Two Peoples
24 April 2025
George Bernard Shaw famously commented that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.
For as long as I can remember the UK and US advertising industries have run on parallel but distinctly different paths.
The UK industry has always considered itself strong at strategic thinking, at basing creative ideas and media placements on what influences how consumers think, and at measurement that goes beyond headcounts.
The US has always been great at selling; there is none of the snobbery apparent in the UK about being a salesman, no suggestion that marketing is somehow a more thoughtful pursuit than getting out there and selling stuff.
We all want to sell stuff; one approach does so by defining who’s likely to buy and then by understanding what makes them buy. The other does so by assuming that the louder you shout to the maximum number of people the more you’re likely to sell.
One assumes that advertising works best when all variables, like creative message, context, timing, audience align and goes to great lengths to understand what is required to shorten the odds in your favour. The other assumes advertising will work as long as it is seen often enough by as many people as possible.
There’s no right and wrong in this. Different strokes for different folks. And there were ‘different folks’; when global media meant doing deals in multiple editions of ‘The Readers Digest’ the industry celebrated national differences.
Now we have global platforms, offering global solutions. Virtually all are US-based and so solutions naturally emerge from seeing the world through a US-lens.
Differences emerge when we start to deconstruct what is meant by ‘seen’, ‘often enough’ and ‘people’.
The likes of Google and Meta realised early and have exploited brilliantly the reality that he who controls measurement controls revenue.
If you own the platform why would you agree to let anyone from outside your organisation have any control over the measurement levers?
Who needs collaboration when you can have solus control?
But something is going wrong. There is a mass of evidence that advertising on vehicles apparently delivering the biggest audience numbers don’t work as well as ads on those with smaller audiences but more impactful environments.
Maybe people don’t like being bombarded with messages that interrupt, and which are all too often entirely irrelevant.
If the volume audience game doesn’t deliver results, then how long before advertisers start to question its veracity? There is anecdotal evidence that such a thing may be starting to happen.
Meantime, an interesting exercise is to explain to anyone outside our bubble that an ad is said to have been seen if half of it appears on a screen for 2-seconds. Once the laughter dies down you can explain that yes, the world’s biggest consumer goods organisations really do spend billions of dollars on that basis.
Recently I had a client explain to me, very patiently that ‘yes Facebook advertising works for us; we know because Facebook tell us.’ That may not wash for long if sales revenues say something different.
It also must be hard to explain internally that yes, ad fraud now accounts for (let’s be conservative) tens of billions of dollars a year and that no it seems our buyers, amongst the biggest anywhere are doing so little to stop it that this estimated figure appears to increase every year.
Why would a procurement specialist not be concerned at the huge sums being spent advertising to bots? After all, bots don’t buy anything.
To return to the theme, we have got so used to bigger audience numbers equalling better outcomes that we are unprepared to consider any advance that just might result in smaller gross numbers.
Even if smaller numbers are closer to the truth.
Even if smaller numbers are demonstrably connected to better returns for the advertiser.
We need to snap out of this obsession, and quickly.