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Why Being Less Wrong Is the Key to Winning in Marketing
Navigate the harsh realities of marketing to uncover the small wins that make a big difference
Aaron Shields
February 25, 2025 • Reading Time: 6 minutes
Four weeks ago, I highlighted a controversial take in my newsletter, “Brand Awareness Is a Deceptive Metric”: awareness isn’t a brand metric.
This week, I’m tackling another take that contradicts standard marketing practice. But it was received well when I tested it in some LinkedIn comments.
The take:
Your marketing shouldn’t aim to be correct. It should aim to be less wrong than the competition.
Four weeks ago, I highlighted a controversial take in my newsletter, “Brand Awareness Is a Deceptive Metric”: awareness isn’t a brand metric.
This week, I’m tackling another take that contradicts standard marketing practice. But it was received well when I tested it in some LinkedIn comments.
The take:
Your marketing shouldn’t aim to be correct. It should aim to be less wrong than the competition.
Do People Pay Attention to Your Ads?
Short answer: they don’t pay much attention to your ads.
And it’s been that way for 80 years.
In the early 1960s, legendary ad man Bill Bernbach sat down with Ad Age editor Denis Higgins for an interview.
Bernbach told Higgins:
Do you know that 85% of the ads don't get looked at? This is a statistic gathered by people commissioned by the advertising business. By the Harvard Business School. And we tried to find out what people think of advertising. We wondered whether the advertising community was loved by the American people. We're not even hated! They ignore us. So the most important thing as far as I'm concerned is to be fresh, to be original—to be able to compete with all the shocking news events in the world today, with all the violence. Because you can have all the right things in an ad, and if nobody is made to stop and listen to you, you've wasted it. And we in America are spending so darn much money for efficiency, to measure things, that we're achieving boredom like we've never achieved before. We're right about everything, but nobody looks.1
85% don’t get looked at.
Pretty crazy, right?
What’s even crazier: despite all of the advances in marketing, that number has been pretty stable since then.
In 2022, the Founder of Amplified Intelligence, Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, gave a talk at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity alongside marketers Peter Field and Orlando Wood.2
Dr. Nelson-Field described a study of 130K ads her company conducted.
And guess what?
85% of ads still got ignored.
85% of ads didn’t pass what Dr. Nelson-Field called the “attention threshold”: the time it takes for an ad to have a long-term effect.
(it’s about 2.5 seconds)
However, this likely not only affects the long-term effectiveness. It likely affects the short-term effectiveness.
According to research, about 50% of the results of an ad are long-term.3
So, if there isn’t a strong long-term effect, the short-term effects are also likely to be low.
Most advertising isn’t that effective.
The Elephant in the Marketing Boardroom
What this comes down to is an often-ignored truth about marketing:
It’s based on probabilities.
A great product placement on the shelf will make it likelier that someone will see it. But it doesn’t guarantee they’ll pay attention to it.
Even the best email subject line might only get you a 40% open rate if you’re lucky.
The power of marketing is a bit like baseball.
The all-time highest batting average is .372.
But that’s enough to win games. And lower averages are enough to win championships.
85% of ads get ignored. But that 15% is enough to build big brands.
It’s not about constantly hitting your marketing out of the park. It’s about being less wrong than your competition.
What Are Marketers to Do?
Marketers typically approach their profession by trying to make things successful.
But if you want your marketing to win, the goal shouldn’t be to make everything successful.
With advertising, getting people to pay attention to 100% of your ads would be unrealistic. Instead, you’d win by having people ignore only 65% of your ads.
They’re ignoring most of them. But they’re ignoring 20% less than the average.
And that’s a significant advantage.
So, don’t spend all your time building the perfect ad that many people won’t see. Instead, spend some time figuring out how to minimize the downside.
That mindset will give you a different approach to marketing and focus some of your time on confronting the reality of the industry.
Onward
Two ways to confront the reality of the industry are to engage in premortems and post-mortems.
Premortems are a technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein, where you look into the future and imagine what can go wrong.4
Post-mortems are when you take time after your marketing has run to analyze it, so you can improve on what worked and minimize what didn’t work.
Many businesses know the value of post-mortems, but few conduct them due to time constraints.
Hopefully, this rethinking of marketing’s aim emphasizes its importance.
Notes
The Bill Bernbach Interview can be found in The Art of Writing Advertising by Denis Higgins.
You can read more about the Cannes presentation in “Understanding the ‘triple jeopardy’ threat of advertising attention” by Stephen Whiteside (note: it’s gated).
A great overview of the long-term effects of advertising can be found in John James’s article “How long does advertising last?” (If you don’t follow John on LinkedIn, I suggest you do. He’s one of the few people who approaches branding realistically on the platform.)
You can read more about Gary Klein’s Premortem method in his article “Performing a Project Premortem.”
P.S. Struggling to make your marketing stand out? Let’s talk. Reply to this email and I’ll set up a free 15-minute call to discuss your problem and see if I can help. No obligations.
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