How a Principles-Based Approach to Advertising Can Give You an Edge

Increase the likelihood of advertising success

I’ll start with an uncomfortable truth: advertising is not a magic wand. It’s not a silver bullet. Not a guaranteed three lucky 7s. It’s not an all-powerful force that guarantees growth and success if done right. Advertising is a weak force, one of many in a chaotic stew of market dynamics, consumer behavior, and socio-political influences. You don’t control it. You can only nudge it, and even then, your best-laid plans may end up a speck in the rear-view mirror as you pivot and adapt to new (or newly discovered) circumstances.

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In short, if you’re looking for guarantees in advertising, stop. There are none. What you can do—what the best marketers do—is focus on increasing the likelihood of success. This is where you can get an edge over the competition. And specifically because so much of the market is geared towards seeking the illusion of certainty, if you can embrace the principles of good advertising, you increase your chances of being known, understood, and imbued with the right kinds of positive associations. All of which will help get your brand bought, and see you win customers, grow market share, and forge ahead of your competitors.

The Cult of Certainty

Let’s talk about the cult of certainty. It feels like every week, someone new reaches that point of wild confidence way out on the left hand side of the Dunning Kruger curve and describes with uncritical subjectivity that they know how to drive a 2x on your CTR, a 59% uplift in conversions, and double your profits in 12 months. “Follow this framework, adopt this strategy, and you’re guaranteed to crush your KPIs!”. No nuance, no recognition of the other variables in play, no category specific best practise, just the unbridled swagger of a few selectively chosen metrics.

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But here’s the thing: marketing isn’t physics. It’s not governed by immutable laws. It’s messy, unpredictable, and deeply human. What works for one brand might flop for another. The same campaign that sets sales on fire in 2024 might fizzle out in 2025 because the context has shifted. Consumer moods change, competitors move, and external events—pandemics, wars, economic downturns—throw everything off balance.

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As Bob Hoffman, put it: “in marketing, advertising, and media our strategies have no inevitability about them. Just probabilities and likelihoods..” We cling to certainties because they make us feel safe. But in doing so, we set ourselves up for failure.

Advertising as a Weak Force

Although advertising is a major route by which brands can achieve great things, and carve ahead of their competitor set, advertising is actually a weak force. It doesn’t operate in a vacuum. A great ad won’t save a terrible product. A brilliant campaign won’t fix a broken supply chain. And let’s not forget, most people simply don’t care about your brand as much as you think they do.

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As Mark Ritson often reminds us, consumers don’t spend their days thinking about your brand. They’re busy living their lives, and your ad is just a tiny blip in their world. That’s not to say advertising doesn’t work—it does. But it works incrementally, subtly, over time. Its power lies in its ability to nudge, to remind, to build familiarity and mental availability. Not to instantly convert skeptics into loyalists. For me, this wonderfully concise summary by the godfather of effectiveness, Les Binet is an oft revisited guide as to how advertising works, and serves as a valuable reminder whenever you’re planning a campaign and setting expectations.

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The Pragmatic Marketer: Betting on Likelihoods

So, what’s the solution? It’s not to throw up your hands and declare advertising useless. It’s to accept the uncertainty and adopt a probabilistic mindset. The best marketers are not those who chase guarantees but those who play the odds intelligently. They understand that their job is not to buy guaranteed success, but to tilt the scales in their favour.

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This mindset shift is liberating. Once you stop chasing certainty, you can focus on what really matters: improving your chances of success. And the good news is, we have a wealth of evidence-based principles that can guide us in this endeavour.

Principles That Increase the Likelihood of Success

Here’s where we get practical. While there are no guarantees in advertising, there are principles—proven, evidence-based guidelines—that significantly boost your odds. Let’s dive into a few of the most important ones:

1. Reach, Reach, Reach

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have made this abundantly clear: brands grow by reaching as many potential buyers as possible. Forget about hyper-targeting a niche persona. The data shows that light and infrequent buyers are crucial for long-term growth. Broad reach ensures your brand stays top of mind for a wide audience, increasing the likelihood that when someone is ready to buy, they’ll think of you.

2. Balance Brand and Activation

Short-term sales activation is seductive. It’s easy to measure, and it delivers immediate results. But if you over-focus on activation, you starve your brand of the long-term equity it needs to survive. Well known, oft-cited research from Binet and Field shows that the optimal split is roughly 60% brand building, 40% activation. Brand campaigns plant the seeds; activation harvests the crop.

3. Creative Matters More Than You Think

Here’s a hard truth: most advertising is invisible. It’s boring, forgettable, and ignored. But great creative cuts through. Studies consistently show that highly creative campaigns deliver significantly better business results. Creativity amplifies effectiveness because it grabs attention and sticks in memory. But more than just demanding 'better' creative, you should seek out the most appropriate creative routes for the job to be done, for the media environments you envisage, for the audience you wish to engage. Sometimes 'make the logo bigger' isn't the request of an ignorant marketer. Sometimes it's a terrible decision.

4. Consistency and Distinctiveness

People don’t buy what they don’t remember. Distinctive brand assets—logos, colors, jingles—make your brand recognizable and memorable. But recognition is useless without consistency. Your branding needs to show up the same way, again and again, across channels and over time. Consistency doesn’t just build memory; it builds trust. Comprehensive new research from Andrew Tindall and the team at System1, using data from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) effectiveness databank, has reinforced this wisdom, showing how creative consistency leads to stronger brands, and greater profits.

5. Metrics can be misleading

While digital metrics like CTR and Viewability offer a data safety net, they have been gamed, exploited by fraudsters, and even shown to have zero correlation with brand effects. So marketers need to find new ways to assure their leadership teams that they’re on the right path. A focus on human attention, context quality, and measuring brand effects ensures that media investments drive sustainable growth and strengthen the brand's position in the market. Larger brands will also benefit from measurement of Share of Voice and even Share of Search as predictors of the efficacy of their advertising.

6. Test and Learn, Relentlessly

Given the uncertainty of advertising, continuous testing is non-negotiable. A/B test your creatives, experiment with new channels, and iterate based on what you learn. Testing doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it helps you adapt and optimize in real time, improving your odds.

Embrace Uncertainty, Win Big

It’s time to stop pretending we can predict the future. Advertising isn’t a science experiment with controlled variables and repeatable outcomes. It’s a game of probabilities, played in the chaotic real world. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. By embracing uncertainty and following evidence-based principles, you can stack the deck in your favor.

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Be one of those people that leans into the unknown, the unknowable. Reject the cult of certainty, embrace the mess, and focus on what’s most likely to work. It won’t guarantee success, but it’ll give you a damn good shot at it. And in this business, that’s as good as it gets.