Orlando Wood on Advertising

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. In this episode, I'm joined by the most returned guest ever. Yes, that's right. It's Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer at System One and author of not one, but two IPA bestselling books, Lemon and Lookout. If you haven't read them, go and order them. They are genuinely fantastic. I want to catch up with Orlando because he's been a very busy guy. He's up to a lot of things at the moment. He's got his eye on a course. He's preparing some new research for F work later in the year. And we also wanted to just chat about ads because that's fun.

0:40And there's been quite a few ads recently that we got an opinion about and we thought we'd deconstruct them and find out why they work. So this is a great episode. A lot of fun catching up with my old mate Orlando. Here it is. I have got a returning guest. In fact, I've got the most returned guest of guests joining me in this episode, Mr. Orlando Wood. Hello, John. Good to be back. Where's the merch, by the way. I know, I know, I know. We were chatting about this before, weren't we? I need to do better on the merch front, don't I? So this is one of my objectives, I think, in the next quarter. But you are in a studio.

1:13Well, you haven't been in the studio before. I know, I know. Exactly. What do you think? You're on the up. It's great. It does the job. It's so that we can look at you rather than the background, you see. That's the whole idea. Now, for those that don't know you, which is probably about two people listening, because, you know, anyone who's listened to a few episodes would have picked you up. Who are you? What do you do? Who am I? And why are you here? We'll start with a few easy questions. I'm Orlando, Orlando Wood, and I have written a couple of books on advertising effectiveness, on the creative itself and what kind of creative works, you know, generates market share gain, profit gain, sales gain.

1:55And I've worked with the IPA and the IPA's effectiveness database. I've worked with Peter Field, Karen Nelson Field. I work at System One. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer there, and I am Honorary Fellow of the IPA. So I guess my job is to look at what makes for great advertising. Fantastic. You'll also be pleased to know, I did ask ChatGPT, who is Orlando Wood? And you got a fairly good write-up, I have to say. Did I? It was referring to me, was it? It referred to you, and apparently you've demonstrated the power of emotion to make advertising that works. Gosh. I thought it was pretty good. Yeah.

2:32I did try John Evans about 15 times. And I just got this statement. So as of September 2021, the algorithm does not pick up any reference to John Evans. No, apparently not. You're kidding. Or the unsensitive CMO. You're kidding. No, exactly. I did try many prompts. Anyway, there we go. It's what I do in my spare time. I'm very surprised by that. So listen, we caught up last time in Cannes. But what have you been up to recently? Well, at the moment, I'm preparing for some new research to be revealed at the IPA's FWorks conference in October, looking at digital platforms and formats and how to create mental availability in those, you know, using those channels and platforms.

3:15So that's going to be quite an interesting one to look out for. and I've also been, well, thinking about preparing a new creative effectiveness course, which I'm working on at the moment, which I'm very excited about. And it should, you know, series of films for marketing teams who are interested in getting the most, squeezing the most out of their advertising. Very good. Well, I'd love to come back to that because that sounds fascinating. And congratulations on setting that up. But first, let's talk about, is 2023 the year Orlando went digital? Because I've pretty much only heard you talk about digital over the last few months.

3:56Yeah. Well, I've talked a lot about television advertising. But, you know, I suppose I think that's a bit, that's slightly harsh, John. I mean, in my book, Look Out, I did talk about how to generate market share gain and these big, lasting, broad and lasting effects using online video. But we've long known the difference between a TV ad, a print ad and a poster and how to, I suppose, create good work in those sorts of channels. But it just seems to me that in the last 15 years or so, there's been a proliferation of new formats and platforms. And we're still trying to get to grips with, you know, how we create brand building work on those channels.

4:49You know, what's the stage for our brand building show? And also, what does the show look like on those different stages, you know? Exactly. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Because we have been quite binary about it, haven't we? TV is brand building medium and digital is activation where people go to buy. That's typically how it has been used. That's how it's been used. And we fall into trap of only believing that either only does that one thing. But actually, of course, they do elements of both to varying degrees. So what does the research tell you about the ability of, let's say, digital channels to build brands?

5:24Well, they can. And they do it in the way that you might use TV in a sense, in the sense that if you can create an emotional response, you can create mental availability. There's this link between advertising that makes people feel something and its ability to lodge in memory and to create mental availability, which of course leads to growth. And that link you see not just in TV, but you see it in other channels too. I've done work with Meta to show that. We've done work recently with Pinterest to show that. So we're looking at how this principle holds. But the other thing it's worth talking about is the scale of the effect, the degree to which you can expect to see those improvements.

6:17And that's where I suppose the work I've been doing with Karen Nelson-Field, Rob Britton, Peterfield comes in, looking at, I suppose, isolating the effect of the attention that media gets as well as the creative strength. and that really to get the biggest bang for your buck, you need high attention media together with highly emotive advertising and you need to be investing in your advertising above your size if you can, that extra share of voice. So that was one of the things I was talking about. I think that's one of the most important things. I mean, we're all very familiar with excess share of voice and how that drives market share.

7:00But if you're not putting very good creative or not using very good creative for that share of voice, then it's going to be wasted. Equally, if you've got really good creative, you can take that excess share of voice can do more for you than it would otherwise do. And that's what we were saying at Cannes. We were looking at, if you look at campaigns which have poor emotive strength, low attention media and negative extra share of voice, you're not going to achieve very much. If you improve your creative, that will get you a bit further in terms of the effects that you see. But still, if you're using low attention media and not investing enough, you're not going to be really where you want to be.

7:40What you really want, of course, ideally, is the triple opportunity we were talking about, which was emotive advertising, high attention media, and positive extra share of voice. Yeah, so very much medium and message being both important. And before we move on, if you can, what are the ways in which advertisers can achieve an effective message. So what would you advise advertisers to do to achieve that? Because I think a lot of people listening might have grown up in the kind of social media world where things are very quick and fast-paced and cut down and so on. But how do you create the kind of work that captures attention?

8:19Well, what I try and do in my books and in my work is look at the style, how different styles of advertising create different types of effect and different scales of effect. So an ad which we might recognize as being a performance ad, which is quite rhythmic, quite mechanistic, words on the screen, no sense of live time, just short, sharp cuts, probably quite self-conscious in the way that it looks and feels. That's going to work most likely on those people who are already primed to like the brand or who are in the buying decision mode in that window. It's not going to work because it's largely very uninteresting if you're not either of those things on a broader population.

9:13So what you need to create growth over a longer period, lasting growth, is advertising that assumes no inherent interest in the brand or product but creates interest in the brand or product, lodges it in the memory. And that's achieved, as I've shown, through advertising that involves the living, people, movement, a sense of lived time, dialogue, betweenness. So like us here now, you know, people talking to each other, character incident and place, as I describe, music. Those sorts of things create an emotional response. They also capture and hold our attention better than that sort of mechanistic advertising.

9:58And they're going to lodge your brand in memory better. And it all, you know, my research was inspired by the brilliant work of a scientist, Ian McGilchrist, who talks about the two halves of the brain and the different types of attention associated with it. I do want to talk about this because I've actually been listening to his audio book. So we'll get into this. But just before we do, you even came up with a new tagline to describe what you're talking about. Can you tell us what that was? What do you mean, which tagline? Motto e azione. Which tagline? Orlando, this was the pinnacle of your canto.

10:34No, it was. Sorry. Let me remind you. Thanks for the prompt. Motto e azione. Si. So, motto e azione is something I talked about at Cannes. And it refers to actually something that 17th century Italian artists and sculptors talked about, which was the way in which, I mean, it means molto as in to move, for movere, and azione is action. So it's the sort of emotion expressed through the body and face at an emotional turning point in the action. And if you look at art from that period, you see that it's like stills from a film, you know, the most emotive moment, you know, the boy being bitten by a lizard, you know, that sort of thing.

11:23And actually, it tells us a lot about what works in advertising. and a certain kind of advertising, brand building advertising that lodges in memory, creates both present and future earnings, by the way, is the sort of advertising that involves people connecting movement and that sense of a turning point. You know, our hero's luck is changing, perhaps. And that sense of suspense, action and resolution is something that agencies, particularly in the 70s and 80s here in the UK, I think really intuitively understood. And I talk about CDP in particular, Collette Dickinson-Pierce, who were masters at this, if you think about some of the ads that they made, like Heineken refreshes the parts.

12:15Well, that was pursued later on by the offshoot, Howard Lowe-Spink. and then also you know you've got the hamlet cigars with the the the sort of change in the face and expressions and then the sort of happiness is a cigar called hamlet so so that movement in the face and body is really important for holding attention now you mentioned in the gilchrist and as i was saying to you uh i'm actually in fact i remember pretty much after we first met you suddenly came over with this enormous book and just said he's written another This changes everything. I remember you were deeply struck, weren't you, by mastering his chemistry and how profound it was.

12:58And what you've done, I think, uniquely has applied that body of work to advertising. And I say, you know, me as someone who's kind of consuming it from you, it really does change how you see advertising. it's almost like the world and the people and the world yeah yeah it's almost like looking under the bonnet and go oh right that's how this works then kind of thing and i say i'm just listening to the audio version of it now and it's just fascinating and and it you know i i mean people really say this too much but it does change how you see the world you know it really does so for anyone that's which i imagine most people haven't read yet the full books it's it's quite it's quite um you know prolific can you describe um what ian mcgill chris has done through his research and why that book in particular and his work is so profound when it comes to yes advertising uh and it's you know i mean do read it yourselves uh because it it you know it's difficult to do it just well i tell you i tell you what like no no no worry about if you listen to the audiobook right it's two hours of introductions caveats context background before you get into the book itself right but even those two hours are really interesting because he basically talks about what you can and can't conclude and that you know for a scientist that's so precise the amount that he says is still yet unknown or you have to take this in context or you know it's not as absolute as you get told but you know one of course one of the things he starts off with is the popular myth that the left and right brain do different things which has been debunked a long time ago but what i found fascinating is he talks about how that's actually held back the whole research of the brain because people People have gone, well, we're not going to look at hemisphere and how it works because of this.

14:37That's right. But actually he's discovered it's not that they do different things, they do things in different ways. They do things differently, different takes on the world, different priorities and different modes of attention, which should be of interest to anyone in working in advertising. And he talks about, I mean, the two hemispheres, first of all, are quite different in the way that they're put together, if you like. the left hemisphere prioritizes information within transmission within local localized brain region, whereas the right hemisphere has got more branching, more overlap. It's bigger and heavier than the left hemisphere.

15:14It's got more myelin. That's the white matter that helps to speed transition. So it's more associative in the way that it passes things around. And he talks about this, not just in people, but in other animals, in birds, and how these two hemispheres, they're quite separate. They're bridged in the middle, but they're really quite separate things. and the left hemisphere likes to have this sort of narrow beam attention which looks very close up at things and likes to abstract things from its context, break things down to smaller parts. So if you think of a bird pecking around on the ground, you know, it's the left hemisphere controlling the right eye that takes the worm or the grub from its context and identifies it, categorise it.

16:06Oh, it's one of those. It's okay to eat. That's what the left hemisphere likes doing and same in people. Now, the right hemisphere is all the while using the left eye to look around it and make sure that it's vigilant for things that might be a threat or there might be a mate out there. So it's largely looking around for social context and trying to understand, make sure it doesn't become someone else's lunch probably. So that sort of holds in people too, but Ian's work goes into much greater depth than that. And he talks about the left hemisphere being, and this is quite interesting,

16:52it's more susceptible or relies more on dopamine, the hormone, which is all about seeking and reward and that sort of goal orientation. whereas the right hemisphere is more susceptible to noradrenaline which is the hormone that's all about vigilance and broad awareness but also the formation and retrieval of memories so you've got these quite different brain habits just just right there you know so the left hemisphere is very goal orientated it likes to break things down to smaller parts it likes to categorize. It can't really understand live time, only snapshots, if you like. It likes things to be fixed, repeatable, unchanging, so that it can control and manipulate them.

17:44And it also can't really understand music, only very basic rhythm. It likes tools with which to manipulate the world. and it you know language is one of these signs symbols these are all things of the left hemisphere but the right hemisphere all the while which presents the world to us and offers up you know sort of prioritizes things for the left hemisphere to to look at has this broad beam attention it's open to social context to the living to things that are happening just slightly off stage you know, just sort of the edge of our awareness, if you like. And it's interested in people, intonation, expression, more intimately involved in expression and understanding of emotion through the body.

18:31So it understands body language and, you know, the context of any given room. And it's really understanding of things on two levels as well. Metaphor and humor tells the difference between a joke and a lie. The left hemisphere can't do that very well. and things to do with live time, space, and depth, and music, all to do with the right hemisphere. So if you kind of start to understand these things and the habits of thinking of the two hemispheres, and you think about the two types of advertising I was describing not long ago, actually the two hemispheres map quite neatly onto these two styles of advertising that have developed over time.

19:15One that's broad beam and broad reach, that how do we attract the attention of people who are maybe not in the buying mode right now, but lodge it in memory? Well, through right brain kind of work, and that's people, dialogue, all those things. If you're in the buying mode, and the left hemisphere is also more intrinsically involved in sort of choice, then it's the left hemisphere sort of advertising, performance advertising that will nudge you towards a purchase at the right time, you know, assuming you've been primed to like the brand and you're in the buying moment. So those two, understanding the way those two hemispheres work and the type of attention associated gives us a really good starting point for understanding how advertising itself works, how to get the most out of it.

20:04It really does. And he talked about going back to the 70s and 80s and some of the famous work there. What I noticed was interesting is how he talks about how much we use different parts of the brain, reflects them, you know, what we rely on. So he was kind of saying, you know, if you use, because I think he was also saying that the left and right are both used all the time, but in different kind of percentages or whatever sort of thing. So, and he was saying, if you know, use one to 100%, the left 100 % and the right to say 90%, it's not that you're going to get roughly that ratio. What happens is you, over time, you'll become dominant in a particular way of thinking.

20:39It sort of strengthens the synaptic. Yeah, it becomes like a muscle, doesn't it? Because, you know, I guess brains are lazy and therefore we do what's easiest for us. So you do see different modes becoming more dominant. And also I think, hence the name of his book, actually the left brain tries to control the right brain and dictates the right brain, hence the mastery of his emissary as an analogy sort of thing. So in your research, have you seen a trend with left and right brain advertising over time? In both my books, Lemon and Lookout, I look at that trend and, you know, looking at a snapshot of advertising going back 30 years, you can see this quite marked shift towards the left brain, you know, left brain advertising, this narrow beam advertising from about 2006 onwards.

21:28and it's sort of been getting largely more pronounced over the last 15 years or so. And that ties in with what other people, Peter Field in particular, have shown about the loss of long-term efficiency or effectiveness in that same period. So you get this shift towards just very direct and narrow beam and attention advertising that doesn't work as well if it isn't accompanied by that broad bean brand building advertising. How much of it do you think is driven by the platforms themselves? Because, I mean, you're referencing back to 2006. The obvious correlation to draw is that that was really the start of social media becoming, you know, mobile devices becoming more sophisticated and social media becoming a serious kind of media.

22:25How much of it is that versus kind of general trends that we might see? Or is it impossible to kind of pull apart in that way? You know, you can't totally pull them apart. But, you know, in the books I talk about this shift, which I think, by the way, you see not just in advertising, but in culture more broadly. This left brain dominance, you know, in programming, in film, in, you know, when you get left brain dominance, it's not a particularly happy time, generally speaking. because I think you can trace it as I do and as Ian does in other periods in history and in the art of other periods. It's to do with, I strongly believe, digitization and getting to grips with this new digital world.

23:08You know, the left brain likes tools. And, you know, we're using the left brain increasingly, all of us, to work with these tools. and then so as you say you know habits of thinking start to form which are better suited to the left hemisphere and you know you get this sort of shift and there's a cultural shift that's happened a very much for anyone who's you know over 40 will have realized and seen this cultural shift happening very rapidly actually in the last 20 years you know that leads to less humorous films being made and advertising, by the way, and a very marked change in style. And even just the way people talk and the literalness and the directness that you might see more today.

23:58So yeah, you get this shift and that's probably, I suspect, strongly down to digital transformation. Yeah, makes sense. Now something you talked about earlier is how the left and right brains regulate our attention and they have different types of attention as well. And again, creative can have a big difference, can't it, in terms of how much attention is created through, I guess there's the attention that's created through the platform, which Karen Nelson-Phil does a brilliant job of revealing, which is quite profound. But the creative itself, actually, there's a huge difference, isn't there, or elasticity in the amount of attention that it might create.

24:33And you get, so what Karen and I have both seen, I think, and talked about together, is that if you've got two, let's call it a left and a right brain ad or you know and you put them both on the same low attention platform there won't be that much difference in how much attention is afforded you know to to them but if you put them on a high attention platform the right brain ad will get much more attention than the left brain ad the higher the inherent attention paid to you know a channel or a medium the more likely your creative is going to work your right brain creative is going to work uh so that that you get that you know boost with a with a higher attention i think you've proven as well that it improves uh recall as well of the brand after yes so i mean just simply the you know the the amount of attention that's paid to to the medium itself can extend or improve mental availability there's that link between the two that karen points to but when you layer in the creative as well you know then that you need and what i mean what kind of difference are you talking about here like two or three percent or two or three times i mean what what's the what how big is that yeah i mean the the recent research we looked at you know suggested that on those high attention platforms a highly emotive ad is going to you know give you 10 20 percent more attention time if you like much less so almost on the low attention platforms but you know emotion has a much greater role than simply just extending the attention paid to your advertising because it helps to put it in memory and it helps to lodge it in memory and to create that mental availability that we open by talking about Yeah, it's amazing, really.

26:32I mean, you know, we're all familiar with the ESOV idea, but the impact of your media choice and then the impact of your creative choice has a dramatic impact on that. So, I mean, either you can take the same investment and achieve much more actual share of voice or with a smaller budget, you can achieve the same. It's quite profound, has quite profound impacts on. It does. It does. And that's one of the things we looked at at our recent study using ACA effectiveness data. And by the way, we're doing a repeat in a few weeks time for anyone who didn't catch us at Cannes. Very good. Your talk was incredibly popular and got some amazing feedback.

27:11So for anyone that wants to tune in, do you have a date for that? 28th is what we're looking at for 28th of September. I will post out details. Keep you posted. fantastic as they say um one of the one of the surprising things actually i i spotted at can was i think there's some evidence that humor might be making a comeback what do you think have we have we passed peak purpose well it may be are we there yes it may be too early to put the uh put the bunting out yes um but yeah no i that was great wasn't it that the the grand one of the grand prix winners was is that apple spot uh which for anyone who hasn't seen it it was sort of the the lizard that you think is dead and uh the guy who's looking after it for his presumably friend you know it's quite a lot good storytelling within a short amount of time actually uh you know uh is about to send a message about i'm sorry you know leon's just died and then suddenly leon flips back and is in is alive you know and uh he can delete the delete the delete the message before anyone sees it any harm is done but i think quite quite neat uh you know way of doing um this is something that jeremy ballmore used to say is that you know if you're using humor then it has to be bound up with the product you know it's not a it's not a separate it's not a separate thing those two things have to go hand in hand and it it demonstrates the virtue of the product I mean, it does it very neatly, you know.

28:45So it's a humorous spot. It's conveying something about the product in a very short amount of time. And it looks quite different from a lot of the work that, you know, we've seen awarded, you know, in recent years. So I take that as, you know, hopefully significance precedes momentum. You know, maybe we'll see more along those lines because humor is a very effective creative approach. And as I think you've documented in your book, But the humour has been declining in terms of being used in creatively award-winning campaigns. And Purpose has been on the up. Yes, it has. So this year, interestingly, I think when we did the System 1 evaluation, we found a big drop in the number of winning campaigns that use Purpose as a communication idea.

29:28In other words, where Purpose is intrinsic to the product, there were just as many of those, which is great, of course, because you want purposeful work to succeed. but where purpose was being used as a creative idea, actually there's a big drop in that and more examples of humour, which is good. Although I do contend, actually, I think humour could be a very good way of delivering purpose. Well, it could be, you know. I think underutilised. It tends to lead to quite worthy and, you know, unhumoured work. Overly serious, you know. But, you know, I think brands of Maltese, I think, have done a nice job on that.

30:04Yeah. No, so if anyone doesn't know that one, that's the disabled girl that's chatting to her friends about her love life. It's very, very, very funny. But the genius thing about that, and the reason I love it so much is she's telling the joke. Yes. Right. And she's, she's got the kind of power of the situation, hasn't she? And you kind of feel like you feel lots of empathy for her. You feel, you very much feel her experience, but you know, it's very funny. Yeah. and you know it makes but it helps you enter into her kind of experience well that's right and that's that's what humour does it makes you kind of relate doesn't it and breaks a barrier down I think again Jeremy Bulmore said this was that it creates a mood of acceptance G.K.

30:43Chesterton wonderful quote humour can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle and that's brilliant that's a very good quote very good quote it does and you've got another phrase similar to that which I also like is what's too silly to be said can be sung which i think i love that is another good example of using music to well that's right and actually music and humor are in some ways conceptually similar they're both about life you know humor is often about inversion transposing something to a different key repetition these are all concepts you get in music as well you know that almost difficult to articulate, but that we kind of intuitively through the right hemisphere understand.

31:30But difficult to put into words, but we know it when we see it type thing. Now, I wanted to quickly ask about one of my favourite contributions of yours to kind of this whole world is fluent devices. I think if I was to start out on a new brand tomorrow and, you know, create a new campaign, I think the very, very first thing I'd do will be thinking about inventing a fluent device for my brand. The evidence is so strong, but, you know, can you explain what a fluent device is and what the evidence, you know, what does the data tell us about how effective it is? It was a term I coined, you know, some years ago now to describe a repeatedly used character through, you know, long running campaign.