WHEN WE DESIGN FOR THE AVERAGE, ARE WE DESIGNING FOR NO ONE?
We marketers do love a rule, don’t we?
A benchmark here, a best practice there, and suddenly a feeling of certainty descends like a weighted blanket. We convince ourselves that what worked yesterday will probably work tomorrow. The world feels ordered. Predictable. Sensible.
Except it isn’t.
Advertising effectiveness is meant to be about understanding how people make decisions. Yet we’ve built an industry that relies on “the average consumer” – that curious statistical phantom who somehow represents everyone, but often resembles no one at all. Our models smooth out the intricacies of real life until all that remains is something blandly reassuring, but not entirely representative.
I’ve spent my career on the sharp end of that smoothing. I have ADHD and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, which means my brain and body don’t always follow the expected choreography. My attention doesn’t move in a straight line; what others see as background noise often grips me completely. I also have auditory processing differences, so subtitles and visual cues are my gateway to understanding and memory. Design choices that exclude these differences don’t just inconvenience me; they erase me.
And I’m far from alone. One in five people in the UK are neurodivergent. More than 16 million live with a disability. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a significant portion of the people we claim to be marketing to. Yet most of our measurement systems and creative strategies don’t take our nuance into consideration.
This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about practical mismeasurement and, frankly, missed opportunities. When we define “what works” too narrowly, we stop seeing the richness of how people actually experience media, attention, and emotion. We start designing for convenience rather than reality.
Rather than discuss these considerations in a vacuum, I will be exploring this very topic at this year’s Future of Media conference. I will explore the idea that the next leap in effectiveness will come from widening our lens.
That means:
- Focusing on outputs, not inputs: fame, memory, and ease of decision rather than the data points that make dashboards glow
- Designing for reality, not the average, understanding that difference isn’t deviance but a fertile ground for creativity and growth
- And having the bravery to question our models, even when that makes the room a little uncomfortable
After all, progress rarely comes from comfort. Curiosity is what moves our industry forward.
Advertising has always been the business of building fame, encoding memory, and removing friction. To keep doing that in 2025 and beyond, we need to stop chasing statistical ghosts and start designing for how people truly see, hear, think, and feel.
Difference isn’t a deviation from effectiveness. It’s where the next great leap will come from.