Sir John Hegarty’s three tests for great advertising: memorable, motivating, truthful

Sir John Hegarty opened the Festival of Marketing in London on Wednesday with a simple test for any piece of creative work. It has to be memorable, it has to be motivating, and it has to be truthful, and he was blunt about the order: “If it isn’t memorable, go home.”

Hegarty’s three tests

He drew the tests as a triangle with memorability at the top, because an ad nobody notices cannot do anything else. Work that is memorable but does not motivate is “no good”, he said. And it has to be true, “because I’m trying to build a long-term relationship with the customer”, a point aimed at an industry that increasingly optimises for the next click rather than the next decade, as Marketing Week reported.

He blamed what he called a “sea of sameness” on the industry’s obsession with KPIs, and on a data industry that has sold marketers the idea that every decision can be measured in advance. The job of communication is to get noticed, he argued, and getting even 2 per cent more people to notice something would be transformative.

On risk and gut instinct

The most revealing moment was a story against himself. Asked by a client’s advertising director whether a famous BBH campaign for Audi would work, he said it would be fantastic. Privately, he told the audience, he had “no fucking idea”. His point was that brave work always involves uncertainty, and a marketer who waits for proof before backing an idea will never back a great one.

He also had a message for the business-to-business marketers in the room: buyers are people with “loves, likes and dislikes”, not visitors from “planet B2B”, and B2B brands should be “the torchbearers” for creativity rather than its last holdouts.

Why it matters

This is the keynote we trailed in September, and it follows his interview last month in which he called modern advertising repetitive, cliché and boring. The three tests are the constructive half of that argument, and they are useful precisely because they are so simple: any marketer can hold a piece of work up against them in a meeting.

They are also a fair description of his own best work. Levi’s Launderette was impossible to forget, sold an awful lot of jeans, and never pretended the product was anything it was not. The industry has the tools to measure almost everything except whether an idea is any good, and Hegarty’s case is that nothing has replaced judgement.