Consider feelings not figures in advertising

The ADFX Awards which take place tonight in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre are all about effectiveness – it's the FX part of the name – gongs aren't given out for just looking pretty.

The shortlist – there's a wide range of categories – includes DDFH&B for Supervalu signature tastes campaign, Irish International for Electric Ireland and Publicis for its Trócaire Lent campaign.

Agencies had to provide the organisers IAPI with extensive bottom-line proof of the success of their campaigns.

And while tonight's keynote speaker Rory Sutherland acknowledges that he'll be "speaking to an audience of ad planners" he isn't going be focusing on data.

Sutherland, who is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, talks more about the need for advertising practitioners to understand behavioural science than to focus so hard on numbers and single communications methodologies.

Understanding behaviour

“There’s been more progress made in psychology in the last 30 years than in the previous 100,” he says, echoing a point he has made in one of his many Ted talks. “Good creatives are very good at instinctively knowing how people make decisions; they understand behaviour.”

There is, he says, a problem in the way advertising agencies feel they have to “look like we know what we’re doing all the time” – though maybe ad agencies aren’t the only ones guilty of that particular response.

“There’s a tendency in advertising towards ‘methological monoism’, that there is only one way to solve a problem.”

And in what sounds like the stuff of a fairly testy client meeting he says, “It would be better if we were like GPs. We’d say where we think the likely problem is and then suggest a likely solution.

“And just like a GP we’d have a range of treatments. If one doesn’t work we’d move on to the next one.”

And to those who think data mining is the new frontier, the great panacea, he points to its limitations.

While data can reveal much about the consumer in terms of, say, buying patterns, he says it can’t do many things such as “express fear of regret or dislike of uncertainty”.

And to prove this isn’t some sort of Proustian reverie he gives the solid example of the success of the Hailo taxi app.

“Objectively and numerically, it’s probably not much better than phoning your local cab company in terms of when the cab will arrive.

“But what the app solves is uncertainty. You’re not sitting in your house wondering where the cab is or if it’s going to turn up at all, you can see it approaching. There’s certainty. And psychologically that’s what people want.”