Killswitch

The message is overrated.

The message is overrated.

This is an odd thing for a strategist to say, I know that. But ironically, that is my message in this piece.

The ‘What are we saying’ part of advertising is given more weight than it deserves. We frame it as the irreducible unit of what we do, when it might not even be the most important part. Maybe not even close.

I know, right? Heresy. The legacy architecture of advertising, from briefs, to propositions, to taglines, to copy testing, all of that is built on an assumption that the job is to say something to someone. Get the message right, say it in the right way, and everything else follows.

The role of strategy is often bound to defining the ‘message’. Strategy works out what to say, Creative works out how to say it… Or at least that’s the cliff notes version. I’ll say this straight up; I don’t buy this framing. I don’t think advertising works by imparting a message, and I don’t think that the role of strategy is to define what that message is.

I’m not alone here. When I ran the Census Uncensored survey last year, I asked the people who make the work, and that includes creatives, producers, designers, and clients, basically all the people who have to work with our strategy documents and turn them into things that exist in the world, what they value most from a strategist. And the answer wasn’t “a clear message.” It wasn’t “a tight proposition.” It was a reframe.

A shift in how you see the problem. A reframe isn’t a message. You can’t put a reframe on a poster. A reframe doesn’t explicitly tell you what to say. It changes what’s possible. It sets a direction. A new one, an unexpected one.

And if the people closest to the work are telling us that the most valuable thing strategy does is not to define a message, it is only natural to wonder why the entire machine is organised around delivering one?

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The transmission delusion

I think the reason we’re so attached to the message is that it makes advertising feel like engineering. A sender encodes a message. A receiver decodes it. Communication happens.

So, it comes as no surprise that the creative industry implicitly adopts a model from engineering to explain how it works. This model is ‘The Transmission Model’.

Except the transmission model was designed for telephone signals, not human beings. The polymath engineering genius who developed it, Claude Shannon, was literally trying to get electrical pulses from one end of a wire to the other. He wasn’t trying to make anyone feel anything. He wasn’t trying to change behaviour. He was trying to reduce noise in a cable. This is the first thing you are taught when you learn about how communication works - the transmission model is a convenient layperson’s shorthand but it’s totally useless as a way to understand how communication works between human beings.

And yet. This is the model that sits underneath everything we do. Craft the message. Brief the message. Test whether the message was received. Did they play back the message? Well… Then it must have worked.

But people don’t walk around with your message in their heads. Ask someone what the “message” of their favourite ad is and watch them struggle. They’ll tell you if they thought it was funny. Maybe they’ll tell you how it made them feel. They’ll describe a scene, a character, a song. They can pass judgement on whether or not it was ‘clever’. But honestly, they might not even remember what brand it was for, let alone what it was saying. What they retained wasn’t a message. It was something residual and irrational. Maybe a vibe. Perhaps a shift in how they felt about something. More likely than not they won’t be able to articulate what changed.

J.L. Austin was a philosopher, not an advertiser, though he’d have been an interesting one. Austin separated what he called locutionary acts (saying something) from perlocutionary acts (doing something by saying it). “I now pronounce you married” isn’t a message. It’s an action. The words don’t describe a state of affairs, they create one.

The best advertising is perlocutionary. It doesn’t say something, it does something by saying something. It creates a feeling, a status, a belonging, a desire, a world to enter. And the thing it creates may have very little to do with the “message” that was in the brief. We might say that advertising works by ‘indirect perlocution’. I’ve previously spoken about Christiaan Huygen’s and ‘entrainment’, a concept from physics, indirect perlocution has a similar lilt.

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Well hydrated gorillas

Cadbury Gorilla. What’s the message? “Chocolate is joyful”? Sure, you can reverse-engineer one. You can always reverse-engineer one. We often find ourselves doing precisely that. But the ad doesn’t work because of that message. It works because a gorilla plays the drums to Phil Collins and something inside our mind opens up. Any message is a rationalisation after the fact. The feeling came first.

Guinness Surfer. “Good things come to those who wait”? Maybe. But that’s not why people remember it. They remember horses made of waves and a sense of something epic and ancient. The message is wallpaper. The energy is the ad.

Apple 1984. The “message” is something about IBM being Big Brother and Apple being freedom. Fine. But the ad works because of the spectacle, it felt like an event. The message is the excuse. The disruption is the point.

Liquid Death. What’s the message? “Water is punk”? “Hydration is metal”? The message is almost deliberately stupid. The brand works because of posture, tone, speed, and an unwavering commitment to the bit. It’s pure perlocution. It does something to your perception of the category by existing in it wrong.

I don’t need to keep going. Most of the work people love and remember and talk about is work where the “message” is either banal, absent, or beside the point. The work succeeds because of something else. Energy, world, posture, disruption, feeling, format, surprise. Things that don’t fit in the message box in a brief.

Which brings us to the brief.

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Excuses

The creative brief, in most agencies, is essentially a written definition of a message-delivery mechanism. Everything funnels toward a proposition. One single-minded sentence. The thing we want to say. And every other element of the brief exists to support, contextualise, or justify that sentence.

It’s here that the misunderstanding about how reality works becomes a systemic, structural issue. The brief doesn’t just contain a message, it is itself a message. It tells the creative team: your job is to find an interesting way to say this thing.

What happens next is predictable and all too familiar. The team presents work in a review. The strategist checks it against the proposition. “Is the message coming through?”, “What’s the takeaway?” These are the wrong questions. Or at least, it’s just one question, and it’s being asked as though it’s the only one that matters. Perhaps because it’s the remit where people feel most comfortable offering feedback?

The brief, constructed as usual, forecloses possibility before anyone’s had a creative thought. If you start from “what do we want to say?” you will end up with an ad that says something. Many would argue that is no bad thing, but what I am saying is that is a narrow-minded and restrictive way to look at things.

Wittgenstein talked about the ladder. You use it to climb up, and then you throw it away. The proposition, the strategy, the message — these things are good ladders. They often help you to get to the work. But the work shouldn’t still be carrying them around. The work should be standing on its own, doing its own thing, creating its own meaning.

But what we’ve done is built an industry that keeps dragging the ladder into the room and asking everyone to admire it. “Can you see the ladder? Is the ladder clear? Did the focus group mention the ladder?”

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The irreducible unit

So if message isn’t the irreducible unit of what we do, what is?

I think it’s change.

Not “what do we want to say?” but “what shift are we trying to create?” What do we want to be different? In how people feel, what they believe, how they behave, what they reach for, who they think the brand is for?

Sometimes a message will achieve that change. Sometimes the clearest, most efficient path to a shift is just to tell people something they didn’t know. New product. New feature. New price. Fine. Message away.

But often, maybe even most of the time, the change requires something other than a message. It requires a tone shift. A cultural gesture. A format disruption. A provocation. A product. A world. An action. A big change can be created by something small or something big.

And if your brief lands on a box for a message, you might struggle to get to any of those responses.

Here’s what changes if you take this seriously. Strategy doesn’t define a message and throw it over the fence. Strategy defines the change, the shift we need to create in how people feel, think, or act. Then strategy and creative figure out together how to achieve that shift. What’s the mechanism? What’s the move? Maybe it’s a message. Maybe it’s a stunt. Maybe it’s a product. The point is, the fundamental question; “how do we create this change?” - is not an entirely creative question, and it is not entirely a strategic one. It’s both. It lives in the overlap.

Afterwards creatives can take that mechanism and make it real in the most compelling, most attention-grabbing, most memorable way possible. Which is what they were always supposed to be doing, except now they’re not finding a slightly more funny way to transmit a sentence. They’re bringing a shift to life.

Strategy defines the change. Strategy and creative collaborate on the mechanism. Creative makes it real. That’s a better model. It’s not even radical. It’s just honest about where real, generative creative leverage is.

So why doesn’t it usually work this way already? Why does the message persist?

Two reasons, I think. And neither of them is that a focus on a message is a particularly effective approach to creativity.

First: message is easy to test. You can put a message on a card and ask people in a focus group whether they understood it. You can measure recall. At least half of the research infrastructure of advertising is built around evaluating whether a message landed, which means message isn’t really a strategic concept, it is in fact a measurement concept. And things that are easy to measure tend to survive, whether they matter or not. If you apply Goodhart’s Law to advertising you might say when the message becomes the measure, it ceases to be a good strategy?

Second, and this is the one that’s a bit more angsty: the message lets everyone stay in their lane. Strategy writes the message. Creative illustrates the message. The client approves the message. Nobody has to sit in a room together and figure out the answer to a question that doesn’t have a predetermined shape. Message is a handoff mechanism disguised as a strategic tool. It survives because it produces the most organisationally convenient work, rather than the best work.

The best work I’ve been part of didn’t start with a message. It started with a clearly defined change we wanted to create, and what followed was a genuinely collaborative argument about how to get there. The message model discourages that argument. It replaces it with a series of fences to lob a proposition over, where each person gets to have a fiddle with it and then chucks it into the next door neighbour’s garden.

And all the most effective advertising doesn’t necessarily say something, but it does shift something. Which, ironically, is the message of this piece. I suppose I couldn’t resist having one.