We’re all asking the wrong question
I was doing a speech once, to clients, about creativity in advertising. I wanted to make the point that creativity in our field isn’t like any other field.
So I showed them a slide of a particular chair. It was an upright chair with a brass-finished, square-section tubular frame and a blue velour seat and back. I explained that the chair had been designed by Hans Hoffstedder, the German furniture designer.
He’d used tubing to form the back in a single letter ‘n’ shaped piece. This could then be attached to the simple bent ‘n’ shape that formed the
front legs, and the base of the seat. Simple blue padding then formed the seat and back.
The main design criteria he was working to was to reduce the cost and make for ease of manufacture. It also made the shape easy to stack, and the chair generally hard wearing. In fact it was on display at the Design Museum in Frankfurt. I asked the audience if any of them had seen the chair.
None of them had. I asked them again. They were all absolutely sure they’d never seen that chair. I said I found that hard to believe. I said, “Look under your bottoms. You’re all sitting on it.”
I’d been to the conference centre the day before the speech, and taken a photograph of the chair I knew they’d all be sitting on. Then shown everyone a slide of it, and talked about it. This was a demonstration of the world of advertising.
When we hold something up in a conference room, everyone notices it. In fact everyone’s got an opinion about every single detail of it. But in the real world, no one even notices it. So the real question shouldn’t be, “What do you think of it?” The real question should be, “Will anyone notice it?”
The evidence is, they won’t. It’s estimated that we are exposed to roughly a thousand advertising messages a day. Posters, TV, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines, internet, ambient, tube-trains, bus-sides, taxis, petrol pumps, carrier bags, T shirts.
And that’s just the advertising. Think how much media that isn’t advertising we’re exposed to. Probably well over a hundred times as much.
How many hours will you spend online at Facebook, or on blogs, or emails? How much time reading or sending text messages? How much time listening to your iPod?
Or reading a newspaper, or a magazine, or a book? How much TV will you watch?
It’s all media, and it’s all in competition for your attention. What chance does a single ad have of getting noticed against that blizzard of over-communication?
A lot less chance than the chair you’re sitting on.
