Good advertising adheres to the principles of marketing science, but great advertising needs more. Great advertising needs thinking.
Comms which allow space for thinking solve specific, unique problems, or lean into one-off opportunities, or harness the power of a creative idea with the potential to supercharge a brand. As an industry we’ve forgotten the power and the value of thinking, and Craft Media London are on a mission to remind everyone of it, through Anti-Ultra Processed Planning, a cookbook full of recipes designed to prompt you to do different, interesting, fun, more effective work by harnessing the power of your brain.
Thinking is the key ingredient of effective communications
Advertising has changed immeasurably in the last 15 years. It’s now a discipline primarily built around data, technology, and adherence to the laws of marketing science. The wealth of data and theory that now informs most planning has raised floor standards of comms enormously. In doing so, however, it has also inadvertently lowered the ceiling. In an attempt to abide by the ‘laws’ of growth, brands mostly now apply the same tactics in their plans as the rest of their category, doing the same things in the same places.
These ‘laws’ of marketing science are great, but they’re a collection of the things that were repeatedly seen in effective work, so they can’t quantify the unique things that made each individual piece of work especially effective: a great idea, a target audience the rest of the category had overlooked, a one-off cultural moment. That’s meant we’ve forgotten the value of thinking, and thinking differently, in communications.
Why thinking gets undervalued
The thing about thinking differently is that the output is always different. Novel. Distinct. Communications are shaped in line with a specific business challenge, or opportunity, or idea, rather than beginning with marketing best practice, and as a result the end product is totally unique, and unique things are impossible to aggregate into quantitative analysis.
The laws of marketing science are totally sound, but work best in service of great thinking, at the moment they’re often used instead of it. When that happens, you create Ultra-Processed plans. Created by following a quick, easy, repeatable process, and designed to deliver the short-term sugar high of easily-measurable outcomes, but over time too much of it undermines the health of your brand. It erodes the competitive advantage a brand creates by weakening distinctiveness, and leaves brands at the mercy of the dynamics of their category and the size of their budgets. Brands need comms that nourish them in the long-term, based on their specific needs, powered by thinking.
How to create more space for thinking in your plans
The industry has plenty of rules to be followed, but too few prompts to inspire creative thinking. That’s why we wrote The Anti-Ultra Processed Planning Cookbook, eight recipes to create nourishing communications with better thinking. Not laws to be adhered to, prompts for you to experiment with, adapt to your own tastes, and combine as best suits your business.
Recipes like ‘Plan for Notice, not Reach’, which challenges the orthodox belief that advertising is processed unconsciously, and doesn’t need to be noticed or understood. That’s true for market leaders trying to build a moat, the dynamics of buying behaviour and inherently bigger budgets stack the odds in their favour. For marketers anywhere else the whole job is to outperform your budget to drive growth. When you don’t have the most money, your plan inevitably requires you to sacrifice and commit - be it by choosing to be for some people over others, showing up at certain times of year rather than every week, or occupying a particular place in culture.
In every instance, the route to outperforming your budget runs through capturing attention. That’s how we ended up putting Perk, a B2B SAAS platform, on a ski slope, or a Brewdog ad with a thrash metal soundtrack first-in-break in Love Island.
Look at the humans, not the crowd
The ‘People, not audiences’ recipe encourages you to see the individual human beings at the other end of your advertising rather than the aggregate. It’s only by looking at them closely you can learn what makes them tick, and how you can influence their behaviour. Laden with techniques to get you away from tools and surveys, thinking about People not audiences is how we helped reverse a 10-year decline in reading rates among teenage boys, or used Strava data to sell B2B security software.
It will help you define and express body language with your comms. In a world of fleeting, low-attention interactions developing a coherent body language allows your brand to stand apart and those tiny exposures to compound. Body language might be about how you show up - in big, bold, mass-viewing environments or among small, in-the-know communities you add real value to - or about defining a unique point-of-view on the world. It’s how we’ve helped brands sponsor the World Naked Bike Ride, or record and release their own singles. It gives your brand distinctiveness.
Thinking multiples other drivers of performance
The recipes included in the book will never demand you deviate away from the proven principles of effectiveness, but they will help all of your communications work harder, command greater attention, and deliver better return on your investment, both immediately and over the long-term. We also guarantee the work will get more fun, and you and your team will enjoy coming into work more.
All profits from book sales fund a bursary to help young comms planners grow their skills via the Media Planning Group
