Advertising Exists to Change Behaviour, Not Win Awards

Advertising exists to change behaviour. That is the complete answer. Everything else, the brand storytelling, the media planning, the creative craft, the channel strategy, is in service of that one commercial purpose. If the advertising you are running is not changing what people think, feel, or do in ways that benefit the business, it is not advertising. It is expensive decoration.

This sounds obvious. It is not, in practice, how most advertising gets made or evaluated.

I have spent more than twenty years running agencies, managing client budgets across thirty industries, and sitting in rooms where advertising decisions get made. The thing that separates effective advertising from ineffective advertising almost never comes down to the quality of the creative work. It comes down to whether anyone asked the right question before the brief was written: what behaviour are we trying to change, in whom, and why will this advertising change it?

What Is Advertising Actually For?

There is a version of this question that gets answered with philosophy. Advertising informs. Advertising persuades. Advertising reminds. These are the textbook answers, and they are not wrong. But they are not complete.

Advertising exists because businesses need customers, and customers do not appear without some form of communication that creates awareness, builds preference, or prompts action. That is the commercial logic. Everything else is a means to that end.

The problem is that advertising, as an industry, has spent decades building a culture that celebrates the means rather than the end. Awards go to the craft. Case studies celebrate the idea. Post-campaign analysis focuses on reach and engagement. The question of whether the business grew as a result often gets treated as someone else’s problem.

When I judged the Effie Awards, which exist specifically to recognise advertising effectiveness, the quality of commercial thinking varied enormously. The entries that stood out were not the ones with the most impressive creative. They were the ones where someone had clearly started with a business problem and worked backwards to a communication solution. The ones that struggled were often technically brilliant but commercially vague. Impressive work in search of a purpose.

If you are thinking carefully about where advertising fits within a broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full commercial context, from market entry to demand generation to channel architecture.

The Three Jobs Advertising Is Actually Doing

When you strip away the industry language, advertising is doing one of three things at any given moment. Sometimes it is doing more than one simultaneously, but it is always doing at least one.

Creating demand. This is advertising that reaches people who are not yet in the market for what you sell and plants something, an association, a memory structure, a preference, that will influence their decision when they eventually are in the market. This is brand advertising in its truest form. It is harder to measure in the short term and easier to undervalue as a result. Most performance marketing does not do this. It finds people who are already looking and tries to win the moment. That is valuable, but it is not demand creation.

Capturing demand. This is advertising that reaches people who are already in the market and tries to direct their decision towards you rather than a competitor. Search advertising is the clearest example. The person has already decided they want something. You are competing for their choice at the point of decision. This is where most digital advertising budgets sit, and it is where the attribution is cleanest, which is partly why it attracts disproportionate investment. Clean attribution feels like proof of effectiveness. It is not always the same thing.

Retaining and expanding existing customers. Advertising to people who already buy from you is underused and undervalued. Reinforcing a purchase decision, upselling adjacent products, preventing churn through continued brand presence, these are legitimate commercial objectives that advertising can serve. In categories with long purchase cycles or high switching costs, this is often where the most efficient advertising spend sits.

The reason this distinction matters is budget allocation. If you are spending ninety percent of your advertising budget on demand capture and wondering why your brand is not growing, the answer is structural. You are fishing in a pond that your competitors are also fishing in, and you are not doing anything to make the pond bigger. Market penetration strategy requires both creating new demand and capturing existing demand. Optimising for one at the expense of the other is a common and costly mistake.

Why Most Advertising Fails Before the Brief Is Written

Early in my career, I was at a small agency called Cybercom. The founder was running a brainstorm for Guinness, one of those sessions where everyone is trying to be clever and the room has that particular energy of people performing creativity at each other. He had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. I was relatively junior. The room was full of people who had been doing this longer than I had. My internal reaction was something close to panic.

What I remember most clearly is that the session had no real brief. There was a vague sense of what Guinness wanted to communicate, but no clarity on who we were trying to reach, what we wanted them to think or do differently, or what success would look like. We were generating ideas in a vacuum. Some of them were genuinely good. None of them were tethered to a commercial purpose that anyone had articulated clearly.

That experience stayed with me. Most advertising fails not in the execution but in the strategic setup. The brief is weak because no one has done the hard work of defining the actual problem. And the actual problem is almost never “we need a campaign.” It is something more specific: we are losing market share among a particular segment, or we have high awareness but low consideration, or we are strong in one geography and invisible in another.

Before any advertising conversation, a proper analysis of your commercial position, including your website as a sales and marketing asset, is worth doing. The brief should come from that diagnosis, not from a gut feeling about what kind of campaign would be interesting to make.

The Context Problem Nobody Talks About Enough

Advertising does not work in isolation. It works in context. The same message, delivered to the same person, in two different environments, can produce entirely different results. This is not a media planning nuance. It is a fundamental truth about how advertising functions.

Context has several dimensions. There is the editorial context, the environment in which the advertising appears. There is the temporal context, whether the person is in a mindset to receive and process the message. And there is the audience context, whether the person seeing the advertising is actually part of the audience the advertising is designed to reach.

This is why endemic advertising remains relevant despite the rise of programmatic targeting. Reaching a specialist audience within a specialist environment is not just about targeting precision. It is about the mindset the audience brings to that environment. A doctor reading a medical journal is in a fundamentally different cognitive state than the same doctor scrolling through a general news site. The advertising that works in one context will not automatically work in the other.

The same principle applies to B2B advertising. A financial services decision-maker reading industry analysis is more receptive to a relevant message than the same person watching YouTube at 11pm. Context is not a media planning detail. It is a determinant of whether the advertising does its job at all. B2B financial services marketing is a category where this distinction is particularly consequential, because the audiences are small, the purchase cycles are long, and wasted impressions are expensive.

Does Advertising Create Demand or Just Redirect It?

This is the question that makes a lot of marketers uncomfortable, because the honest answer is: often, it just redirects it.

There is a version of advertising that genuinely expands a category. It reaches people who were not previously aware of a problem, or a solution, and creates new demand that did not exist before. This is rare. It requires significant reach, sustained investment, and a message that is genuinely new to the audience receiving it. Apple did this with the iPhone. Dyson did this with bagless vacuum cleaners. Category-creating advertising is real, but it is not what most advertising does most of the time.

Most advertising is competing for a share of existing demand. The category is already established. The audience already knows they have the problem. The advertising is trying to ensure that when they go looking for a solution, they think of you rather than someone else. This is valuable. It is worth doing. But it is important to be honest about what it is, because the investment required to create demand is different from the investment required to capture it.

Go-to-market execution is getting harder, and part of the reason is that most markets are more competitive than they were a decade ago. More brands are competing for the same existing demand. The advertisers who grow are often the ones who invest in creating new demand while their competitors fight over what already exists.

When Advertising Is the Wrong Answer

This is the part of the conversation that does not happen enough. Advertising is one tool. It is not always the right tool.

I have worked with businesses that were spending significant money on advertising while their product had fundamental problems that advertising could not fix. Awareness was not the issue. Conversion was not the issue. The product itself was the issue, and no amount of advertising was going to solve that. In those situations, the most commercially useful thing I could do was tell them to stop spending on advertising and fix the product first.

There are also situations where the sales process is the constraint, not awareness. If your pipeline is full but your close rate is low, advertising is not the answer. If your customer acquisition cost is already efficient but your retention is poor, advertising to acquire more customers is not the answer. The discipline is in diagnosing the actual constraint before defaulting to advertising as the solution.

For businesses where the sales process is the bottleneck, models like pay per appointment lead generation can be more commercially efficient than traditional advertising, because they tie spend directly to a commercial outcome rather than an intermediary metric. This is not always the right model, but it is worth understanding as an alternative when advertising is being used to solve a sales problem rather than a marketing one.

The Measurement Problem and Why It Matters

Advertising measurement has always been imperfect. The digital era created the illusion that this was no longer true. It gave us dashboards full of numbers, attribution models, conversion tracking, and the sense that we finally knew exactly what our advertising was doing. We do not. We have better data than we used to have, but we have also created new ways to confuse activity with effectiveness.

When I was growing an agency from a team of twenty to over a hundred people, one of the things I had to get comfortable with was the gap between what we could measure and what was actually happening. We could show clients their click-through rates, their cost per acquisition, their return on ad spend. What we could not always show them was whether the advertising was building the brand in ways that would compound over time. Those effects are real. They are just harder to put in a report.

Proper digital marketing due diligence includes understanding what your measurement framework is actually capturing and what it is missing. Attribution models are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. A last-click model that gives all the credit to the search ad that converted someone ignores every other touchpoint that built the preference that made them search in the first place. That is not measurement. That is a particular way of looking at measurement that happens to favour performance channels.

Marketing does not need perfect measurement. It needs honest approximation. The goal is to have a clear enough view of what is working and what is not to make better decisions, not to have a dashboard that looks impressive in a quarterly review.

Advertising as a System, Not a Campaign

The campaign mindset is one of the most persistent problems in advertising. A campaign has a start date, an end date, a budget, and a brief. It gets made, it runs, it gets evaluated, and then everyone moves on to the next one. This is not how effective advertising works.

Effective advertising is a system. It has consistent brand elements that accumulate recognition over time. It has a clear understanding of where different types of advertising are doing different jobs, brand-building at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom. It has feedback loops that connect commercial outcomes back to media and creative decisions. And it runs continuously, not in bursts separated by gaps where the brand goes dark.

This is particularly important for B2B businesses, where purchase cycles are long and the buying committee is multiple people making a decision over months. A campaign that runs for six weeks and then stops is not building the consistent presence that influences a decision that takes six months to make. B2B tech companies in particular often struggle with this because their marketing is organised around product launches and events rather than sustained commercial communication.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes the point that understanding the evolving needs of your audience is not a one-time exercise. It is an ongoing discipline. The same is true of advertising. The market changes. The audience changes. The competitive context changes. Advertising that is built as a system adapts to those changes. Advertising that is built as a series of campaigns does not.

The broader question of how advertising fits within a go-to-market architecture, who it reaches, when, with what message, and how it connects to the rest of the commercial system, is something I cover across the growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice. The short version is that advertising is most effective when it is designed as part of a system, not as a series of disconnected executions.

The Honest Answer to Why Advertising Exists

Advertising exists because businesses need to communicate with people who do not yet know them, do not yet prefer them, or do not yet have a reason to choose them over an alternative. That is the commercial reality. The craft, the creativity, the storytelling, these are the means by which that communication becomes effective rather than ignored.

Marketing is a business support function. It is not an industry that exists to celebrate itself, and advertising is not a discipline that exists to produce interesting work. When the advertising is interesting, that is a means to an end. The end is a business that grows because more people know it, prefer it, and choose it.

The question every person making advertising decisions should ask before they start is not “what kind of campaign should we make?” It is “what behaviour are we trying to change, in whom, and what is the most effective way to change it?” Everything else follows from that.

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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