To write great ads, you’ve gotta well-informed about the product you’re trying to sell so you can present it in the best possible light; this is well-known. But is your expertise in what you’re writing about actually holding you back?
Basically:
- Once you know something it’s very hard to un-know it or imagine not knowing it
- This forms bias in your writing that hurts your target audience’s ability to follow your train of thought and reach the conclusion you intend them to
- If this is happening in your ads, it’s costing you money
- To avoid it, constantly re-check your work for the assumptions you’re asking your audience to make. Treat your audience like smart people who are hearing about this for the first time
Does any of that feel vague? Good. We’ll come back to that.
Not-knowing is half the battle
Early in my career, I suggested to a colleague that the only reason they picked up on a clever bit of marketing in a parcel they’d received was because they themselves were a marketer. The response amounted to “no, I was thinking like a consumer there”.
I don’t object to that person’s intentions- taking your specialist skills out of the equation and thinking like a layperson is a good call in a situation like that. Really though, it’s basically impossible to pull off. Once you know something, it’s mind-bogglingly difficult to un-know it. Willpower or hard work won’t help either. You can’t think your way out of knowing something. You’d probably have to literally boggle your mind.
Making the attempt anyway- or at least, the way you’re going about it- might be the reason your ads aren’t working. You’re suffering from something called the Curse of Knowledge.
To avoid the same pitfall, I’m going to immediately explain what that is.
Put simply- once you know and understand something, it’s very difficult to imagine not understanding it. You can’t see from that other perspective anymore. That now-lost perspective hurts your ability to communicate your point because you end up focused on the wrong knowledge gaps, or assuming certain knowledge gaps don’t exist.
In many ways, there’s no going back. I’ve been running Google Ads as part of my day job for the better part of a decade. When I think back to before that time and try to remember if I even understood the extent of advertising on Google, why the links inside of the yellow ‘sponsored’ box were different, what it meant when Google got rid of the yellow box but kept the ‘sponsored’ heading, I literally can’t do it. I have less than zero idea how I used to think about this stuff.
No matter how much you try to temporarily un-know a piece of knowledge, it’s never all that doable. It would be like trying to forget the “I am your father” twist before re-watching The Empire Strikes Back. Everyone understands why you’re trying, but your chances are about the same as Luke Skywalker fishing his original hand back out of that big round pit it falls into.
In lots of areas of knowledge work this can be especially precarious- most teams are designed so your personal job description and skillset feature abilities and knowledge nobody else on your team has. Or maybe your work is more general than that, but only you know something about a certain project or client. You can’t do anything about that (and sometimes shouldn’t: it’s your unique advantage), but you need to keep it in mind:
It’s not enough to know something unique and have it stay inside of your head. You need to be able to communicate it to another person so they see the value in it. That way, the time and effort you put into knowing that thing gets the credit it’s due. Keep the knowledge, avoid the curse.
The Curse of Knowledge can curse your messaging
Coming across examples of this mistake in other people’s advertising is difficult, because ads which fall into this trap generally do poorly and don’t get seen as much. Retargeting ads which end up being seen by unaware users can have this effect because viewers lack essential pre-existing context.
For contrast, here’s an example of a UK household name winning the spotlight because they’re big enough for the general public to fill in the blanks themselves:
For the unaware, Specsavers opticians built their brand for years around ads where someone has an embarrassing, inconvenient or painful moment because they couldn’t see properly (like this delivery driver), followed up with the iconic “should have gone to Specsavers” slogan. When a car crashed into their shop, it was shared far and wide by the general public. Other examples are easy to find and it’s always Specsavers who are referenced.
If another optician, one which hadn’t built an iconic association with these sorts of mishaps, was involved in a similar car accident, there would be no story at all. Or more likely, people would still say “should have gone to Specsavers” and the context would make it even funnier. The danger of the curse of knowledge comes from wrongly assuming your target audience will join the dots for you, the way they do for Specsavers.
An example slightly closer to home- I once offended a mate by trying to reference an episode of a podcast I knew we both listened to, only for him to have fallen behind on his listening. Instead of a funny inside joke it sounded like I was just launching a vicious attack on one of his more painful moments. Not a mistake I’ll make twice.
Avoiding the curse
Honestly, avoiding the curse is one of those “simple but difficult” scenarios: it doesn’t take a genius, but it demands discipline. You have to do the same basic stuff over and over again, in all your comms. The different target audiences your different ads and content are aimed at make the correct level of detail into a moving target.
Whenever you’re writing, re-read your content word-for-word and ask yourself what assumptions you’re making. What pre-existing knowledge does the reader need? What can you flesh out in the text? What needs changing completely?
Are there acronyms you haven’t explained? Have you launched straight into explaining the result of an action without properly putting the action in context? Have you delivered a numbers-heavy rundown to an audience that doesn’t care about numbers, or vice versa?
It’s not about treating anyone like they’re stupid- it’s about avoiding a situation where they feel stupid because you overestimated what they already know about a topic.
You can cover a lot of bases by asking if your target audience will:
- Understand what they’re reading
- Focus on the right details
- Care about what those details imply
Don’t give yourself any benefit of the doubt here. It’s another place where LLMs can be useful- ask it to roleplay as someone with the correct level of subject knowledge and ask them how well it would understand what you’ve written. Just remember- LLMs will try their hardest to agree with you and are easy to gaslight into agreeing, so keep your questions neutral and avoid leading them in a certain direction.
In as few words as possible;
To revisit:
- Once you know something it’s very hard to un-know it or imagine not knowing it
- This forms bias in your writing that hurts your target audience’s ability to follow your train of thought and reach the conclusion you intend them to
- If this is happening in your ads, it’s costing you money
- To avoid it, constantly re-check your work for the assumptions you’re asking your audience to make. Treat your audience like smart people who are hearing about this for the first time
Makes more sense now than at the start of the post? Good. If not, let me know so I can make some changes and avoid embarrassing myself further.
You won’t always have a few hundred words to fill in the blanks, but the whole idea scales down. It’s always possible to make sure your writing stands on its own two feet.
Joe Robinson: Bald Guy, Marketer, Self-Improver. 
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