VML Strategy Director Jonny Park says brands win when they accept consumers' indifference as a starting point to finding a more meaningful and entertaining way to advertise.
What do batteries, banking, accounting software, and painkillers have in common?
Whilst usually hallmarks of a dinner party conversation gone wrong, these were the key talking points during our ‘low interest’ panel discussion, celebrating the launch of the IPA/Thinkbox Brand Film about the IPA Effectiveness Award-winning campaign for Xero accounting software.
In the conversation, chaired by Lilli English, Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Burnett, with David Lucy, Managing Director of December 19 and one of the authors of the winning Xero case, and Joss Major, Strategy Partner at McCann and author of the award-winning Nurofen case, and myself, we talked about how ‘low interest’ doesn’t have to mean uninteresting, leading to three lessons that apply across categories:
1. Nobody cares (and that’s helpful)
The first rule of being in a low interest category is accepting you’re low interest. When you don’t, you’ll likely end up talking to your audience like calculators, not humans, leading to dry and dull advertising. Starting from a point that really nobody cares about your product – or your advertising – is surprisingly liberating.
It forces you to ask: What could I do to make them care? So perhaps, in the same way Victorians carried a memento mori – a small totem reminding them of death, so they’d live more fully – we could all do with a memento nemo curis (Google Translate assures me this is Latin for ‘remember nobody cares’) – a reminder our job is to make them care.
Starting from a point that really nobody cares about your product – or your advertising – is surprisingly liberating.
2. Finding meaning in the ‘low interest’ void
Having accepted you’re in ‘low interest’ jail you still need to plot your escape route. This starts with a re-frame – a new angle that invariably prompts reappraisal of your category, and product.
For our client Procell (Duracell’s B2B brand which was also the subject of an IPA Effectiveness Award-winning case) our audience – procurement buyers – were uninterested in batteries. But research showed they cared (a lot) about productivity and operational efficiency. So, we shifted how they made decisions: from focusing on cost-to-buy (batteries are cheap and unimportant), to the cost-to-replace – highlighting the inconvenience of constantly needing to change cheaper batteries and additional labour costs incurred.
Joss shared a similar strategic flip for Nurofen: moving beyond the expected category conventions of fast pain relief to tackling the systemic bias around women’s pain. An effective flip that helped Nurofen find a role in culture, leading to 5x higher ROI than the previous rational, product-focused comms.
In short, if your category feels uninteresting, you may just be looking at it from the wrong angle.
3. The rest is entertainment
Once you’ve uncovered your masterful strategic flip, you still need to bring it to life. This is where your interesting angle must become entertaining. As the Xero case shows, when most of your audience is out-of-market, communications need to work like a Trojan horse, delivering an important but rational message in a way our right-brain decides is worth a few seconds of our attention.
This is where tools like humour and storytelling, mascots and music, nuance and symbolism can do what rational persuasion alone can’t: create the sense something matters before we’ve consciously decided why, capturing attention. It’s only once you’ve piqued interest, that you can give the hard sell.
The problem is one of perspective
In summary, the lesson from the panel was simple: low interest is only a problem of perspective. Brands win when they accept indifference as the starting point, find a sharper angle that raises the stakes, and then smuggle that meaning in through entertainment.
So, next time you get that brief for B2B infrastructure, paper towels or bin bags, grip tightly on your 'memento nemo curis', accept the challenge, and take joy in transforming indifference into irresistibility.
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Last updated 11 February 2026