Good Advertisements: What Separates Work That Sells from Work That Wins Awards

Good advertisements do one thing above everything else: they change behaviour. Not awareness scores, not recall metrics, not creative industry applause. They move people from indifference to action, and they do it in a way that is commercially traceable. Everything else is theatre.

That sounds obvious. It is not, in practice. The gap between advertising that looks impressive and advertising that actually works is wider than most marketing departments are willing to admit, and narrowing it requires a clear-eyed understanding of what good work is actually made of.

What Makes an Advertisement Actually Good?

The word “good” does a lot of work in marketing conversations, and most of the time it is doing the wrong job. In agency presentations, “good” tends to mean creatively interesting. In performance dashboards, it tends to mean efficient at generating clicks. Neither of those definitions is wrong exactly, but both are incomplete.

I spent years running agencies and managing large media budgets across thirty-odd industries. One thing I noticed consistently: the clients who got the best long-term results were not always the ones running the most creative campaigns. They were the ones who had the clearest idea of what they wanted the advertising to do, and who held that line even when internal stakeholders wanted to go in six different directions.

Good advertisements are built on three foundations. First, a clear and specific audience. Second, a single-minded message that is relevant to that audience. Third, execution that earns attention without obscuring the message. Strip any one of those away and you have something that might look like advertising but will not perform like it.

The advertising industry has a habit of celebrating the third element in isolation, which is why award ceremonies are full of work that is visually stunning and commercially inert. I have judged enough work to know that the inverse problem also exists: campaigns that were commercially sound but so dull that they generated no engagement at all. Neither extreme is the answer.

The Brief Is Where Most Advertising Goes Wrong

If you want to understand why so much advertising is mediocre, start with the brief. Not the creative execution, not the media plan. The brief.

A vague brief produces vague advertising. When the target audience is described as “adults aged 25-54 who are interested in quality,” the creative team has nothing to work with. They will produce something inoffensive and forgettable, because that is the only rational response to a brief that tells them nothing specific about who they are talking to or why that person should care.

I remember a brief early in my career that described the target customer as “anyone who drinks beer.” That was the actual audience definition. The campaign that came out of it was predictably generic, and predictably ineffective. The brand had a specific drinker it was trying to reach, a particular occasion it was trying to own, and a genuine point of difference from its competitors. None of that made it into the brief, so none of it made it into the advertising.

A good brief answers four questions without ambiguity. Who is this for, specifically? What do we want them to think, feel, or do after seeing it? What is the single most compelling reason for them to do that? And what do we know about this person that makes us confident this message will land? If you cannot answer all four, the brief is not ready.

This is foundational to any serious go-to-market approach. If you are thinking about how advertising fits into a broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial context that should sit behind every campaign decision.

Specificity Is the Most Underrated Quality in Advertising

There is a persistent belief in marketing that broad messaging reaches more people and therefore performs better. The opposite is usually true. Specific messages, written for a precise audience, tend to outperform broad ones because they feel relevant. And relevance is the single most powerful driver of advertising effectiveness.

When I think about the campaigns I have seen perform consistently over time, they share a quality: they feel like they were made for someone in particular, even when they were seen by millions. That is not an accident. It comes from a deep understanding of who the audience is and what they actually care about, not what the brand wants them to care about.

This is harder than it sounds. Most organisations have a natural instinct to broaden their messaging to avoid alienating anyone. The result is advertising that resonates with no one strongly enough to change their behaviour. If you are trying to reach everyone, you are effectively reaching no one.

Specificity applies to the message as much as the audience. A single-minded message, one that makes one clear point and makes it well, will always outperform a message that tries to communicate five things at once. Every additional claim you add to an advertisement reduces the probability that the primary message lands. This is not a creative opinion. It is a commercial one.

Understanding market penetration dynamics is relevant here. Brands grow primarily by reaching light and non-buyers, not by converting the already-loyal. That means your advertising needs to be specific enough to be memorable, but clear enough to land with people who do not yet have a strong relationship with your brand.

Emotional Resonance Is Not Soft. It Is Strategic.

There is a version of performance-minded marketing that treats emotional advertising as a luxury for big brand budgets and a distraction for everyone else. I have sat in enough budget meetings to know this view is common. It is also wrong.

Emotion is not decoration. It is a mechanism. Advertising that generates an emotional response is more likely to be remembered, more likely to be shared, and more likely to influence a purchase decision at the moment it matters. That is not a creative argument. It is a commercial one, and it holds across categories from FMCG to B2B.

The mistake is treating emotion as the goal rather than the vehicle. The goal is always a commercial outcome. Emotion is one of the most reliable ways to achieve it, because it bypasses the rational filters people apply to information and creates a memory structure that persists. But emotion without a clear commercial point is just entertainment, and entertainment does not pay for itself.

The best advertising I have seen, across twenty years and across industries, carries both. It makes you feel something and it makes the commercial point clearly. The tension between those two requirements is where the most interesting creative work happens. When you resolve that tension well, you get something that is genuinely hard to ignore.

BCG’s research on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy consistently points to the same conclusion: brands that align emotional brand-building with commercial rigour outperform those that treat them as separate disciplines. That alignment starts in the advertising.

Why Consistency Compounds and Why Most Brands Ignore It

One of the most commercially damaging things a marketing team can do is change its advertising too frequently. It feels counterintuitive, because internally the team is bored of the work long before the audience has had a chance to absorb it. But boredom inside the building is not the same as saturation in the market.

I have watched brands pull campaigns that were working because someone in a senior position wanted something fresh. The replacement would launch, perform worse, and the team would spend six months trying to diagnose the problem. The diagnosis was usually the same: the audience had just started to recognise the previous campaign and it had been pulled before it could compound.

Good advertisements get better with repetition, up to a point. They build memory structures. They create associations between the brand and the emotional territory the campaign occupies. That takes time and consistency. Changing creative too often resets the clock and forces you to rebuild from zero each time.

This does not mean running the same execution forever. It means maintaining a consistent strategic and emotional platform while refreshing the execution beneath it. The brand character stays stable. The specific creative evolves. That is a very different thing from starting from scratch every eighteen months because the marketing director has changed.

Consistency also matters across channels. An advertisement that works in isolation on one platform but contradicts the brand’s presence on another creates confusion rather than reinforcement. Channel-specific creative approaches can vary in format and tone, but they should always feel like they come from the same brand.

The Attention Problem Every Advertiser Is Actually Solving

Every advertisement is competing for a finite resource: attention. Not just attention against competitors in the same category, but attention against everything else a person could be looking at in that moment. Social feeds, news, messages, entertainment. The competition is not your category rivals. It is the entire information environment.

This changes the way you should think about creative execution. An advertisement that is technically correct but visually unremarkable will not get seen. It will appear in front of people and they will scroll past it without registering it. Reach without attention is not reach. It is just cost.

Earning attention is not the same as being loud or significant. Some of the most attention-grabbing advertising I have seen works because it is unexpectedly quiet in an environment full of noise. It is surprising in a way that is relevant to the audience, not surprising for its own sake. The creative decision is always in service of the message, not instead of it.

The first few seconds of any advertisement carry a disproportionate amount of weight. If you have not earned the viewer’s attention in that window, the rest of the creative does not matter. This is not a new insight, but it is one that gets ignored regularly in the production process, where teams spend the majority of their time on the middle and end of an advertisement and relatively little on the opening.

Understanding how audiences actually behave, rather than how you hope they behave, is foundational. Tools that help you understand real user behaviour on your owned channels, like Hotjar’s user research capabilities, can surface patterns that inform how you structure creative for different contexts.

The Relationship Between Good Advertising and Business Context

Here is something I have come back to repeatedly over the years: good advertising cannot rescue a bad business position. It can accelerate a good one, and it can slow the decline of a weak one, but it cannot substitute for a clear value proposition, competitive pricing, or a product that actually delivers what it promises.

I once worked with a client whose product had a genuine quality problem. Rather than address it, they increased their advertising spend. The additional reach just meant more people discovered the product’s shortcomings faster. The advertising was not bad. The business context made it counterproductive.

This is a version of the relative performance problem. A brand can grow its sales by ten percent while the market grows by twenty, and the advertising team will celebrate. But in context, that ten percent growth represents market share loss. The advertising appeared to work in absolute terms and failed in relative ones. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes clear that commercial decisions, including advertising investment, need to be evaluated against market dynamics, not just internal benchmarks.

Good advertising works hardest when it is aligned with a genuine commercial advantage. A clear product benefit, a credible brand position, a pricing structure that makes the purchase decision easy. When those elements are in place, advertising amplifies them. When they are not, advertising is doing remedial work that it was never designed to do.

The intelligent growth model that Forrester has written about points to the same principle: sustainable commercial growth comes from the alignment of multiple factors, not from any single lever. Advertising is one lever. It is a powerful one when used correctly, and an expensive distraction when it is not.

What the Best Advertising Teams Do Differently

After twenty years of working with marketing teams across industries, I have noticed that the ones producing consistently effective advertising share certain habits that have nothing to do with creative talent.

They start with the audience, not the brand. They spend time understanding what the target customer actually thinks and feels before they write a single word of copy. They do not assume. They find out. That might mean qualitative research, customer interviews, or simply spending time with the people who sell the product and listening to the questions and objections they hear every day.

They are ruthless about the brief. They will not approve a brief that is vague or that tries to achieve too many things at once. They know that a brief which asks the advertising to build awareness, drive consideration, and generate immediate sales is a brief that will produce advertising capable of none of those things effectively.

They measure the right things. Not just the metrics that are easy to collect, but the metrics that are actually connected to the commercial outcome they care about. This requires honest thinking about the relationship between advertising activity and business results, which is harder than it sounds and more valuable than almost anything else a marketing team can do.

And they protect the work. Not out of ego, but because they understand that good advertising requires consistency to compound, and that every unnecessary change resets the clock. They push back when stakeholders want to change things for reasons that are not commercially grounded, and they do it with evidence rather than opinion.

Growth-focused marketing strategy requires this kind of discipline. The Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the broader commercial framework that gives advertising decisions their context, including how to align campaign investment with where your business actually needs to grow.

A Note on Creative Awards and Commercial Reality

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise advertising effectiveness rather than creative craft alone. Even there, in a competition explicitly built around commercial outcomes, you see the tension between what the industry finds interesting and what actually moved business metrics.

Creative awards are not meaningless. Work that wins on craft often does so because it is genuinely well made, and well-made advertising tends to perform better than poorly made advertising, all else being equal. But all else is rarely equal. A brilliantly crafted advertisement with the wrong message for the wrong audience will underperform a straightforward advertisement with the right message for the right audience, every time.

The danger of award culture is that it can create an incentive structure that optimises for what impresses other marketers rather than what changes the behaviour of customers. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is expensive.

The most commercially effective advertising I have seen over the years has often been quiet. It does not announce itself as advertising. It does not try to be clever. It simply says the right thing to the right person at the right moment, and it does it consistently enough that it builds into something durable. That is harder to celebrate in a presentation than a visually spectacular campaign. It is considerably easier to defend in a board meeting.

If you are thinking about growth strategy from a commercial perspective, including how advertising investment fits into a broader market approach, growth strategy frameworks can offer useful context for how advertising decisions connect to wider business objectives.

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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