The Game I Played Between the Ads

Before I knew anything about marketing, I'd already invented a game to beat it.

When I was a kid, my parents watched their shows downstairs. I wasn't interested. Their shows were boring — at least to me. So I'd head upstairs to their bedroom and watch TV on my own.

That's where I started playing a game with myself.

Every time the ads came on, I'd try to name what the ad was selling — or whatever I called it — as fast as I possibly could. Not the whole slogan. Just the product. The second I recognised it, I'd say it.

In my head, it was the ultimate challenge. Ad comes on, clock starts, name it.

And there was a rule. If I got it really quick, I was allowed to stop playing. Because somewhere in my kid brain, I'd started to worry about something: Oh my God, I'm getting addicted to the commercials.

It was a silly game. But looking back, it was my first real experience with advertising. And, strangely, my first experience with the idea of addiction.

What a kid's game knew about advertising

I didn't know it then, but that game was measuring the thing advertisers spend fortunes chasing: how fast you know who an ad is for.

Some ads I could name almost instantly. A shape, a colour, a sound, a few words — and I had it. Others I'd sit through, half-watching, still not sure what they were selling until the very end. And by then I'd usually stopped caring.

The ones I could name fast were the ones that stuck. Years later, working in marketing, I learned the name for it: brand recognition. But that kid upstairs had already worked out the rule. If people can't tell who you are in the first few seconds, you've lost them.

That's even more true now. Nobody sits upstairs waiting for the ad break any more — they're scrolling. You don't get thirty seconds; you get about two. If your ad doesn't say who you are and what you're offering before the thumb moves, it might as well not exist.

The part about addiction

The other half of that memory stays with me too — the worry that I was getting hooked.

Ads are designed to get inside your head. That's their job. Even as a kid, I could feel the pull. I'd made up a whole game, with its own rule for stopping, partly to feel like I was the one in control.

I think about that a lot now that I make ads for a living. There's a difference between an ad that grabs you and an ad that gets you. One earns a few seconds of your attention honestly: here's who we are, here's what we've got, here's why it might be worth it to you. The other just wants to keep you staring.

I want to make the first kind. Ads that are clear in two seconds, honest about what they're offering, and then let you get back to your show.

Still playing

Sometimes I still catch myself doing it. An ad comes on — on TV, on my phone, between levels of a game — and some part of me starts the clock. Who's this for? Name it.

If I can name it fast, I know it's a good ad.

If I can't, I know exactly what I'd change.

— JJ D'Emanuele, founder of Soulwidth