Why Some Commercials Work Better Than Others
why-some-commercials-work-better-than-others
Commercials succeed or fail on three layers: strategy (is this the right message for the right audience?), creative (is it distinctive and emotional enough to be noticed and remembered?), and execution (is it clear, credible, and easy to act on?). The layers multiply rather than add — brilliant execution can't rescue a weak strategy. Most failed commercials are technically well-made; they fail at the strategy layer, before a frame was shot, by saying something forgettable to the wrong people.
Post-mortems on failed campaigns almost never find a production problem. The footage is sharp, the audio clean, the edit competent. What they find is a message problem: the commercial said something the audience didn't care about, something every competitor also says, or something true but irrelevant to the decision the customer was actually making. The film was fine. The thinking was dead before the shoot.
That's the first of three layers, and they're worth examining in order, because the order is the point.
Layer 1 — Strategy: Saying the Right Thing
Two thirty-second spots for the same regional HVAC company:
- Spot A lists credentials: family-owned since 1987, certified technicians, free estimates, financing available. Every claim is true. Every claim is also made by every competitor, so the spot gives customers nothing to choose with.
- Spot B is built on one researched insight — what homeowners fear most isn't the price, it's being sold repairs they don't need — and spends its whole thirty seconds making one promise vivid: a technician who shows you the problem on camera before quoting anything.
Same company, budget, and production quality. Spot B works because it answers the question the customer is actually asking. Strategy is the discipline of finding that question, and no camera has ever compensated for skipping it.
Layer 2 — Creative: Being Impossible to Ignore
A correct message delivered forgettably still fails, because nobody is waiting for your ad. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has made this point repeatedly: most advertising isn't rejected — it's simply never noticed, never encoded, or never attributed to the right brand.
Two creative properties do the heavy lifting:
- Distinctiveness. The commercials that work have something a viewer could describe to a friend — a character, an unexpected image, a tone that doesn't match the category's wallpaper. Note that distinctive and clever are different things: clever ads make viewers admire the ad; distinctive ads make viewers remember the brand.
- Emotion. People store feelings far more durably than facts, which is why someone can hum a jingle from childhood but can't recall a statistic from yesterday. The commercial doesn't need tears — it needs a feeling specific enough that the memory gets filed under your name.
Layer 3 — Execution: Removing Friction
The final layer is craft, and its job is subtraction. The checks:
- Can a viewer say, an hour later, what the company does and what they were supposed to do about it?
- Is the offer legible at the pace the spot moves?
- Does the production quality clear the credibility bar for the category? (A wealth management firm and a taco truck have different bars; both can fail by miscalibrating.)
- Does the spot fit its placement? A film built for sound-on connected TV dies in a sound-off social feed, where the first second has to work as a silent image. Plenty of "underperforming" commercials are fine films playing in the wrong room.
Why the Order Matters
The layers multiply. Brilliant execution of a weak strategy produces a beautiful failure; a strong strategy delivered with modest craft frequently works anyway — homely but effective ads outnumber gorgeous but useless ones in every market. This ordering is uncomfortable for an industry that sells cameras and polish, but it's the most useful diagnostic a business can own: when a commercial fails, look upstream first.
Key takaways:
- Most commercials fail at the strategy layer — the wrong message — not the production layer.
- The right message answers the question the customer is actually asking.
- Distinctiveness beats cleverness: the goal is being remembered and attributed, not admired.
- Emotion is the encoding mechanism; facts without feeling don't get stored.
- The layers multiply: execution can't rescue strategy, but strategy survives modest execution.
One thing I've learned:
Rough-cut reviews instinctively drift to execution — this shot, that word, the music. One question, asked first, reorders the whole conversation: "If a customer saw this once, what would they repeat to their spouse at dinner?" If the room can't answer, no shot note matters. If it can, most of the shot notes stop mattering.
Continue reading:
Why Some Commercials Work Better Than Others
why-some-commercials-work-better-than-others
Commercials succeed or fail on three layers: strategy (is this the right message for the right audience?), creative (is it distinctive and emotional enough to be noticed and remembered?), and execution (is it clear, credible, and easy to act on?). The layers multiply rather than add — brilliant execution can't rescue a weak strategy. Most failed commercials are technically well-made; they fail at the strategy layer, before a frame was shot, by saying something forgettable to the wrong people.
Post-mortems on failed campaigns almost never find a production problem. The footage is sharp, the audio clean, the edit competent. What they find is a message problem: the commercial said something the audience didn't care about, something every competitor also says, or something true but irrelevant to the decision the customer was actually making. The film was fine. The thinking was dead before the shoot.
That's the first of three layers, and they're worth examining in order, because the order is the point.
Layer 1 — Strategy: Saying the Right Thing
Two thirty-second spots for the same regional HVAC company:
- Spot A lists credentials: family-owned since 1987, certified technicians, free estimates, financing available. Every claim is true. Every claim is also made by every competitor, so the spot gives customers nothing to choose with.
- Spot B is built on one researched insight — what homeowners fear most isn't the price, it's being sold repairs they don't need — and spends its whole thirty seconds making one promise vivid: a technician who shows you the problem on camera before quoting anything.
Same company, budget, and production quality. Spot B works because it answers the question the customer is actually asking. Strategy is the discipline of finding that question, and no camera has ever compensated for skipping it.
Layer 2 — Creative: Being Impossible to Ignore
A correct message delivered forgettably still fails, because nobody is waiting for your ad. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has made this point repeatedly: most advertising isn't rejected — it's simply never noticed, never encoded, or never attributed to the right brand.
Two creative properties do the heavy lifting:
- Distinctiveness. The commercials that work have something a viewer could describe to a friend — a character, an unexpected image, a tone that doesn't match the category's wallpaper. Note that distinctive and clever are different things: clever ads make viewers admire the ad; distinctive ads make viewers remember the brand.
- Emotion. People store feelings far more durably than facts, which is why someone can hum a jingle from childhood but can't recall a statistic from yesterday. The commercial doesn't need tears — it needs a feeling specific enough that the memory gets filed under your name.
Layer 3 — Execution: Removing Friction
The final layer is craft, and its job is subtraction. The checks:
- Can a viewer say, an hour later, what the company does and what they were supposed to do about it?
- Is the offer legible at the pace the spot moves?
- Does the production quality clear the credibility bar for the category? (A wealth management firm and a taco truck have different bars; both can fail by miscalibrating.)
- Does the spot fit its placement? A film built for sound-on connected TV dies in a sound-off social feed, where the first second has to work as a silent image. Plenty of "underperforming" commercials are fine films playing in the wrong room.
Why the Order Matters
The layers multiply. Brilliant execution of a weak strategy produces a beautiful failure; a strong strategy delivered with modest craft frequently works anyway — homely but effective ads outnumber gorgeous but useless ones in every market. This ordering is uncomfortable for an industry that sells cameras and polish, but it's the most useful diagnostic a business can own: when a commercial fails, look upstream first.
Key takaways:
- Most commercials fail at the strategy layer — the wrong message — not the production layer.
- The right message answers the question the customer is actually asking.
- Distinctiveness beats cleverness: the goal is being remembered and attributed, not admired.
- Emotion is the encoding mechanism; facts without feeling don't get stored.
- The layers multiply: execution can't rescue strategy, but strategy survives modest execution.
One thing I've learned:
Rough-cut reviews instinctively drift to execution — this shot, that word, the music. One question, asked first, reorders the whole conversation: "If a customer saw this once, what would they repeat to their spouse at dinner?" If the room can't answer, no shot note matters. If it can, most of the shot notes stop mattering.