The Role of Empathy in Advertising
Ask a room full of marketers if they care about their customers, and every hand goes up. Ask the same room to sit through a 30-second pre-roll before a 15-second reel and watch them reach for the skip button like everyone else. That’s the gap. Not a lack of caring, but a kind of professional forgetting, where the person who spends all day thinking about “the consumer” walks out the office door and immediately becomes one, with the same impatience and the same distrust of ads that they were paid to write that morning.
Call it whatever you like. The industry has a name for it: collective amnesia, the thing that happens when you’ve been inside the machine long enough to stop noticing what it feels like from outside it. It explains a lot of bad advertising better than “lazy strategy” does. Nobody sets out to make something forgettable. They just forget, somewhere between the brief and the final cut, that they were once the audience too.
Empathy is supposed to be the fix. Except the word has been so overused in decks that it’s started to mean nothing, a soft synonym for “nice,” slapped onto any campaign with a slow zoom and a string section. Real empathy in advertising isn’t a tone. It’s a specific, testable claim: that you understand what someone wants badly enough to say it back to them before they’ve fully said it to themselves. Most ads fail this test, not from a lack of heart but because they mistake noticing someone for understanding them.
There’s data behind this now, not just instinct. Edelman’s most recent Trust Barometer found that nearly nine in ten consumers rank trust as a critical purchasing factor, on par with product quality and price. That’s not a soft metric anymore. Trust used to be the thing you built after the sale, a loyalty program, a customer service line. Now it’s a precondition for the sale happening at all. And the same research found something almost counterintuitive: unpaid, peer voices carry roughly five times more influence over trust than paid brand messaging, particularly among audiences that have grown wary of anything that smells like an institution talking at them. Which means the empathy has to be real enough to survive being repeated by someone who isn’t on your payroll, because increasingly, that’s who’s doing the repeating.
Take Dove’s “Real Beauty” against the hundred imitators that followed it. Dove diagnosed something true: that women were exhausted by impossible standards sold to them by the same industry profiting off their insecurity. Every brand that copied the format, real women, no retouching, and soft acoustic backing got the aesthetic without the diagnosis. The ads looked identical. They didn’t land the same way because empathy isn’t a visual style you can lift. It’s a piece of reasoning about someone’s actual situation, and reasoning doesn’t screenshot well.
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This is where the amnesia does the most damage. It shows up at the wrong stage. Empathy is applied after the strategy is locked by softening the copy, adding a testimonial, and cueing the tears as decoration. Empathy that matters shows up earlier, when someone asks an uncomfortable question, and the whole campaign has to be rebuilt around the answer. Which is also, not coincidentally, the version that costs the brand something.
Cadbury’s “Not Just A Cadbury Ad” is a decent case study on cost. The brand handed its own ad space to small local businesses instead of promoting itself. That’s not a gesture; it’s a bet that people trying to survive as small business owners mattered more, in that moment, than the brand’s airtime. It worked because it was expensive in a way that mattered. Compare that to the wave of brands that posted a black square in 2020 and changed nothing else about how they operated. Same visual grammar, solidarity, statement and hashtag. No cost, no bet, no memory of it a year later.
The newer Edelman data adds a wrinkle worth sitting with. Consumers now trust the brands they personally use more than they trust business, media, government, or NGOs generally, which sounds like good news for advertisers until you notice what it implies. That trust isn’t given to the category. It’s given to the specific brand that earned it, one interaction at a time, and it can be withdrawn just as personally. The old model treated empathy as something you broadcast at scale, the same soft-focus ad running everywhere at once. The current environment rewards something closer to the opposite: a brand behaving like it actually knows the one person in front of it, even while talking to millions of them.
People have gotten fluent in spotting the difference between the two. Not more cynical, exactly, just better read. They’ve seen enough decks’ worth of empathy as aesthetic to recognize it the moment it shows up in an ad, the same way you can tell when someone’s listening to respond rather than listening to understand. Trust, once it erodes, doesn’t come back because the next campaign uses a warmer font.
The uncomfortable part is that real empathy usually produces less impressive-looking advertising. It’s slower. It asks basic questions: What is this person actually afraid of? Is the product actually the answer or just adjacent to one instead of clever ones? It doesn’t always deliver a punchy line. Sometimes the honest insight is quiet, and the braver move is leaving it quiet instead of dressing it up for an awards entry.
It also means resisting a very specific temptation, the one where empathy gets treated as a topic rather than a discipline. A campaign about kindness isn’t automatically empathetic. A campaign that never mentions the word but clearly understands why someone would hesitate before buying—that's the one doing the actual work. The subject matter is irrelevant. The posture is everything.
Which might be the real divide in this industry. Not between brands that care and brands that don’t; most of them do, at some level, want the message to land. It’s between the brands willing to let empathy change the strategy and the brands that only let it change the voiceover. One means sitting with someone else’s actual problem long enough to feel slightly implicated in it. The other means a font choice and a slow zoom.
Empathy, done properly, should occasionally embarrass the brand a little. It should surface some gap between what the company says and what it does. If the insight doesn’t complicate your own campaign, you probably haven’t found one. You’ve found a compliment, dressed it up, and sent it to market.
