What The Alchemist can teach us about advertising

Attraction remains advertising’s most powerful currency. David Edworthy gives insight into how brands position themselves in our imaginations long before we’re ever ready to buy. (Image supplied)

Advertising’s real job: creating future desire

Performance marketing obsesses over clicks, conversions and measurable ROI. Brand advertising plays a much longer game.

Luxury campaigns for cars, watches, travel and fashion are often seen by millions of people who will never buy the product. On paper, the conversion rates look terrible. In reality, that was never the point.

The goal is psychological positioning: to occupy space in someone’s imagination long before they enter the category.

It’s why kids will ask their parents questions like, “If you could have any car in the world, what would it be?” And almost instantly, an answer appears.

Maybe it’s a Porsche. Maybe it’s a Ferrari. Maybe it’s something vintage and impossibly rare. That answer didn’t appear by accident,years of brand advertising put it there.

When someone eventually asks themselves, “What car would I buy if money wasn’t an issue?”, the brand wants to already own the answer.

That’s attraction.

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The Alchemist and the “Language of the World”

In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho writes about the universe conspiring to guide people toward their “Personal Legend”.

Advertising works in a surprisingly similar way.

The strongest campaigns create the illusion that the product appeared at exactly the right moment for exactly the right emotional need. They make coincidence feel intentional. Discovery feels like destiny.

That emotional alignment is why people remember certain brands for decades, even if they’ve never purchased from them.

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Why the Bud Light campaign worked

One campaign that captured this perfectly was Bud Light’s 2014 Up For Whatever activation by BBDO Chicago and BBDO New York.

Featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Cheadle, the ad transformed an ordinary night out into a surreal fantasy sequence designed around escalating delight.

Its genius wasn’t just celebrity casting or production budget. It was emotional engineering.

The campaign sold the feeling that once you chose the brand, life itself became more exciting, spontaneous and cinematic.

In many ways, it works as the complete opposite of The Hangover.

That film famously takes the idea of “what’s the worst thing that could happen after a wild night out?” and keeps escalating the chaos, a tiger in the bathroom, missing friends, angry gangsters and eventually Mike Tyson demanding answers.

The Bud Light campaign flips that formula entirely. Instead of everything getting worse, everything keeps getting better. Every new moment feels more surreal, more rewarding and more unbelievable than the last.

That’s what great advertising does: it sells a future version of yourself.

The bigger takeaway for brands

Consumers rarely remember product specs. They remember emotional association.

The brands that endure are often the ones that successfully position themselves as part of someone’s imagined future — not just their immediate shopping basket.

That’s why attraction remains advertising’s most valuable currency.