Watch The Appeal.

While reading a 2009 interview with Marc Newsom,  I was struck by this seemingly innocuous exchange.

Louise Neri: Is the Solaris a unisex watch? 

Marc Newson: Yes, I’ve never really designed for men or women but most of my watches tend to appeal to men because of their scale and weight. Perhaps this is the first of my watches that will appeal as much, if not more, to women.

Maybe it's my obsession with the negative, but it seems to me that what he should have been asking why his previous watches had repelled many women. It's a similar question, but different.

Check Your Insight.

That's one of the nicer variations on the inattention blindness theme originally demonstrated in the famous invisible gorilla experiment from 1975. Slickly and amusingly done.

Unlike this new Skoda ad.



The obvious edits are irritating enough, but then what are we left with? Here's a car that holds your attention. That's not even a minimum viable proposition.

I thought we'd all agreed that attention was a given and marketing needed to aim for more than that, but apparently the memo didn't reach everyone.

What's worse is that the experiment shows that people are inattentive. People don't notice things. That's how you should use it in an ad.

You should not use it to suggest that people who are inattentive will pay attention to your car simply because it's parked in the street. There's no explanation as to why they would pay less attention to anything else that was parked there. Worse still, repeated viewings will inevitably focus attention on everything but the car.

The whole point of research is to unearth a new truth, not to underpin a lazy creative idea.