• by April 27, 2004

A BIG IDEA, OR JUST THINKING SMALL - "Have you ever thought about what it is when you have a thought?" Normally, the Riff would have to answer that question with an honest, "no." But hearing it raised this morning during the Advertising Research Foundation's annual conference in New York made us think. And hearing it posed by Gerry Zaltman, an acknowledged expert on the process of thought, made us think about thinking. According to Zaltman, what the Riff was actually experiencing was nothing more than the "activation of a set of neurons that have meaning." The goal of Zaltman's speech, of course, was to simultaneously trigger a similar set of neurons across Madison Avenue, up and down Main Street, USA, with a few stops in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles and just about any other place where people tend to think about advertising.

When he's not telling the marketing gurus at General Motors, Procter & Gamble, IBM, or the McCann Worldgroup how to think, Zaltman is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. He's also author of an important new management book, "How Customers Think," that is transforming the practice of marketing, advertising and, potentially, media buying. Specifically, Zaltman is on the cutting edge of a movement toward understanding the role emotion plays in advertising, how to measure it, and how to apply it to make better, more effective and engaging ad campaigns.

The whole thing has triggered a major ad industry initiative that is being coordinated by the ARF, with backing from the American Association of Advertising Agencies and a bunch of leading marketing research organizations. The effort is a radical departure from the current precepts of understanding and measuring advertising, which are generally based on measures of ad attentiveness, recall and persuasion. This new emotions-based approach seeks to understand how consumers feel when they are exposed to an ad, what memories they have and how they are affected by advertising, and, equally as importantly, what new thought processes consumers bring to the party.

Zaltman calls this process the "co-creation of meaning" and he says that really effective advertising does it and really great advertising professions should understand how to employ it. What it means is that advertising can only go so far, and that after a point, consumers bring their own thoughts into the shaping of a brand.

"Successful advertising results in the co-creation of personally relevant stories. The consumers are the primary authors," says Zaltman, suggesting an idea that is bound to send chills up the backs of any copywriter. And that's just the way one of Madison Avenue's preeminent copywriters, DDB Worldwide Chairman Keith Reinhard, seemed to react.

"Artists have always intuitively known this. That's why they are artists," said Reinhard, invoking some of the spirit of DDB founder Bill Bernbach, who was known for debunking the notion that great advertising could be scientifically deconstructed or modeled. While he said he "is always in favor of new learning," Reinhard said he "fears" the new approach might create a "new set of rules" that ultimately might be just as bad as the old ones, just different. What do you expect from an agency, which lists as one of its greatest advertising works, the Volkswagen campaign, "Think small."