Advertising doesn't work just because people see it or feel something from it.
It works because people return to it mentally.
Interestingness — the quality of being worth thinking about — is what makes that happen.
It makes the creative work harder by increasing attention and strengthening memory, leading to more effective advertising.
The Problem
What we have now is a number of competing ideas about what creative quality is that lead us in different directions
Without a clear standard, creative quality is hard to discuss or defend.
What we need is a model that's not only accurate, but is useful, unifying, and inspirational for the people who have to make advertising
The Causal Chain
Memory is the mechanism that drives brand choice. "The brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought" (Ehrenberg-Bass). But how does advertising build memory?
Decades of research in neuroscience, psychology, and marketing science point to the same answer: memories are built by cognitive processing — by returning to something, revisiting it, thinking it through. The more a piece of communication gets mentally replayed, the more durably it encodes.
Most advertising fails this test. It gets seen, perhaps felt, and then forgotten — because it gives people nothing to think about afterwards. The missing link in most effectiveness models is later thought: the spontaneous cognitive processing that happens after exposure, and that converts fleeting attention into lasting memory.
When advertising is genuinely interesting, it generates later thought — the spontaneous mental replay that happens after exposure. That later thought strengthens memory, deepens mental availability, and increases the probability that the brand will come to mind in a buying situation. Interestingness is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism.
"The primary task of advertising agencies is to generate outstanding creative ideas that viewers will notice and will be willing to process over and over."
"We remember what we think about."
"How often do you have to read a book, a news story, or see a movie or play? If it is interesting, once is enough; if it is dull, once is plenty."
The Five Qualities of Interestingness
Effective ads consistently share five qualities. Each works by increasing cognitive work, especially later thought. They don't replace emotion or attention. They explain how creative earns processing.
Breaks expectation in a way that demands interpretation — not just surprise, but the kind of gap that makes the mind work to resolve it.
Incongruity creates a question the audience can't ignore. When something doesn't fit the expected pattern, the brain searches for an explanation. That search is later thought.
The most effective incongruity is meaningful — it connects to something true about the brand or the audience. Random weirdness gets noticed and forgotten. Resonant incongruity gets noticed and remembered.
Connects the message to something the audience genuinely cares about — stakes that feel real, not manufactured.
Significance is not about making things dramatic. It's about making them matter. Advertising that touches on something the audience already cares about — deeply, privately — earns a different kind of attention.
Significant advertising prompts the audience to apply the message to their own lives. That application is later thought.
Creates emotional complexity — layering feelings that resist easy resolution and keep the audience mentally engaged.
Simple emotions resolve quickly. Mixed emotions linger. When advertising creates feelings that sit in tension — funny and sad, proud and uncomfortable, warm and uneasy — the audience stays with it longer.
Mixed emotions are a signal that something real has been touched. They are the emotional equivalent of incongruity: a state that demands resolution, and that keeps generating thought until it finds one.
Signals that the message is a genuine expression of who the brand is — not a tactic, not a performance.
Authenticity triggers a question audiences can't ignore: is this for real? Not factually real, but existentially real. That question doesn't resolve quickly. It turns into internal dialogue—Do I believe this? What does this say about them?—and that dialogue is what lingers.
Uses specific, concrete, unexpected particulars that trigger imagination and make the message vivid and retrievable.
Detail is the opposite of generic. The right detail — unexpected, precise, true — does something that abstractions can't: it creates a mental image. And mental images are among the most durable forms of memory.
Detail also signals care. An advertiser who noticed that specific thing is an advertiser worth paying attention to. Detail earns credibility and creates the kind of vividness that survives long after the campaign ends.
The Payoff
Interesting advertising generates later thought — spontaneous mental replay after exposure. That mental replay builds memory traces that are richer, more durable, and more readily retrieved when a buying situation arises.
Durable memory is what drives brand choice not just after the next impression, but long after the campaign has ended. Interesting advertising keeps working — because the memory it builds keeps working.
Interesting advertising earns its memory formation rather than buying it through repetition — requiring less frequency to build equivalent memory strength and making every impression work harder.
What We Can Do For You
Interestingness offers a model that is useful, unifying, and inspirational, designed to be applied during the work, not retrospectively applied to explain it.
One or two-day working sessions for creative and strategy teams. We introduce the ISMAD framework, apply it to real briefs and existing work, and leave teams with a shared language and a practical tool they can use immediately.
We work alongside creative and strategy teams during the development process — from brief writing through to creative evaluation. We help frame the right brief, brief it compellingly to creatives, and evaluate responses against ISMAD criteria.
A structured review of existing advertising and brand communications against the ISMAD framework. We identify what's working, what's missing, and where the biggest opportunities to increase interestingness — and effectiveness — lie.
Research
David Nottoli and Jeffre Jackson introduce Interestingness as the quality that makes advertisements truly memorable: not through momentary attention or positive emotion, but by generating the later thought that builds lasting memory structures and drives brand choice.
David Nottoli and Jeffre Jackson are advertising strategists — practitioners who have spent decades working at the world's most creatively ambitious agencies: Wieden+Kennedy, BBH, Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Goodby Silverstein, and others. The research came out of that practice: asking the question that good planners always ask, and eventually deciding to find a rigorous answer.
Interesting Talks
About
For over 20 years we've been thinking about why Nike ads are better than everyone else's — and what that difference actually is. InterestingnessWorks was founded by David Nottoli and Jeffre Jackson, two advertising strategists who have spent their careers at the world's most iconoclastic agencies asking exactly that question.
The answer, backed by research, is Interestingness: a specific, definable, teachable set of properties grounded in cognitive science that predict whether advertising will generate the mental revisitation that builds brands over time. Both David and Jeffre are alumni of the Open Intelligence Agency, the global collective of strategists founded alongside Russell Davies and Emily Reed, whose conviction that the most interesting thinking happens at the edges of disciplines continues to shape how we work.
David spent twenty-five years as a strategist at some of the world's most creatively ambitious agencies — Wieden+Kennedy, BBH, and Crispin Porter+Bogusky — working on many of the world's most iconic brands along the way.
After leaving agency life, David joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder's School of Advertising, PR and Design, teaching Consumer Insights, Brands & Culture, and History of Advertising. Alongside teaching, he consults for agencies and brands on strategy, creative development, and interestingness.
Brands include Nike, Levi's, Samsung, P&G, Coca-Cola, Hershey's, Microsoft, Toyota, and Gillette.
LinkedInJeffre began his career writing systems at an investment bank, left to study psychology at Berkeley, and eventually arrived at advertising — where it turned out a feel for how systems work and a feel for how people think are exactly what the job requires. He learned the craft at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, working under Jon Steel, one of the most influential planners of his generation, before becoming Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam.
A lifelong student of what makes things genuinely interesting, Jeffre has been working on the concept formally since 2006, when he produced the original video introducing Interestingness to a global conference series. His thinking on interestingness as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon forms the backbone of the ISMAD framework and the WARC research.
Currently based in Amsterdam, working with brands and agencies on the practice of making advertising genuinely compelling.
LinkedInGet In Touch
We work with agencies and brands who want to build advertising that earns the right to come to mind. Whether you're looking to evaluate existing work, improve creative development, or build interestingness into your team's process. We'd love to hear from you.