Neil Dawson on Why Emotion is at the Heart of Advertising

This Wednesday sees the start of the 2018 Kinsale Shark Awards and Festival and one of the speakers at the event will be creative director Neil Dawson. 

His talk, Trump: Racist, Misogynist, Narcissist, Genius, will examine the power of emotion and how it helped push Donald Trump into the Whitehouse. Here, Dawson explains how emotion in advertising is the industry's most powerful force.

"How any sane individual could think that that was a credible role for the product is beyond me."

Is creating a positive emotional reaction from a consumer the bedrock of good advertising?

An emotional connection is absolutely the bedrock of great advertising. The best way of a message being lodged in a person’s memory is to make them feel it. It’s connecting with the limbic brain. The part of our grey matter that’s been with us for centuries and the bit that makes decisions.

How difficult is it, in your experience, to do that successfully? 

It’s difficult or easy depending on the client and how well they understand this. I’ve worked on car accounts recently and they are only about ‘showing the metal’. They are moving brochures. Ask anyone what Nissan or Hyundai or Mazda stand for and no one will be able to tell you.

But look back at VW UK and you will see plenty of examples of creating an emotional connection. Remember Paula Hamilton chucking away everything but her Golf? That was 1987 [below]. Thirty-one years ago. I don’t know of any car ads made recently that would be remembered in three months, let alone thirty years. Honda Cog and Grrr would be the last ones..

Last year's infamous, in-house Pepsi spot was designed to foster a specific emotion, but ended up creating an altogether different one; is it all-too-easy for creatives and those involved in the creative process to misread emotive messages?

That Pepsi spot shows what happens when you lose perspective. How any sane individual could think that that was a credible role for the product is beyond me. Someone was drinking the Kool-Aid (I’m here all week…).

I worked on Diet Coke which was a fizzy drink drunk by women who knew their own mind. But it didn’t make them that way. To suggest that drinking the liquid changed you in some way would have been a strategic blunder.

Why are more straightforward, heartstring-tugging commercials often looked down upon for being overly manipulative, and is that just an ad industry perspective?

I think that’s an industry perspective. Look at John Webster’s commercial for British Meat that was shot by Trevor Melvin, or David Abbott’s Red Rudge Bicycle ad for Chivas Regal. Firmly tugging at the heartstrings and rightly so.

What do you think some of the most successful, emotional advertising messages are?

Right now, I’d say Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad [Dream Crazy, below] is a pretty good example of a successful, emotional reaction….

Attendees of this year's Kinsale Sharks Awards and Festival can see Dawson's talk, Trump - Racist, Misogynist, Narcissist, Genius, on Saturday September 29 at 11.45am. For more information on attending the festival, visit their website.