Advertising is life and death.

When people recount intense moments in their lives, like falling from a great height, or being caught up in a robbery, or some kind of near-death experience, they often describe the moment as feeling like ‘time slowed down’. It’s such a phenomena that we even see it recreated in film or written narrative. (Often accompanied by a comical deep warbled ‘NNNNNNOOOOOoooooooo’.)

Neuroscientists have even studied it by setting up situations in which people might experience such a moment while studying their brain activity. (I’m not entirely sure how they do this but the way things are going I can imagine it being the next demented game show on Netflix.) As it turns out, despite the intense feeling that we’re experiencing ‘time slowing down’, it’s actually more so a function of how our brain imprints memories. When we’re experiencing something as intense as a life or death situation, our brain (rightly so) effectively goes ‘shit, hang on, I better really pay attention to this’. So much so, that it acutely studies every single detail of the moment to such a degree that the information it stores in regards to the experience is so voluminous and deeply imprinted - that it feels as if time slows down. Simply because of how detailed the memory is. Even when we think back to it years later.

This pattern extends well beyond ‘life and death’ situations as well. Remember when you were kid, and weekends spent at your friend’s house felt like an eternity? The school holidays, especially the ‘big ones’ felt like almost an entire year of fun? But now that we’re older, weekends vanish into thin air and holiday periods always feel ‘too short’? And we’re always banging on about how ‘every year goes faster than the last’? It, of course, doesn’t. It’s just how our brain interprets it. Everything feels ‘fast’ now because we’re just doing the same shit over and over again. Nothing is new. Nothing is novel. Nothing is exciting and fresh and fun. It’s all routine, and our brain treats it as such. Unimportant. But when you were a kid, everything was new and exciting and fun and entertaining. So, interestingly, the whole ‘life or death’ thing isn’t just about intense morbid moments, it’s more so a different, new, novel experience that your brain then decides is worth dedicating more memory to. Equally so, if something is fun and exciting and fresh, our brain pays attention to more details and stores those details to a greater degree.

After years of studying time and our brains interpretation of it, the neuroscientific discovery was not so much about time itself, or life and death, but the importance of new and novel experiences clinging to our memories.

(So, funnily enough, while weirdo billionaires are out there harvesting their son’s blood and eating 117 pills a day and creating the most mind numbingly boring daily routines to follow so they can live longer - the secret to ‘living longer’ is probably just to seek novel experiences and have fun. Something they, ironically, seem acutely incapable of.)

Which is why I don’t read many advertising and marketing books anymore, nor listen to endless podcasts or read thinkpieces from today’s advertising and marketing heads. I often find there’s more to learn about advertising and creativity by listening to intuitive people in other fields. Because there are people out there who are a lot smarter than we are. Or at least than we think we are. (I include myself in this assessment, so if you unfollow now, I don’t blame you.)

Our attention spans are shrinking because people don’t like to watch shit ads on YouTube.

Using this one same template every time will always give you the best result.

Brand advertising is a waste of money because it doesn’t ‘sell the product’.

Marketers are not evolutionary anthropologists. The science disagrees. The science says that seeing, hearing, feeling something new and novel and exciting and fresh and funny and intense and emotional puts our brain into a state where it clears wider and deeper space to reserve memory of it. The science says that seeing something routine and increasingly familiar likely risks it bouncing off of our forehead. (I like to take this same approach to where I seek inspiration from - outside of our own bubble. Places I don’t normally spend as much time in. Like weird neuroscience studies on time and death.)

A lot of the opinions above are really self-fulfilling prophecies because we’ve given up on taking risks and swimming upstream and swinging for the fence. We’ve given up trying to excite people. We’ve given up trying to make them care. We’ve stopped doing the things that actually create mental availability in the people we hope to connect with.

Which is maybe a ridiculous segue to our first real spot for SLATHER. Made on a shoestring budget but with take-on-the-world-ambitions. A sunscreen ad, I think it’s fairly safe to say, that is unlike any other sunscreen ad ever made. Fresh, novel, entertaining. Terrifying. (That includes terrifying to us, as well as the audience.)

A brand that’s barely one month old and somehow carved out enough brain space to end up in a headline that says ‘Nike, Porsche, SLATHER’.

So, if you’re reading this, keep on swinging for the fence.

You’ve got science behind you.

(Actual science.)