NPR posted a story a while ago about how humans perceive time slipping by faster as they age. In effect, as we grow older, experiences aren’t as fresh and thereby aren’t as memorable. Robert Krulwich, the NPR reporter, used the ubiquitous first kiss as an example of how we remember firsts differently from those subsequent experiences that pile up as life progresses.

Which led me to a more pointed marketing realization: If a company’s advertising is similar to something that’s been seen before, then doesn’t that make it more forgettable? In other words, less effective, and more expensive?

I realize clients and ad agencies are always striving to create advertising and marketing that’s ground breaking, or at least attention getting. My goal with this Pearl is to encourage you to add this particular piece of first-kiss neuroscience to your list when evaluating whether you’re getting the most for your marketing dollar.

The NPR story quoted Neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine on how your brain deals with repetition and why it dulls your sense of wonder.

"Of course, you can see this in everyday life," says Eagleman, "when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you're not really writing it down anymore. There's nothing novel about it."

Same can be said for familiar advertising.

Say you’re the marketing director of a hotel casino. Casino marketing of late is very, very static from one property to the next. The casino hospitality market is a mature industry – it’s fully entrenched in its audience’s minds, like so many mature businesses are with their customers (auto dealerships, furniture stores, banks…). There isn’t much differentiating one competitor from the other. And nobody in marketing is trying very hard to distinguish his or her property from the one next door.

So, as the casino marketing director, are you doing right by your company to authorize and pay for marketing that smells remarkably recognizable – advertising that could just as easily wear your competitor’s logo? If your target audience has been repeatedly exposed to similar (or non-existent) brand positioning, similar retail promotion, similar entertainment marketing, then your customer’s neural ability to discern your establishment as different from all the other hotel casinos is virtually nil. That “first-kiss” novelty is gone. There’s nothing they haven’t seen before.

That’s money ill spent.

I’m pointing at casino marketing execs and their advertising agencies in this example, but it can be applied to any number of marketing driven businesses. Yours, perhaps?

My friend Stan said leave room for the magic. Stan’s a gifted art director, creative director and advertising savant. He’s been of great inspiration to our agency and always drags a truckload of ideas to every meeting, whether it’s a pre-braining get together, or a full-on, lock-the-doors, ignore-the-phones, scribble-like-mad brainstorm for a new campaign.

We had recently come up with a sharp campaign for a new auto body client and I was writing the TV script. Budget was tight. Bull’s-ass-in-fly-time tight. And as creative director/principal/copywriter, I was trying to button everything up in the script for the :30 TV spot. Experience has taught me that any loose ends left hanging in your pre-planning will reveal themselves as costly mistakes in production and postproduction. So I was trying to think through every angle where a slip-up would potentially blow the bottom line.

At our final pre-production meeting, I was going over the script with Stan and Sarah (account executive), pouring over production details, outlining efficiencies, speculating where hiccups might occur and generally fretting. We were shooting in two days, cutting final audio after that and the thing was due on air the week after. As Stan was listening, he interrupted. “Leave room for the magic.” I stared, somewhat flummoxed. “Let’s not direct it so tightly that the magic can’t happen.”

The spot came together well. And sure enough, two instances of magic occurred. The talent did an unscripted gesture with her hand on the hood of the car and the camera was rolling. Caught it. Used it. And the audio guy said, “Hey, I have this piece of music. It’s different than what you scripted. Wanna hear it?” It was the seed that took the music – and the spot – in an entirely better direction.

Point is: Advertising, marketing, is all about control. Controlling your message. Controlling your audience, your talent, your vendors, your media. Controlling everything. But Stan reminded me, thankfully, that loosening up on the reins is alright. Let the air in and people can breathe. Beautiful things happen when people can simply breathe. Not easy to do when there’s money, reputation, deadlines, sales… when seemingly everything is on the line.

Leave room for the magic. Yup. Right-on, Stan.

For the sake of discussion, overlook the vandalism aspect and slip into the skin of a graffiti artist to see the world through his or her eyes. As a marketer, you might be able to gain a street-smart perspective for reaching your audience when they least expect it.

We humans are conditioned to travel the most convenient path. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Freeways get us from here to there faster, and malls make it easier to wrap up the Christmas shopping. Marketing is no different. The media buying model, for example, has remained relatively unchanged for the past 75 years or so: Find the media that reaches the broadest audiences, secure the best price and place the buy. Repeat until budget is allotted. Simple, easy, convenient.

Only problem is your market-share-stealing, customer-snatching competition is traveling the same trodden path, so theoretically your customer is exposed to both messages, yours and the competition's. Definitively distinguishing your brand and stating your value propositions becomes more difficult and more expensive.

But step into Mr. Spray Paint’s world. Graffiti Guy/Gal sees every square inch of the landscape as a blank canvas for their art. And because graffiti artists boldly splash their message where our unsuspecting eyes are unaccustomed to seeing anything other than a cityscape, we notice it. (Whether we approve of it or not is outside the scope of this Pearl.)

Take that approach as a marketer and suddenly you can accomplish greater impact. You catch your audience’s attention when least expected, and your brand message can be seen in a fresh light, in an atypical setting. There are the obvious legal and moral parameters to heed. But that doesn’t mean you and your marketing agency shouldn’t step out of the regular media-buying/planning model, throw away the creative “rules” and view the world through a different lens. It’s an opportunity to communicate in a fresh way with your customer, rather than strictly following set standards. Here are what a few open-minded companies and agencies have done to get their message seen.

You may never be able to pull off a great ambient ad because of corporate culture or other constraints. But just going through the exercise dusts off synapses that may be going dormant. Plus, when you’re painting with a new brush, it’s simply inspiring to behold the myriad methods humans employ to communicate with each other beyond the Internet, television, magazines and other traditional media.

To view the published article, click here.