Why this marketer believes ‘less is more’ in marketing

Sometimes, the best thing a marketer can do is less. Or at least, less of the usual stuff.

In his former role as Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer, Raja Rajamannar, who is now the brand’s senior fellow, significantly cut the brand’s traditional marketing budget, redirecting it into experiences, sponsorships, and consumer engagement.

Very little changed—and, in fact, the brand saw better results when it focused on emergent channels. It was an enlightening result that has led Rajamannar to claim that traditional advertising as we know it is dead.

“It’s not that advertising doesn’t work,” Rajamannar told us, “but to make advertising work, it’s getting already more difficult, and it’s becoming even more difficult to establish that your advertising is working and attribute the results.”

At Cannes Lions, we sat down with Rajamannar to hear more about where he thinks the advertising industry is headed, and why he believes in the power of brand restraint in a world of endless digital clutter. Here are some highlights.

On his claim that traditional advertising is “dead”: Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer. On an average, you are bombarded by anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 commercial messages every single day. It’s an overload of commercial messages that most people, and the human brain, cannot simply process, they just tune out. So the clutter is unbelievable. Coupled with that, the span of human attention has started shrinking. Now it stands just under eight seconds, which is less than the span of attention of a goldfish. So you’ve got a very narrow window of attention through which 3,000 to 10,000 ads are trying to go through. To me, it sounded like madness. I said, how do we even know if our ad is being noticed properly?...My hypothesis is, advertising is not working the way it used to when there was much less clutter. And I said, “Let’s cut 10% of our advertisement budget and then see what happens.” Nothing happened. Then I said, “Okay, we can go bolder and bigger.” So over a period of time, I cut off 70% of my entire advertising budget, and moved that money to alternate ways of communicating, whether it is influencer marketing, whether it’s experiential marketing. And our brand started growing faster. In the last six, seven years, we have been one of the fastest-rising brands…and we have now become the world’s 12th most valuable brand, and one of the most liked brands and one of the most recognized brands in the world. So, in spite of cutting 70% of my advertising budget, we could actually get better momentum than ever before.

It’s not that advertising doesn’t work, but to make advertising work, it’s getting more and more difficult, and it’s becoming even more difficult to establish that your advertising is working and attribute the results to this advertising campaign. And so, from that point of view, I keep saying in a provocative way that advertising is dead. And the reality is that the alternate mechanisms of reaching out to consumers are going through the roof. For example, if we look at live experiences around the world, they are being sold out like there is no tomorrow. And it’s not just the selling of the tickets at the venues, but also the social amplification of what’s happening. And with the rise of influencers, that’s another huge jump…We have to be looking at a holistic picture. The need to communicate remains. How you communicate need not only be through advertising, but that doesn’t mean advertising is going to go away anytime soon. The reality is, 30% of my budget is there, in advertising.

On the power of brand restraint: I think marketers ought to be extremely thoughtful, and they should be secure in themselves. When the clutter is high already, you should figure out a way to stand out as opposed to add to that clutter…At one of the [Cannes Lions] hotels…every single place you look around, there is the name of a particular brand, which I don’t want to name. One of my other colleagues was actually commenting, “Oh, this brand seems to be vomited all over this hotel.” Meaning, the idea is not to maximize visibility. Don’t mistake visibility for impact. You need a certain level of visibility, but beyond that, it is off-putting, and it only adds to the clutter, whether it is visually or on your television or your digital, wherever. Don’t overdo it. Number two, you have to be contextually appropriate. You have to be present in a most compelling fashion. There has to be a design aesthetic that is pleasing to the consumer. You have to be very, very elegant as a brand. Now, whatever your brand character is, you can be present in that character. If you are a pretty rebellious brand, be a rebel. Be in line with the character of your brand. But you don’t have to be a rebel here, here, here, every five centimeters… It is actually counterproductive. Bear in mind, consumers are not idiots. When they see it, they get it. Like, for example, some of the advertising strategies that amuse me even now—and my heart bleeds at the amount of wasted money—in the same programming, they repeat the advertisement multiple times, the exact same ad during every single break. You don’t need that. And it doesn’t have to be that way…Sometimes, less is more. In some cases, silence, actually, is golden.