Why it’s time to Look Out - Orlando Wood

Orlando Wood is Chief Innovation Officer of System1 Group and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. He is also a member of the IPA’s Effectiveness Leadership Group. Author of Lemon (IPA, 2019), co-author of System1, Unlocking Profitable Growth (2017), his research on advertising effectiveness draws on psychology and a study of the creative arts.

Orlando’s work has influenced thinking and practice in the research, marketing, and advertising, winning him awards from the ARF (Great Minds Distinction Award), the AMA (4 under 40), Jay Chiat (Gold Award for Research Innovation), ISBA (Ad Effectiveness Award), MRS (Best Paper and Research Effectiveness Awards) and ESOMAR (Best Methodology).

Orlando led the IPA’s Creativity and Effectiveness research for Effectiveness Week in 2018, 2019 and 2020. He has repeatedly worked with Peter Field and the IPA’s DataBank to demonstrate the long and broad effects achieved by emotional advertising, including the performance of fluent devices, a term he coined.

Orlando is a frequent conference speaker and has been published in The Journal of Advertising Research, Admap, and Market Leader.

What we covered in this episode:

• Why digital disruption means we need to start ‘looking out’
• His last book was a Lemon but it did rather well
• How Prof Iain McGilchrist inspired Orlando
• What history can tell us about what is happening today
• How understanding the brain helps us capture & sustain attention
• The left brain argument for right brain creativity
• How our culture lost its vitality
• The separation of writing a book during lockdown
• Orlando reads his own introduction to the book
• Its rude to stare. How the stare has been used throughout history
• How advertising is starting to reflect art from periods of disruption & conflict
• Fake news isn’t new. How the printing press created a publishing revolution
• How the industrial revolution created a loss of community
• The rapid rise of anxiety and the loss of humour
• The different modes of attention and why they matter
• Why we can’t see the wood for the trees
• We watch what interests us and sometimes that’s advertising
• How emotion orientates our attention, encodes in memory & aids decision making
• The role of digital to support brand building ‘broad beam’ advertising
• Why brand building becomes more important for online businesses
• How emotion drives more viewing of advertising in digital environments
• The trap of using digital style ‘narrow beam’ advertising on TV
• What features in advertising holds attention and drives business effects
• The swordfish strangler called Wilford. Why uniqueness creates believability.
• Yorkshire Tea and creating connections
• Poking fun at rigidity and the serious case for humour 
• What’s too silly to be said can be sung
• How colour grading can change our mood and how effective an Ad will be
• The pandemic and why we need a right-brained reaction
• The story of a dog and cone and the inspiration for this book
• Look Out for the book o Amazon and via the IPA’s website