Commentary

To Make Advertising Better, First Understand Why It Works

by Bill Harvey , Yesterday

Advertising has been around since ~3000 BC when Hapu the weaver wrote the first ad in Thebes.

None of the theories of advertising to date have been comprehensive in adequately addressing the only question that matters as relates to making advertising more effective. That is, "why does advertising work?"

What's needed is a true, comprehensive theory of advertising.

First, what are the requirements for such a theory? It must explain why and how an ad can cause a person to change his or her buying behavior. It must also explain why various specific dimensions of advertising work to the degree and in the way that they do, including reach, frequency, attention, emotion, context, recall, etc. It must be provable or falsifiable based on evidence.

An ad is a stimulus which can be ignored and will still have the potential to rearrange the contents of the brain of someone in range of that ad.

Although the Reticular Activating System (RAS, together with the rest of the brain's salience network) may have suppressed conscious awareness of the ad, it can still have effect on the subconscious mind and the brain.

RAS, together with the rest of the salience network, is the gateway filtering out all the irrelevance for each of us. It measures personal relevance based on the stored subconscious motivations of the individual. Psychology has known that motivation is the cause of all action since Aristotle and even earlier.

If an ad is relevant to our stored motivations, the RAS and the rest of the salience network will cause us to become consciously aware of it. The advertising industry originally called this "noticing" or "noting" and today calls it "attention". If the ad conveys (typically subconsciously) that the brand might be able to help the individual increase the present satisfaction level of one or more of his motivations, there is an increase in positive emotion (typically subconscious because slight) and memory encoding is engaged long-term.

Frequency of exposure to the same or another ad from the same brand carrying a similar motivational payload will increase the probability of purchase, sometimes to near-certainty.

As human beings share the same pool of motivations, with different degrees of priority in different mixes that make individuals unique, an ad that resonates with the motivations of one individual is also likely to resonate with the motivations of many other individuals. EEG synchrony is a measure of this motivational resonance between an ad and a set of individuals.

Context also affects the ad experience. To the degree that there is resonance in any dimension between the ad and the context (similar setting, characters, objects, language, products in view, colors, sound qualities, tempo, lighting, mood, emotions, and especially motivations) the resonance of the ad experience will be amplified.

It is more efficient to have advertising achieve more than just get a foot in the door. If an ad can be: (1) Designed to be relevant to specific motivations known or suspected to be strong in the users of the product category (2) Delivered to people known to strongly have the same motivations as those strongly found in the ad (3) Through a context also strongly containing the same motivations, less frequency would be needed to achieve trial (or retrial) of the brand.

In-market testing of campaigns with and without motivation methods has shown that campaigns that leveraged motivation according to the new theory achieved higher levels at every stage in the funnel and especially in terms of sales.

Science will require many more replications, and the industry should supply them. With ethical, wise and pragmatic application of a comprehensive theory of advertising we can reduce waste in advertising, increase brand trust where merited, learn how to quickly neutralize manipulative uses of mass media, increase the consumer's enjoyment of advertising, and make businesses more profitable and capable of employing more people and developing new innovations.

The sooner we truly understand why advertising works, the sooner we can make all of it work better-for brands, for media, and for the people watching.

4 comments about "To Make Advertising Better, First Understand Why It Works".

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Frank Zazza from iPause Ads, August 18, 2026 at 11 a.m.
Bill, I agree with your explanation of why advertising works. Advertising becomes most effective when a brand’s message resonates with the viewer’s underlying motivation and when that same motivational relevance is reinforced by the program and content surrounding it. This alignment strengthens attention, emotion, and memory, making consumers more receptive and more likely to act. The future of advertising is not simply greater reach and frequency, but creating stronger resonance among the message, the audience, and the context in which it appears.
Reply

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, August 18, 2026 at 11:27 a.m.

The problem is that we are being saturated with ad messages as there are more media sellers than can be sustaionable without an ever creasing load of commercials and ads. So the TV commercial of the future will have to share its brief time with each viewer with more and more other ad messages in very close proximity--same break,usually. In order to stand out and capture attention for increasingly short messages--mostly "15s" on national TV--the creatives have to use attention getting gimmicks like special effects, music, humor, etc which leaves less time to get their basic selling proposition across.

Frank Zazza from iPause Ads, August 18, 2026 at 11:42 a.m.

Ed, I agree that growing ad saturation and shorter commercial formats make it increasingly difficult for any single message to stand out. That is precisely why I believe relevance and resonance will become even more important. Creative techniques may capture initial attention, but aligning the brand’s selling proposition with the viewer’s motivations and the surrounding program context can make that attention more meaningful and memorable. In an overcrowded environment, the answer is not simply to become loude I believe it is to become more relevant.

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc replied, August 18, 2026 at 11:55 a.m.

Frank, the way most national TV time is bought--in massive, corporate hunks, not brand by brand--makes it very difficult for individual brands to focus on contexts and attentiveness as they are forced to share in the corporation's CPM-driven, bulk buys and accept good as well as bad and ugly ad placements. Hoewver this may not be as crazy as it sounds--as I explain in my book, "TV Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow" ( Amazon ), for there are mitigating factors like higher CPMs for go it alone targeting, to consider.