agencies who don’t hold their creative teams to the discipline of their marketing teams, who do usually have a clear criterion for success. One of the things I have noticed in the recession is that when the basics should become more important than ever, people just start flailing around and will try anything and everything to get results.