How many times have you seen (or heard) an ad and immediately responded to it?

Be honest.

Once? Five times? Maybe 10? If you give me a higher number I will assume you are either a liar or did not understand the question.

Fact is, you almost never immediately respond in any meaningful way to an ad. You might enjoy the ad. You might even have some vaguely positive feelings about the product being advertised. But it’s doubtful you actually do anything about it at that moment.

The impact of most advertising happens over time. You’re at the store and your subconscious remembers something positive about cheerios. Or you’re shopping online for TVs and you do a search for that ‘company that starts with a V’ that you sort of remember from a sort of memorable commercial.

The impact of advertising also doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The information conveyed in an ad is competing with the countless other messages that are out there competing for precious brain real estate.

And yet we continue to see ads ‘tested’ in focus groups all over the world.

We create unnatural environments (a vacuum, essentially) where we ask people to respond instantly to advertising, despite the fact that this rarely happens in a more natural setting.

Now, you may be thinking, c’mon you’re a creative. You only hate focus groups because you don’t want to see your work get killed.

And that’s true, to a point. But the real reason, for me at least, is that I don’t want to see my work get killed for the wrong reason.

Like, perhaps, when an ad doesn’t meet the approval of 8-10 strangers who actually willingly decided to spend 2 hours in a room with 7-9 other strangers looking at ads.

Or, perhaps, when that group of strangers, when asked to critique an ad, does just that. They are not experiencing the ad as they would in the real world (flipping through a magazine, watching TV, driving to work, etc.). They are in a stuffy room, eating bad food, being forced to view and evaluate something completely out of context.

And there is usually one person in the group who leads the charge, with the sole purpose of proving the old adage about opinions and assholes.

The rest of the herd usually falls in line, offering their own version of the same critique.

And then the ad gets killed. So you go to market with some flaccid piece of garbage, because it’s the only work boring enough to make it through the focus group process unscathed.

And we wonder why people hate advertising. Maybe if we just spent less time worrying about what people think, they might actually think more highly of us.

Because there’s one truth in life that even a focus group can’t deny.

Nobody likes a kiss ass.

- TJ Bennett