How Many Times Can You Distinctly Remember Peeing?

We have a question we’ve been asking friends for years.

It’s an important piece of scientific research.

Potentially Nobel-worthy.

How many times can you distinctly remember peeing?

Not:

Do you remember that you have peed?

Obviously.

Hopefully quite regularly.

We mean individual pisses.

Specific ones.

Can you close your eyes and remember where you were?

What happened?

Who was there?

How it felt?

For most people, the answer is surprisingly small.

One.

Two.

Maybe three.

Which is strange.

Because you've probably peed tens of thousands of times.

And your brain has apparently decided almost every single one wasn't worth keeping.

Fair.

So, Tell Us About the Memorable Piss

This is where the question gets interesting.

Because when someone does remember one, there's usually a story.

They wet themselves at a train station.

They somehow got locked naked in a hotel corridor.

There was blood.

An STI.

A terrifying toilet in the middle of nowhere.

A spectacular view.

An extremely unfortunate wardrobe decision.

A moment where they thought:

Well. This isn't fucking normal.

Something happened.

There was a before.

Then a moment.

Then an after.

Their state changed.

And their brain went:

Yep.

Keeping that one.

Your Brain Is an Aggressive Editor

Think about the amount of information your brain encounters every day.

Faces.

Cars.

Signs.

Conversations.

Emails.

Rooms.

Meals.

Footpaths.

Ads.

Pisses.

Most of it disappears.

It has to.

Imagine remembering every time you've opened the fridge.

Every red light.

Every Teams call.

Every time you've put on socks.

Every time you've seen a fucking pre-roll ad for insurance.

You'd be unusable.

Memory has to be selective.

And one of the things that helps something survive is change.

Something unexpected happens.

You laugh.

You become nervous.

Disgusted.

Curious.

Excited.

Surprised.

Turned on.

Angry.

Moved.

Confused.

Something shifts.

Your internal state before the experience is different from your internal state after it.

Now there might be something worth remembering.

Most Marketing Is a Perfectly Normal Piss

This is the problem.

Think about the amount of content brands make.

Thousands of impressions.

Hundreds of posts.

Campaigns.

TVCs.

Creator content.

Emails.

Display.

Outdoor.

Pre-roll.

Paid social.

Millions upon millions of tiny encounters with customers.

And so much of it is designed to create absolutely no state change whatsoever.

Don't surprise them too much.

Don't make the joke too weird.

Don't make them uncomfortable.

Don't be too funny.

Don't be too sexy.

Don't be too strange.

Don't be too emotional.

Don't make anyone angry.

Don't confuse anyone.

Don't push too far.

Don't do anything the category wouldn't normally do.

Make it familiar.

Clear.

Safe.

Boring.

Then we're surprised when nobody fucking remembers it.

“We Want to Drive Awareness”

Excellent.

How?

“We'll reach them four times.”

Right.

With what?

“The campaign.”

Is it memorable?

“Well, it's very on-brand.”

Okay.

This is like trying to create someone's most memorable piss by asking them to urinate four completely normal times.

Maybe frequency will do it.

Piss again.

Nothing?

Again.

Still nothing?

MORE FREQUENCY.

Eventually Media is standing outside their bathroom with a reach-and-frequency chart.

The problem wasn't that they needed to experience the boring thing more often.

The problem was that nothing happened.

Memory Needs Something to Grab Onto

This is why distinctive creative matters.

Something has to happen.

Not necessarily something enormous.

You don't need every piece of content to cause an existential crisis.

But give the brain something.

A weird line.

A surprising visual.

A character.

A joke.

A feeling.

A story.

A creator people actually give a shit about.

An opinion.

A moment of tension.

Something beautiful.

Something stupid.

Something they didn't expect the brand to say.

Something.

Because memory needs handles.

And:

“Here are three key product benefits presented in accordance with our brand guidelines”

is quite a slippery little bastard.

Arousal Is Not Just About Sex

Calm down.

We're using the psychological version.

Arousal is essentially a change in activation.

Something wakes you up.

Your attention increases.

Your emotional state shifts.

Your system goes:

Hello. What's this?

Humour can do it.

Fear can do it.

Curiosity can do it.

Beauty can do it.

Surprise can do it.

Anger can do it.

Desire can do it.

A brilliant piece of craft can do it.

A creator saying something unexpectedly honest can do it.

Marketing should be trying to create some kind of response.

Instead, a lot of approval processes are specifically designed to remove arousal.

Too surprising?

Change it.

Too provocative?

Soften it.

Too funny?

Might not land with everyone.

Too emotional?

Can we bring the product in earlier?

Too strange?

Doesn't feel like the category.

Round by round, every potential state change gets surgically removed.

Until finally:

Nobody feels anything.

Approved.

This Might Be the Weirdest Thing About Brand Awareness

We're obsessed with being remembered.

Mental availability.

Awareness.

Recall.

Recognition.

Distinctiveness.

All sensible things.

Then we create work designed to resemble everything the customer has already seen.

Same category codes.

Same casting.

Same language.

Same claims.

Same creators reading slightly different scripts.

Same beautifully lit product.

Same emotional arc.

Same fucking drone shot.

And somehow expect the brain to file ours separately.

Why would it?

If your customer feels exactly the same before, during and after your advertising, what reason have you given their brain to keep it?

You Don't Remember Normal

That's the piss test.

You don't remember the normal ones.

You remember the time something happened.

The weird one.

The painful one.

The embarrassing one.

The hilarious one.

The one with a story attached.

Nobody has ever answered our question:

“Oh yes. Tuesday, 14 March 2017. Lovely standard piss. About 42 seconds. Nothing happened. Five stars.”

Because normal is extraordinarily forgettable.

That's generally a feature of human existence.

For marketers?

Slightly inconvenient.

“But We Don't Want Negative Emotions”

Fine.

You don't need to traumatise anyone into remembering your yoghurt.

We're not arguing:

MEMORY = MAKE CUSTOMERS FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES.

State change can be tiny.

Make them smile.

Make them curious.

Make them want something.

Give them a useful piece of information.

Show them something beautiful.

Surprise them.

Make them feel understood.

Make them laugh.

Give them a little dopamine hit.

Make them think:

Huh.

That's already more than most advertising manages.

The point isn't which emotion.

The point is:

Was there one?

The Absence of Complaints Is Not Evidence of Memory

Here's where organisations get themselves into trouble.

Campaign launches.

No negative comments.

No complaints.

No angry emails.

No Comms issue.

No CEO concerns.

Excellent.

But also:

No conversation.

No shares.

No memory.

No real response whatsoever.

We've successfully engineered an experience as emotionally significant as using the toilet at home on a Wednesday morning.

Nothing went wrong.

Nothing happened either.

And nothing is extremely difficult to remember.

Your Creative Review Needs a State-Change Question

Forget:

“Do we like it?”

For a second.

Ask:

“What should somebody feel before and after seeing this?”

Before:

Don't care.

After:

Curious.

Good.

Before:

Don't know us.

After:

That brand is fucking funny.

Good.

Before:

Think all products in this category are the same.

After:

Wait, theirs does what?

Good.

Before:

No desire.

After:

Want.

Very good.

But if the answer is:

Before:

Fine.

After:

Also fine.

We might have a problem.

This Is Why “Fine” Is So Fucking Dangerous

Fine feels safe internally.

Fine gets through.

Fine doesn't require defending.

Fine doesn't make Legal call.

Fine doesn't make management nervous.

Fine doesn't get the agency invited back in to explain the joke.

Fine is easy.

And then Fine meets the human memory system.

Delete.

Because the brain isn't sitting there thinking:

That was a very appropriately branded execution. I'll store that for future purchasing occasions.

It's filtering.

Constantly.

Interesting.

Not interesting.

Relevant.

Irrelevant.

Expected.

Unexpected.

Keep.

Flush.

We Spend a Fortune Making Things Designed to Be Flushed

That's the bit.

Strategy.

Creative.

Production.

Creators.

Media.

Agency fees.

Internal salaries.

Research.

Measurement.

Millions of dollars.

All so we can put something in front of a human being that has been carefully optimised to create as little disturbance as possible.

Then:

“Brand recall was lower than expected.”

No shit.

We made the cognitive equivalent of a completely uneventful piss.

So, How Many Times Can You Remember Peeing?

Ask people.

Seriously.

It's a good question.

You'll probably get a laugh first.

Then they'll think.

And eventually they'll give you a story.

Not because peeing is inherently memorable.

Clearly it isn't.

Because something changed.

Something unexpected entered an otherwise completely ordinary experience.

And that's what survived.

Marketing isn't so different.

Your customers will see thousands upon thousands of pieces of commercial content.

Most will disappear.

Yours probably will too.

Unless you give their brain a reason to keep it.

Make them laugh.

Surprise them.

Move them.

Excite them.

Make them curious.

Make them want.

Make them feel something.

Anything.

Create a state change.

Because if your ambition is to make advertising that's as safe, familiar and uneventful as every other piece of advertising in the category, don't be surprised when it receives the same fate as almost every piss you've ever taken.

Flushed.

And immediately fucking forgotten.