When I was a junior copywriter at BMP, I wanted to know how advertising worked.

In fact did it work at all?

Sure everyone liked the ads, they were entertaining.

But I never knew anyone who’d seen an ad and gone out and bought something as a direct result.

So why did people pay us to do it?

My mum was a typical housewife, so I thought I’d start there.

So I said, “Mum, why do you always buy Cadbury’s chocolate instead of anyone else’s?”

She thought for a bit, and she said, “I don’t know. It’s got a good name hasn’t it? You see a lot of it around. It’s well known. I suppose they must have a reputation to protect.”

But that can’t be all there is to it, can it?

Because, for a start, Mum didn’t represent every consumer.

She was female, C2D, age 70+.

Her demographic obviously didn’t represent AB’s, or 16-44s, or males, for a start.

But there was something more important to be learned from that chat.

Mum had revealed she was very affected by what other people thought.

That made her an opinion-follower, not an opinion-former.

In fact, most of the population are opinion-followers.

So to get to people like Mum was an expensive proposition.

You would need a massive budget, millions and millions.

So what do we do if we haven’t got a massive budget?

We use trickle-down advertising.

We talk to the people that opinion-followers, follow.

We talk to opinion-formers.

Obviously there are far fewer of these.

But, just as obviously, one opinion-former may affect dozens of opinion-followers.

So it makes more sense to spend our advertising money there.

Triggering these people to create free media.

That’s why opinion-former advertising can work in a market that seems to be made up overwhelmingly of opinion-followers.

Not always of course.

But we need to have that conversation before we start, instead of knee jerking into the same old solution.

Just by having the debate you’ll uncover more effective solutions.

Take media for car insurance, for instance.

If you want older, down-market, opinion-followers, you advertise on daytime TV with a phone number at the end.

These people are either unemployed or retired, so that’s where you find them.

And they aren’t comfortable on the Internet.

So you give them a number where they can talk to someone.

But if you want younger, upmarket, opinion-formers, you advertise in the evening with a website at the end.

These people are working during the day, so you reach them at night.

And they’re too busy to spend ages on the phone discussing it.

So you give them a web address they can just click on.

Something else I learned when I was a junior copywriter at BMP.

The people you think you’re talking to may not really be the people you’re advertising to.

Like all juniors I had to do lots of trade ads.

You can learn a lot about how advertising really works from doing trade ads.

Take beer accounts, I did lots of salesman’s brochures.

These were little leaflets for the sales-force to show to publicans.

There’s a simple equation here.

If pubs don’t stock our beer we won’t sell any.

If they do we will.

So these little leaflets had to persuade the publican to stock our beer.

There was always a DPS about how our beer was “BACKED UP BY A MULTI-MILLION POUND TV ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN”

Usually the brochure was done before the TV campaign.

So we never had any pictures to show.

But it didn’t matter.

The publicans didn’t really care what the advertising was.

Just that it was a “multi-million pound TV advertising campaign”.

Just the fact that we had advertising made them stock it.

And the fact that they stocked it made it sell.

So actually, a lot of the multi-million pound advertising campaigns are really trade ads.

They work just by increasing distribution.

When you understand who you’re really talking to and why, you can put up a much better argument for your work.

You can explain why running a campaign that gets into the language makes financial sense.

Then it isn’t just a vanity project to try to win an award.

Now there’s a reason it needs to be the way it is.

And now you have a much better chance of getting good work to run.