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Opinion: There’s a Problem with Effective Advertising

While measurements like reach and engagement can be useful, effective advertising needs to be judged on the problem it solves, something that can easily be overlooked by clients and agencies, writes Ronán Jennings.

Do you remember staying up all night to finish an assignment in college, fuelled by your fifth cup of coffee, panicking over something seemingly simple like creating an Excel graph? For advertising strategists, this anxiety isn’t just a memory—it’s an annual event when the Effie Awards come around. The Effies are like the Oscars for effective advertising in Ireland, but also globally.

Browsing through the global Effies database recently, I noticed that all the campaigns I admired had something important in common: they each started by clearly defining the problem they were aiming to solve.

Despite what the headline to this article might imply, effective advertising isn’t problematic—it’s essential. However, effective advertising always begins by clearly identifying the specific problem it aims to solve.

The real issue in our industry today is that many advertisements are created without genuinely understanding or directly confronting their underlying problems. This reluctance to clearly define problems undermines the very purpose of advertising, which is to address the fundamental reasons a campaign is needed in the first place. Let’s explore why we’re often hesitant to face these problems head-on, and how confronting them can lead to far more effective campaigns.

Maybe it’s an Irish trait, but we often shy away from openly using the word ‘problem,’ instead opting for softer terms like ‘challenge,’ ‘opportunity,’ or ‘barrier,’ especially when talking to clients. But every brand faces problems—otherwise, they wouldn’t need agencies. Perhaps consumers doubt the quality of your product, your brand lags behind competitors, or your website isn’t user-friendly. Facing these uncomfortable truths directly can lead us to disruptive new ideas, ultimately creating more effective and impactful campaigns.

Sometimes, advertising becomes about ticking boxes—producing content just because it’s scheduled or expected. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you’re an advertising agency where every brief can look like a reason to produce a TV ad, then you’re probably missing the real issue. The first step shouldn’t be deciding what media to use but rather determining what real-world impact you need to create to address your specific problem. This approach can lead us to much more unconventional and innovative places.

A great example of this is Resilience Road by Suncorp Insurance in Australia. They cover parts of rural Australia where extreme weather conditions are resulting in more people’s homes being destroyed. Suncorp wanted to show how they were supporting their customers. Instead of saying this in a TV campaign, they created an initiative to strengthen the homes on a single street against bush fires, floods and cyclones. This provided a real-world example of how more resilient houses could be and proved Suncorp’s support in a far more effective way than any TV campaign could have.

Closer to home, TBWA’s recent campaign for the HSE, “You, Me and HIV,” directly addressed the stigma surrounding HIV. Instead of just using traditional media, the campaign humanised the issue, generating genuine public conversations and effectively confronting the real problem—public misunderstanding and stigma.

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” – Albert Einstein. I know quoting Einstein might seem pretentious, but his point holds true. When measuring campaign effectiveness, agencies often default to metrics like reach or engagement. While these numbers can be valuable, they’re meaningless if they don’t align with solving your initial problem. Clearly defined problems allow for targeted measurement that genuinely evaluates campaign success.

Issues like “low awareness” or “declining sales” don’t inspire creative solutions—they’re too vague. Effective advertising requires digging deeper. Instead of just recognising declining sales, ask why customers aren’t buying your product. This deeper curiosity leads to genuinely useful insights. Similar to the ‘5 Whys’ technique, keep asking about the problem until you uncover the root cause.

 

For instance, ITV’s campaign ‘Eat them to defeat them’ brilliantly motivates kids to eat their vegetables by showing vegetables as horror movie style monsters that only brave kids can vanquish. They understood that the problem wasn’t just that parents couldn’t get their kids to eat vegetables, but that the kids hated vegetables with a passion, and that the only way to motivate them was to tap into this hatred.

At TBWA\Ireland, we encourage brands to embrace clear, honest discussions about their real problems. Recent work like “Wide-Fi” for eir and “You, Me and HIV” for the HSE show how this direct approach creates impactful, effective advertising.

So next time you’re working on your brand’s strategy, don’t be afraid to ask: “Do you know what your real problem is?”

Ronán Jennings is a Strategy Director at TBWA \ Ireland. He is the recipient of a Gold Effie and is a Cannes Young Lions representative for Ireland.

 

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