It is a marketer’s folly to overplay how rational our decision-making really is. System1’s Andrew Tindall argues that the heart, not the head, runs the show and explains how to craft more effective advertising.
“Only art can make you feel, and only feeling can make you act.”
Bill Bernbach said that, but I’m guessing he never pre-tested an ad with procurement’s boot on his neck.
I used to love cocktail culture.
Like, seriously love it.
I ran on-trade (bars) sales for Bacardi in London’s fanciest (and campest) part of town: Soho. My early twenties were heaven, hanging with bar owners, bartenders and drinkers alike Monday to Friday. I genuinely became obsessed. It didn’t help that I would spend my weekends in these bars as well…
I remember thinking one night that it was a shame that there were no films or Netflix docs on cocktails. I’d love to sit there and gauge daiquiri knowledge.
Now, as a marketing effectiveness nerd, I’ve got good news. There’s a new free film for advertising lovers. Measuring the Magic by Orlando Wood and Peter Field. Diving into how advertising works, and a 25-year story of trying to measure that magic. Sure, there are no salted rims, but it’s niche luxurious craft created for true marketing wankers like me.
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Advertising has been torn between two camps since the circus first painted clowns on posters: showmanship and salesmanship, emotion and persuasion.
One camp is focused on stopping hearts, the other on getting tills ringing.
Both matter.
I shout about this all the time.
But if you want to build a brand, not just sell a couple more under-sink water filters (does anyone else get served ads for these 100 times a day?), you need to understand something uncomfortable for most marketers today: it’s the emotion that works. And we’ve got the data to prove it.
Let’s wind it back.
Back in the 1830s, circuses used drawings of their performers on posters to draw a crowd. In the 1880s, color printing turned ads into art, and artists turned ads into something people wanted to look at.
Theatres, cabarets, and showmen used emotion to fill seats. It was working.
Then Claude Hopkins got stuck in and we got lost for a little while. We may still be lost.
Hopkins was the king of “scientific advertising”.
The man who insisted you give people a reason why they should buy. His legacy? A shift from entertainment to information. From showmanship to salesmanship. He wrote the book on it, it sounds awfully similar to what your local Meta rep will sell you today.
The split has endured, with brand advertising on one side and performance advertising on the other. For decades, pre-testing leaned hard toward the latter. If an ad couldn’t explain itself in bullet points, it failed, no matter if it made you laugh, cry, or fall in love.
Cadbury’s Gorilla ad is the cliched example. Drumming gorilla. Phil Collins. Zero “reason to buy.” It barely made it to air because pre-testing said it wouldn’t work. Yet it reversed a trust crisis, boosted profit, and was adored by the public. Testing almost killed it. Marketing almost got in its own way.
That Gorilla was the wake-up call.
So was our data.
2009 System1 partnered with Peter Field and Les Binet (yes, the Long and Short of it legends) to try something new. What if we could actually measure emotion and put the magic back in advertising?
What if we could use real faces, real feelings, to test how ads made people feel?
Not “do they recall the message,” but “do they feel anything at all?”
As we know from Jon Evan’s and Adam Morgan’s recent research the ‘Cost of Dull’, people usually don’t feel anything when they see ads.
We used Paul Ekman’s seven universal facial expressions (joy, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and contempt) and created a simple self-report tool from faces. Thousands of images, one very patient model, and a lot of coffee later, we built a system to gauge the emotional intensity of an ad.
And then we did something mad.
We tested IPA award-winning ads with it.
What we found was clear. Ads that sparked strong positive emotions drove long-term growth, price elasticity, and brand preference. They were the compounding kind. Ads that aimed for persuasion or packed in “reasons to believe” gave a short-term bump. Then faded. Emotion didn’t just predict effectiveness. It predicted business outcomes.
Peter and Les weren’t surprised. When they published Marketing in the Era of Accountability, the data already hinted at this. Then came our big experiment: we paired the IPA’s effectiveness data with our emotion scores. Blind.
No peeking.
The result?
A crystal-clear correlation between strong emotional response and long-term growth. Campaigns that made people feel were more likely to drive market share growth, especially when combined with investment (Extra Share of Voice nerds, take note).
You can probably guess how this went down in the performance marketing world. “You’re trying to kill ROI,” they cried.
Not true.
What we found was that performance works, but brand building works harder. There is the sawtooth and the curve, the short and the long, the click and the compounding.
And this wasn’t academic fluff. Real businesses had been throwing everything at performance-only strategies, and eventually, they saw diminishing returns. Growth dried up. Just look at the recent Nike horror stories.
We shouldn’t hate performance marketing. I lose interest when marketers frame it as us v them. It’s in the title of The Long and the Short of It. But the book was a warning: don’t go all-in on short-term salesmanship and forget that advertising is meant to entertain, seduce, and be remembered.
In short, stop trying to cram both information and emotion into every ad. You’ll end up with something forgettable.
Be brave.
Pick a side. If you want long-term growth, pick the one that makes people feel something. Make them smile. Surprise them. Delight them. And you’ll often see that long-term strategy helps feed your short-term, like WARC recently proved in the Multiplier Effect.
Obviously, I’m sold. I think this film release is an important reflection for the industry. How we’ve managed to (sort of) find our way again. I believe Peter Field’s new analysis of the IPA data bank shows this, that “pre-testing” once was shit but now it actually helps.
Enjoy Orlando’s dulcet tones for 30 minutes, but let’s not get complacent. The industry is now owned by media that can be skipped, targeted and tracked. If we don’t all understand why emotion is important, we can easily start slipping again.
That’s what I do in all my research. Understand how brands can be built in a modern media mix. Come back to my column regularly to learn how we can do that together.
Andrew Tindall is a senior leader in the advertising industry and SVP of Global Partnerships at System1, where he champions creative effectiveness and evidence-based marketing. Known for his sharp thinking on out-of-home, emotional advertising, and brand growth, he’s become a go-to voice on how creativity and data can work together. With experience across major brands like Diageo and Bacardi, Andrew now helps global agencies and marketers make better ads that actually work, contributing regularly to panels, podcasts, and the occasional punchy LinkedIn rant.
