Ever heard that old fable about the Wind and the Sun making a bet?They have a wager on who can get a hat off an old man’s head?The Wind is really cocky, thinking I’ll blow that sucker off in seconds.The sun appears to go along for the shits and giggles.The wind goes first – blows up a storm.The old man puts his head down walking into the wind, hat intact.The wind has another go – the man pulls the hat down more tightly onto his head.The wind, by this point furious, let’s rip, trees bend, dogs hover, but the hat stays firmly on the old man’s head, he’d grabbed the brim of the hat to keep it on.The sun has a go.It gently radiates heat.The man starts to perspire.It radiates a little more heat.The man takes his hat off.To me, that’s how advertising works.Most companies, like the wind assume they can make people bend to their will by the sheer weight of their budgets – they appoint Windy & Windy Corps to blow up a storm, to force people to bend to their will.Some people call it ‘hard sell’.Look out for it, it’s loud, boring and generally features numbers.But most people are like the old man in the hat – stubborn.They don’t just succumb to calls to ‘buy this’ or ‘do that’.Weirdly, the kind of ads that people like, may want to engage with or tell their friends about, is called soft sell.Which is taken to mean ‘weak sell’, or ‘no sell’.There is no hard and soft sell, just sell.It either does or it doesn’t.And if you can get under people’s radars and get them to listen to you, you win.But somehow, over the years, those things that we know get through people’s radars have become unfashionable.Take humour, people love that right? There are 50% fewer ads using humour than 25 years ago.What about ads that have a story? Like those surfers waiting for the perfect wave, that old man looking for his book or the guy fighting a bear for a fresh salmon, parables, they’re a good way to make a point aren’t they? Down by xx%.What about encapsulating the company position in a line, like Just do it or xxxx xxxxxx xxxxx?(Let’s not even mention rhyming end lines, found top be the most remembered.)Where do I get my figures?The IPA.To be more specific, Orlando Wood.His two reports ‘Lemon’ and ‘Look Now’ are like an X-Ray of advertising today – what’s gone, what’s been added and it’s heatlt.give us a snapshot in