Good Advertising Is Rarer Than You Think

A good advertisement does one thing well: it changes how someone thinks, feels, or behaves in a way that benefits the business. That sounds simple. It is not. Most advertising fails that test, not because the execution was poor, but because the brief was wrong, the audience was assumed rather than understood, or the business problem was never clearly defined in the first place.

After 20 years managing ad spend across 30 industries, I have seen a lot of advertising. Most of it is forgettable. A small percentage is genuinely effective. The difference between the two is almost never about production quality or media budget. It comes down to a handful of principles that are well understood in theory and consistently ignored in practice.

This piece is part of a broader body of work on Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy, where I cover how marketing decisions connect to commercial outcomes. Advertising sits inside that system, not above it.

What Does “Good” Actually Mean in Advertising?

The word “good” gets used in two completely different ways when people talk about advertising, and conflating them is one of the industry’s oldest problems.

There is advertising that is good creatively: well crafted, visually striking, culturally resonant, award-worthy. And there is advertising that is good commercially: it drives awareness, shifts perception, generates leads, or moves product. These two things overlap, but they are not the same thing, and you should never assume that one implies the other.

I spent time judging the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to reward effectiveness rather than craft. What struck me most was how often the winning work was not the most polished or the most talked-about. It was the work where someone had clearly started with a real business problem and built backwards from there. The creative was in service of an outcome, not the other way around.

That inversion, starting with the outcome rather than the execution, is the single biggest predictor of whether an ad will actually work.

Start With the Business Problem, Not the Brief

Early in my career, I was at a brainstorm for Guinness at Cybercom. The founder had to step out for a client call and handed me the whiteboard pen on the way out. I was relatively new. The room was full of people who had been doing this for years. My internal reaction was somewhere between panic and determination. But that moment taught me something I have carried ever since: before you put anything on the whiteboard, you need to know what problem you are actually trying to solve.

Guinness is a brand with enormous cultural weight. The instinct in a room full of creative people is to reach for the mythology, the pint, the ritual, the “good things come to those who wait” territory. But the right question is always: what does the business need right now? Is it penetration? Trial among a new audience? Defending share against a competitor? The answer to that question should shape everything that follows.

Most briefs skip this step. They describe the brand, the audience, and the tone of voice. They rarely define the specific commercial outcome the advertising is supposed to produce, or how success will be measured. When I was running agencies, I used to push back on briefs that arrived without a clear success metric. Not because I was being difficult, but because an ad without a measurable objective is just decoration.

If you are working through your own marketing setup and want a structured way to audit what you are starting with, the checklist for analyzing your company website for sales and marketing strategy is a useful starting point. Advertising does not exist in isolation from your broader commercial infrastructure.

The Clarity Principle: Why Simple Ads Outperform Clever Ones

There is a persistent belief in advertising that complexity signals sophistication. That a layered, multi-message ad demonstrates the brand’s depth. This belief is wrong, and it costs businesses money every day.

People do not study advertisements. They glance at them while doing something else. The cognitive load available to process an ad is minimal. If your message requires more than a second or two to land, it will not land at all. The audience will move on, and your media spend will have bought you nothing.

The most effective advertising I have seen across 20 years and hundreds of campaigns shares one characteristic: it communicates a single, clear idea. Not a platform. Not a manifesto. One idea, expressed simply, directed at a specific audience.

This is harder to achieve than it sounds. Simplicity requires discipline. It requires the ability to say no to stakeholders who want to add messages, to product teams who want to feature every capability, to legal teams who want to qualify every claim. The brief that arrives with six key messages is not a brief. It is a committee document, and it will produce committee advertising.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes the point clearly: the businesses that grow fastest are typically those that simplify their commercial approach, not those that add complexity. That principle applies directly to advertising.

Relevance Is a More Valuable Asset Than Reach

I managed significant media budgets across my agency career, and the number that always mattered more than gross reach was relevant reach. An ad seen by a million people who have no use for the product is not a success. It is a waste. An ad seen by ten thousand people who are actively in-market for what you are selling is a different proposition entirely.

This is one reason I find endemic advertising genuinely interesting as a tactic. Placing advertising in environments where your audience is already engaged with a relevant topic is a way of buying relevance rather than just buying eyeballs. The context does some of the persuasion work for you.

Relevance operates at two levels. There is audience relevance: are you reaching the right people? And there is message relevance: does what you are saying connect to something they actually care about? Both matter. An ad with perfect audience targeting but a message that does not resonate will still fail. An emotionally resonant message shown to the wrong audience will also fail, just more expensively.

The discipline of audience understanding, really understanding, not assuming, is where most advertising falls short. I have sat in rooms where the “audience insight” was essentially a demographic description with some lifestyle assumptions layered on top. That is not insight. Insight is understanding the tension, the aspiration, the fear, or the frustration that your product or service can actually address.

The Role of Emotion: Recognition Over Admiration

There is a category of advertising that makes people say “that’s a brilliant ad” and then buy nothing. It generates admiration for the craft, the wit, or the production values, but it does not connect the audience to the product in a way that changes behaviour. This is a real failure mode, and it is more common in brand advertising than people like to admit.

The emotional response that actually drives commercial outcomes is not admiration. It is recognition. The feeling of “that is exactly how I feel” or “that is my problem” or “that is the person I want to be.” Recognition creates a sense of connection between the audience and the brand that admiration simply does not.

This is why advertising that starts from genuine audience understanding tends to outperform advertising that starts from a clever creative concept. When you know what your audience is actually experiencing, you can reflect it back to them in a way that feels true. That truth is what creates the emotional response that moves people.

Vidyard’s research into what makes GTM activity feel harder than it should points to a consistent gap between what marketers think resonates and what audiences actually respond to. That gap exists in advertising too, and it is almost always caused by starting from the brand’s perspective rather than the audience’s.

Measurement: The Part Most Advertisers Get Wrong

I have a view on measurement that makes some people uncomfortable. If businesses could honestly measure the true impact of their advertising on business performance, it would expose how little difference much of it actually makes. Not because advertising does not work, but because a significant proportion of what gets spent is not connected to a clear outcome, not tracked properly, and not evaluated honestly.

Fix measurement, and most of advertising fixes itself. When you have to demonstrate that an ad produced a result, you make better decisions about what to run, where to run it, and how much to spend. The discipline of accountability improves everything upstream of it.

This does not mean every ad needs to be a direct response ad with a trackable conversion. Brand advertising operates differently, and its effects are real even when they are harder to isolate. But “harder to measure” is not the same as “unmeasurable.” There are honest ways to approximate the impact of brand activity, and there are dishonest ways to claim credit for outcomes that would have happened anyway.

If you are working in a sector where lead quality and conversion tracking matter as much as impression volume, the mechanics of pay per appointment lead generation are worth understanding. It is a model that forces accountability into the advertising relationship in a way that most brand campaigns do not.

For anyone conducting a more structured review of their marketing operation, digital marketing due diligence is a framework I would recommend. It applies the same rigour to marketing that a finance team would apply to a P&L, and it surfaces the gaps that comfortable reporting tends to hide.

Context: Where Your Ad Appears Shapes What It Communicates

An ad does not exist in isolation. It appears somewhere, surrounded by something, consumed by someone in a particular state of mind. That context is part of the communication, whether you planned it or not.

A financial services ad that appears next to a story about market volatility lands differently than the same ad in a stable, positive editorial environment. A luxury product advertised in a discount context suffers brand damage that the creative cannot compensate for. These are not edge cases. They are the normal operating conditions of advertising, and they are often ignored in media planning.

In B2B advertising specifically, context matters enormously. The environments where your buyers spend their professional attention are different from where they spend their personal attention, and the message that works in one will not necessarily work in the other. The B2B financial services marketing landscape is a good example of this: the audiences are sophisticated, the stakes are high, and the tolerance for generic messaging is essentially zero. Context and credibility do a lot of the work.

Semrush’s coverage of growth-oriented marketing approaches touches on this point: the businesses that grow fastest tend to be those that are precise about where they show up, not just how often.

Consistency: The Compounding Effect Most Brands Underestimate

One of the most reliable findings in advertising effectiveness is that consistent brands outperform inconsistent ones over time. Not because consistency is inherently virtuous, but because memory works through repetition. The more consistently a brand shows up with a coherent look, feel, and message, the more efficiently each subsequent ad builds on the ones that came before.

I have watched businesses throw away years of brand equity in a single rebranding exercise because someone new arrived and wanted to put their mark on things. The instinct to refresh is understandable. The cost is rarely calculated honestly. When you change your visual identity, your tone of voice, or your core message, you are not starting from zero. You are starting from negative, because you have to overcome the memory of what came before.

This does not mean never evolve. It means evolve with intention and with an honest accounting of what you are giving up. The brands that have built genuine long-term equity, in almost every category, have done so through disciplined consistency rather than constant reinvention.

For B2B companies managing multiple business units or product lines, this consistency challenge is structural as much as creative. The corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies addresses how to maintain coherence at the brand level while allowing flexibility at the unit level. It is a tension that most B2B organisations manage badly.

The Brief Is the Work

I want to come back to the brief, because it is where most advertising is won or lost before anyone has opened a design file or written a line of copy.

A good brief defines: the specific audience (not a demographic, a person with a problem), the single thing you want them to think, feel, or do after seeing the ad, the reason they should believe you, and the context in which they will encounter the message. That is it. Everything else is noise.

When I was growing an agency from 20 to nearly 100 people, the quality of our briefs was one of the things I tracked most closely. Not because I was being precious about process, but because I had seen too many times what happened when creative teams were sent off with unclear direction. They made something. It just was not something that solved the client’s problem. And by the time that became apparent, significant time and money had been spent.

The brief is not a formality. It is the most important document in the advertising process. Treat it that way.

Vidyard’s pipeline and revenue research highlights a consistent pattern: GTM teams that align on clear objectives before execution consistently outperform those that optimise in-flight without a clear starting point. Advertising is no different.

Advertising sits inside a commercial system. The decisions you make about where to advertise, how to measure it, and how to brief it are all part of the same strategic conversation covered across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. If you are treating advertising as a standalone activity rather than as one component of a connected commercial approach, you are probably leaving results on the table.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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