Paid Attention Quotes

“As Rachel Hatton, strategy partner at Dare, has pointed out: ‘There was a lot of thinking about how communication worked in the 1960s and 1970s. It feels like, now, it’s all practice and no theory. If we want to professionalise as an industry, we need to pay more attention to how communication actually works in this new world.’29”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

“rational messaging seems to have little impact when changing behaviour, and that emotional response – regardless of how it is generated – is what does.”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

“If we return to the roots of planning we see at its heart a desire to understand human behaviour and provide a robust model for influencing it. Rather than dismantling strategy into endless experimentation, we need a new way of understanding the world, a modern philosophy.”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

“Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse symbols but rather the emergence of a new behavioural grammar for companies, as they begin to engage with their customers in new ways in new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

“CASE STUDY In 2012, investigators were trying to understand why supermarkets in the United States were being robbed every month of Tide detergent – and only Tide detergent. As with every investigation, they ‘followed the money’ only to find that Tide was the money. Bottles of Tide had become an ad hoc street currency, with 150-ounce bottles being exchanged for $5 or $10 worth of drugs, earning it the nickname ‘Liquid Gold’. As New York magazine pointed out: ‘this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product’.37 It turns out that despite being considered a ‘low interest category’, people have very strong feelings about their detergents. Tide came in the top three brands that consumers were least likely to give up during tough times. This bond has allowed the producer, Procter & Gamble, to charge 50 per cent more than the average detergent and yet it still outsells its nearest competitor, which is also produced by P&G, by more than two to one. So, what is it about Tide that means more people will pay 50 per cent more for a functionally parity product from the same manufacturer? The investigating sergeant puts it well: ‘I’m a No. 1 Tide fan’, he says. ‘I don’t know if it’s all psychological, but you can tell the difference.’38”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

“successful advertising often leverages existing referent systems by making our brain process information and link it to things already in our heads,”
― Faris Yakob, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World