The ad that could never persuade you wasn’t trying to.
A beer ad shows attractive people at a party. It says nothing about the beer: not the taste, not the price, not how it is brewed. A smart viewer notices that the ad contains no argument at all and concludes, reasonably, that it would never persuade them. Yet brewers keep paying for exactly this kind of ad. If ads worked by persuasion, much of advertising would be incompetently designed. So either the industry is wasting its money, or ads do not work the way smart people think they work.
Kevin Simler’s point in “Ads Don’t Work That Way” is that the absurdity is a clue. Most ads are too repetitive, too emotional, too underspecified, and too disconnected from the purchase to work by implanting a private desire in a solitary consumer. They work because culture is a shared memory system. Advertising works less by persuasion than by cultural imprinting: installing shared availability, shared meaning, and shared social permission before the purchase moment arrives.
Availability
Follow the beer ad to the store, months later, on the way to a friend’s party. You do not stand at the cooler comparing ingredients. You are tired, the shelf is crowded, and one brand feels familiar in a way the others don’t. Byron Sharp’s marketing science calls this mental availability: the brand comes to mind in the buying situation. It is built from “memory structures” and distinctive assets, the colors, logos, jingles, characters, packaging and usage occasions that give a tired mind a handle to grab.
That is why repetition matters even when an ad contains no new information. You already know the brand, but knowledge was never the goal. The goal is availability under weak attention. At the purchase moment you rarely want truth; you want enough fluency to avoid thinking.
Meaning, made public
Sharp’s account is operational. Cultural imprinting is the thicker version of the same mechanism, because the memory structure does not live only in your head. The ad attaches a public association to the brand, here party energy, elsewhere youth, safety, rebellion, thrift or luxury, and it does not need you to believe any proposition. It needs you and everyone around you to carry the same association.
Publicness is the point. A Super Bowl ad is valuable not only because millions see it, but because millions know millions saw it. The brand has bought common knowledge, a small piece of shared reality. When you carry that beer into the party, you are relying less on your own memory of the ad than on everyone else’s. The ad was never telling you why the beer is good. It was telling everyone what the beer means. In that sense ads work by building shared cultural priors, and the purchase comes later, inside a landscape of obviousness the ads helped shape.
Permission
So the purchase is social before it is functional. Walking into the party, you are buying permission to be seen holding that bottle. Hence the ads that show the people around a product rather than the product itself: the beer held by friends, the watch on a confident wrist. Advertising answers a hidden question: what will this purchase say about me?
The answer works better left implicit, because an explicit status claim is gauche. A cultural imprint lets the buyer borrow the association while pretending they simply liked the product. It is signaling with commercial infrastructure, and the buyer often cannot say the real reason because saying it would spoil the signal. “I bought it because it makes me look fun” sounds pathetic. “I just like it” preserves dignity.
Where it stops, and where it goes
The persuasion model is not always wrong. Direct response advertising does inform: a new product, a specific offer, a sale, a coupon, a landing page. An ad that gives you a reason and a link may be working exactly as it appears to. The imprinting model is for the ads that seem to say nothing, which is most brand advertising.
Those are the ads whose effects eventually stop feeling like advertising at all. Cultural imprinting turns social instruction into taste. Once the imprint is installed, the consumer experiences conformity as self-expression. The preference is authentic at the level of feeling; the manipulation happened upstream, in the culture that trained the feeling.
So the smart viewer was right that the beer ad would never persuade them. It was not trying to persuade the part of them that evaluates arguments. It was trying to ensure that, six months later, at a crowded cooler, one brand would feel culturally warm and another blank. People make the same mistake about taste in general, imagining they choose from the inside out when much of the inside was installed from the outside in. The installation becomes real preference, which raises a question for anyone sure that ads don’t work on them: which of their tastes could they tell apart from an imprint?
References:
- Kevin Simler, Ads Don’t Work That Way, Melting Asphalt
- Alex M. H. Smith, How Brands Shape Culture: Cultural Imprinting, Basic Arts
- Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow