Reason No One Cares About Your Campaign

12.08.26 | By Clara Daley | blogs

Help. Why doesn’t anyone care about your campaign

Our Copywriter Clara Daley shares how to craft a campaign that gets remembered. It all starts with an insight.

Let me tell you a secret.

The most valuable resource isn’t gold. Or silver or stocks or a coffee card one stamp away from a freebie.

It’s attention.

Humans only have so much space in our brains. According to the stats, we’re exposed to 6,000 to 10,000 advertising messages a day. Sounds like a big number, and to be fair, some researchers think that’s a crock of brace and bit. So close your eyes (not literally, I need you to read these words) and join me on a 30-second experiment.

Flick your eyes away from your monitor. Note a branded ballpoint pen. A 1L emotional support water bottle emblazoned with logo stickers. Out the window, a giant billboard. A second billboard. Tap to IG. Weekly gelato flavours. Ad for car insurance. Friend on Euro summer. Ad for a holiday. Fit check. Brand activation… all this and you haven’t even stood up from your desk.

Ad clutter is stuffing the world to overflowing. In the 2005 marketing bible Coming to Concurrence, the authors call it “the biggest problem facing marketing and marketers.”

This one’s for you if…

You want customers to rate your brand above all the other brands in their brain
You don’t want to waste your coins on campaigns that wrap up tomorrow’s fish ’n chips

The secret sauce

Successful advertising campaigns follow a formula.

Each one unearths a hidden human truth (the insight). Translates it into a cracker of a creative concept (the idea). And crafts it using a particular type of media (the execution).

If you can’t find an insight, that’s a boo-boo. If you find an insight that isn’t hidden or truthful or it takes long pitch decks to explain the vibe to a boardroom of yawning executives, that’s also a boo-boo.

Razer pointy insight = campaign success.

Insights are like acorns. Tiny seedlings of potential that determine whether a campaign captures attention, generates emotion and creates memories. Or whether it’s forgotten in two seconds flat.

A not-dictionary-approved definition

in · sight /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t / n 1 a truth

good in · sight /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t / n 2 an unspoken truth

An insight can be about anything. A product. An audience. A behaviour. Strategist Mark Pollard calls it, “An unspoken truth that sheds new light on the problem.”

A good one makes you go, “Oh yeah, that’s so true.” Or: “I never thought of it that way, but you’re so right.” “Lol, that’s so me.”

It is not a trend, a fact or an observation. Save that kind of info for the background research page.

Brand tracking platform Tracksuit analysed The Ordinary’s The Periodic Fable last week. A scientific table with zero science. Also a Cannes Lion winner. This campaign exposed the beauty industry’s flagrant misuse of buzzwords, exposing 49 fake elements—from Pore Erasing and Dream Serum to Instant Youth and Freshly Made—under the microscope.

The insight was not: Gen Z likes to shop for skincare on TikTok. That’s an observation. Instead, it might have been: skincare brands condition Gen Z to seek out misinformation by deliberately inventing buzzwords that imply authority and luxury. Or: the average Gen Z knows less about "phosphorus" than “porelessness” because only one drives the hamster wheel of consumerism.

Tracksuit said, “It worked because it tapped into a cultural truth.” From June 25 to May 26, the campaign drove +12% consideration with 18-34 year-olds.

The cold-hearted business case for warm and fuzzies

Emotional campaigns create more profit.

Hand on heart. Time to be honest. The path that guides a CMO is the bottom line.

We’re not crafting a headline that sounds like music on the tip of your tongue because we’re interested in exploring the theory of language. We’re doing it to sell supplements. Success equals more bottles on consumers’ bathroom shelves. (For example.)

Tracksuit finds 29% of emotional campaigns result in very large profit growth. 16% of rational campaigns result in very large profit growth. James Hurman, co-founder and author of NZ’s most backed book on Kickstarter ever, describes it like this. “When we elicit emotion with our marketing, customers don’t just know the brand, they feel something for it. And when customers feel emotionally connected, they are far less price sensitive.”

p.s. you can’t elicit emotion without an unspoken truth.

And of course, the brand experienced their best ever week of sales. Could any brand ask for a better birthday present?

Want to know what else we did for Showpo? Read the full case study.

Help. Why doesn’t anyone care about your campaign

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