Essays

December 18, 2012

Mr. John Wanamaker
Wanamaker’s Department Store
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Wanamaker,

We apologize for responding to your problem at this late date. As you might recall, you said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Considerable time and effort was required to prepare a response to your implied question: How can I pick the most effective advertisement for the situation? In fact, thousands of experimental studies conducted over a century were necessary to answer your question. Eighteen years were needed to summarize this knowledge and to put it in a form that your employees in Philadelphia can use. I hope that this delay has not been a hardship for you.
    We were inspired by noticing the tremendous progress that has been made by doctors and engineers, who base their decisions on experimental evidence. We are trying to emulate their methods. We owe a huge debt to Benjamin Franklin, who provided advice on how to handle such complex problems.
    Our “innovation” weighs nothing. Fortunately it is free as otherwise, the cost per pound would be so high as to discourage customers.
    Once you have this innovation in hand, provide it to your employees and tell them to use the “self-training module.” With less than two hours of training, the use of our innovation will allow them to make far better assessments of the effectiveness of an ad than those made by your best advertising experts.
    We have labored for eighteen years in the expectation that this innovation would be a success, but the degree of improvement has been beyond our wildest expectations. Thus, we are rushing our preliminary findings to you under separate cover. We will continue to test this innovation, which we call the AdPrin Audit, and we have many improvements that we plan to make.
We hope the AdPrin Audit will open a new era in advertising. We are not sure what to call it, but perhaps “evidence-based advertising” would be appropriate as it relies on the work of the many scientists who conducted the experiments.  Without their help, this advance would not have been possible. A copy of our paper is attached.
    Again, I apologize for the tardy reply.

Yours, in good health,

Professor J. Scott Armstrong, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

PS. I think of you often when we pass by your house during our summer vacations in Cape May.

Distraction is a popular advertising tactic that, when used properly, can be effective. It should be avoided if people might be deceived into making poor decisions. To use distraction to deceive would be unethical and, if used by a business, would also likely harm long-run profitability. In my opinion, the primary value of distraction is to delight people who are making hedonic decisions. It is like the enjoyment one gets when magicians use distraction to deceive them, as described in “A Pickpocket’s Tale”.

In some cases it can lead people to make decisions that are good for them by distracting them from thinking about their objections. But it has also be used inappropriately some organizations, For example, some firms advertise their support of popular social causes so as to divert attention from their irresponsible behavior in other areas (Kotchen & Moon 2011). In addition, some advertisers use distraction in such a way that it distracts people from an important message in the advertisement.

For more on distraction, see Persuasive Advertising (pages 106-110).

Scott Armstrong

Distraction is a popular advertising tactic that, when used properly, can be effective. It should be avoided if people might be deceived into making poor decisions. To use distraction to deceive would be unethical and, if used by a business, would also likely harm long-run profitability. In my opinion, the primary value of distraction is to delight people who are making hedonic decisions. It is like the enjoyment one gets when magicians use distraction to deceive them, as described in “A Pickpocket’s Tale”.