The six word rule. Why outdoor advertising lost its way.

"Make it simple. Make it memorable." Easy to say. Murder to execute.

The fact that System1 and JCDecaux needed to commission research on how to make outdoor advertising effective is genuinely heartbreaking. It means we've lost something fundamental about our craft.

The lost art of six words

The six-word rule for outdoor was probably the first thing I was taught at Award School. Think like the person driving by. You have a tiny window of opportunity (assuming they're even looking out that window).

But those six words represent the paradox of simplicity. Getting there means you've probably written hundreds and discarded them all. Argued over whether "the" was needed. Spent days finding the perfect verb. It's brutal, essential work.

Bill Bernbach knew this. David Ogilvy too. They understood that in outdoor advertising, you're not having a conversation, you're throwing a dart at someone's consciousness while they're doing 100km/h.

The napkin test that built empires

Along with the six-word rule, the other cornerstone of great advertising was the napkin test.

There simply isn't room for complexity on a napkin. The medium is small, the paper is thin, it is quite literally impossible to over-complicate. And if the idea didn't work on a napkin, it probably wasn't worth pursuing. There's even a book written about it: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam.

The napkin forces you to find the one thought that matters. The single truth worth expressing.

Think about the campaigns that built brands: "Just Do It." Three words. "Think Different." Two words. "Got Milk?" Two words. These weren't accidents, they were the result of relentless reduction, of finding the irreducible minimum that could still carry maximum impact.

What went wrong on our highways

Drive any Australian freeway today and witness the death of discipline:

• Billboards with paragraphs of body copy – as if anyone has time to read it at 100km/h (especially when the typo size has to be so small to fit it all in).

• QR codes on outdoor advertising – because nothing says safety first like scanning codes while driving.

• Multiple messages fighting for attention – hedging bets by saying everything and communicating nothing.

• Tiny logos and contact details – missing the entire point of brand building.

This isn't just bad outdoor advertising. It's advertising by committee, created by people who've never been taught the fundamentals.

The digital banner disaster

And digital banners? Twenty years on from the first 728x90, we're still creating the same formats, yet somehow they're even worse.

Digital banners should follow the same rules as outdoor. You have milliseconds, not minutes. The user's finger hovers over the close button before your animation even loads. But instead, we get:

• Flashing carousels trying to cram in four messages

• Microscopic type that's unreadable on mobile

• Seventeen different calls-to-action

• Auto-playing videos that everyone immediately mutes.

The medium that should have learned from outdoor's discipline learned nothing at all. Those old IAB standard sizes, the 300x250 MREC, the 728x90 leaderboard, they're still with us, still being filled with cluttered confusion.

Where have all the mentors gone?

As agencies systematically purge senior talent and AI fills the production pipeline, we're losing the craftspeople who'd spend days getting to those six words. The ones who knew that "An important idea not communicated persuasively is like having no idea at all."

This knowledge wasn't written in manuals. It was passed down through late nights, having your ideas challenges, pushed, supported, and pouring through award annuals. It was apprenticeship, not algorithm.

When I started in advertising, a lecture told me “99 times you’re ideas will be shit", don’t talk it personally, their ideas, not you. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s the one brilliant idea we’ll care about”. He knew difference between good enough and unforgettable was often draft 46. Most creatives could count on one hand the times the first idea as the one.

The cost of complexity

Radio tells the same story. Scripts with 93 words crammed into 30 seconds, delivered at auctioneer speed while sound engineers quietly weep. We've forgotten that silence is punctuation, that breathing room lets ideas land.

It's the easy path of adding instead of subtracting. As Mark Twain famously wrote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Creating effective advertising requires the confidence to say less. The discipline to find the one thing worth saying. The craft to make it memorable.

Why research papers can't replace wisdom

The System1/JCDecaux research will undoubtedly provide data. It will quantify attention spans, measure recall rates, and produce heat maps of where eyes travel on billboards.

But it won't teach what the old masters knew in their bones:

• Respect the medium – Outdoor isn't print. Digital isn't TV. Each has its own grammar.

• Respect the audience – They're not waiting for your message. You're interrupting their day.

• Respect the craft – Simplicity is the hardest thing in advertising. It requires confidence, discipline, and taste.

The future needs the past

At Pitch Collective, we believe in marrying proven fundamentals with modern thinking. Our collective includes creatives who learned from the legends, who understand that creative talent isn't just about new tools, it's about timeless principles.

We still apply the six-word rule. We still question “will it work in a napkin?” We still believe that if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Because while the media landscape has changed dramatically, human attention hasn't. We still have seconds to make an impression. We still need clarity to cut through chaos.

The bottom line

Simplicity is the hardest thing in advertising. Which is why so few achieve it anymore.

The next time you're briefing outdoor advertising, or any advertising, ask yourself: Could I explain this idea on a napkin? Can I express it in six words? If not, keep working.

Because somewhere out there, your competitor might be working with people who still remember the fundamentals. Who know that the best practice isn't following formulas, it's understanding why those formulas existed in the first place.

If you can't explain it on a napkin, you shouldn't put it on a billboard. And if you need a research paper to tell you that, you might need better creative partners.