The Ads Your Customers Swear They Never Saw

 

There’s a special moment in every marketer’s life when the data taps you on the shoulder, clears its throat, and says, “Hey, you might want to sit down for this.”

Valspar just had one of those moments.

Neuromarketing researcher Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy discovered that 95% of shoppers exposed to Valspar ads bought the brand. Only 70% of the “unexposed” did. 

Great news, right? Champagne? High-fives? Cue the case-study video?

Hold the confetti cannon.

Because when those same shoppers were asked at checkout if they remembered seeing any Valspar advertising, most of them said, with full confidence, “Nope. Never seen it.”

So there it is: the creative work doing the heavy lifting is the very work people swear they’ve never laid eyes on.

Which, honestly, feels about right.

Your brain is a stingy little machine, burning 20% of your calories while making up 2% of your body. It refuses to let your conscious mind handle anything it can safely automate. Walking, tying shoes, choosing paint brands … all shoved into the dusty back room marked AUTOPILOT: NO LOITERING.

And advertising? It sneaks in through that door.

Ramsøy found that people spot an ad in roughly 2–3 seconds. Two. Maybe three. That’s your window. That tiny sliver where attention flares just long enough to stamp an emotional watermark on the subconscious before the brain yanks the power cable from the memory department.

And that watermark? That’s what guides the hand reaching for paint cans later, while the shopper’s mouth says, “I just like this brand better.”

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you’re measuring success by whether people remember your ads, you’re basically asking your guests to review the meal based on a dream they half-had during dessert.

Stop chasing recall. Chase resonance. Chase the spark in those first 300 milliseconds when decision-making actually happens.

Your best campaigns might be the ones nobody remembers … except their brains already bought the product.

The Annoying New Rhythm of TV

 

I realized something had shifted the night a car chase got interrupted by a toothpaste commercial.

Not at the end of a scene. Not after a dramatic pause. Right in the middle of screeching tires and someone dangling off a bridge *bam* “micro-foam technology.”

Ads don’t bother me in principle. I understand the deal. We pay less, they sell stuff. Fine. But TV used to have rhythm. Scenes had buttons. Jokes landed. Tension peaked. Then the ad break arrived like a predictable thunderclap. You could feel the structure underneath it.

Now, when streaming movies on services like YouTube, the interruptions feel like a cat sprinting across your keyboard. No warning. No rhythm. No sense of story. 

Maybe we’ve just gotten used to being interrupted. Our attention spans are basically public sidewalks now … any brand can set up a folding table in the middle of them. We’ll step around it and keep going.

Still, I miss when timing mattered. When pauses meant something. When a scene could actually finish before an emu tried to sell me insurance.

Yes, I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep rolling my eyes when the climactic duel is interrupted by a cheerful voice promising two-day shipping. I’ll mute it. I’ll sigh. I’ll wait. But every time an ad crashes into a moment that was about to mean something, I feel like I’m watching creativity get nudged aside by a spreadsheet.

Am I the only one muttering at the screen or does everybody use the break to scroll on their phones?

We Need Education Reform

My youngest is graduating from university this month and the world has radically changed since her freshman year. And it is becoming increasingly clear that it's time to radically reform our education system..

We built an education system for factories.

For bells that told us when to move.

For clocks that told us when to stop.

For bosses who told us what to do.

We taught kids how to show up on time.

How to sit still.

How to follow the plan.

How to pass the test.

And for a while, it worked. Factories needed rhythm. Offices needed order. Society ran smoother when everyone knew their line and stayed inside it.

But now? We’ve built machines that do all that better than we ever could.

AI doesn’t get tired.

It doesn’t forget.

It follows instructions perfectly.

It memorizes flawlessly.

It regurgitates infinitely.

It never shows up late, never needs a coffee, never blanks out on test day.

It does exactly what we were trained to do … what we're training our kids to do ... only faster, cheaper, cleaner.

The world has changed: Information isn’t the prize anymore … knowledge is cheap and easily accessible. Now, the very skills we spent decades drilling into kids are the ones least worth having.

So what now?

We’ve gotta teach kids how to think, not just what to think.

How to question the premise.

How to build something that doesn’t exist yet.

How to use those infinite facts not as answers, but as ingredients.

The future won’t belong to the ones who know the most, it’ll belong to the ones who can connect the dots the machine can’t see.

The machines can follow the instructions. We need humans who can write them.

The Sea Is the Sea

When critics went hunting for symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway famously pushed back:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. 
The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.
The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit.”

Of course, the story resonates beyond its literal parts. Of course, readers will see struggle, dignity, mortality, grace. Hemingway wasn’t naïve about that.

But he was serious about something deeper that can be important to writers: the work begins with the concrete. Not theme. Not metaphor. Not what the thing stands for. The thing itself. The sea. The fish. The boy. The sharks.

Hemingway’s rebuke of critics is a reminder to writers that meaning collapses when it’s declared too early. If you write toward symbolism, you end up with cardboard symbols instead of living objects. But if you commit to the truth of the words themselves -- the texture of the rope, the weight of the line, the ache in the old man’s hands -- meaning happens anyway. And it feels earned, not imposed.

For writers, that’s the lesson. Don’t chase allegory. Don’t decorate your work with “important ideas.” Put your faith in the tangible. Tell the truth about what's there. Let readers discover what it means.

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Here are some other posts that touch on Hemingway and his work:

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

The Original Hemingway on Punctuation

Write Drunk Edit Sober

Writers Read

The Sun Also Rises