Sometimes I totally despair.

I'm sitting at home, feet up, watching the footy and up comes the ad break which, being in the business so to speak, usually interests me more than most.

First, there's a mammoth, rather costly car ad, then a couple of fairly forgettable, mediocre jobbies, then those brilliant Meerkats (devised by Chris Wilkins, an ex-Saatchi chum) and then up pops one that really catches my eye – but for all the wrong reasons.

It's a 30-second précis of what was a pretty interesting 60 second storyline and a natural continuation you may think.

However, someone had probably suffered from that rather worryingly common advertiser's (or adperson's?) disease known as 'Assumption' .

They had assumed that every viewer watching the 30-second commercial had religiously watched the series of three previous 60-second ads that had cleverly built a scene and storyline over the last year, albeit quite sparsely on other channels, and had even assumed that the viewer had tracked down and called the ad agency concerned asked for an airtime schedule so that they could eagerly record all these masterpieces and watch them late at night with a cocoa and brandy.

But it's quite likely that many viewers of the 30-second film had never seen any of the 60-seconds and, even if they had, the advertiser had assumed that they had remembered every minor detail of the story.

As it transpired, I was recording the commercial (or rather the footy) so I could watch this little gem later at my leisure and concluded that IF you hadn't seen the previous ads which fully explained the story, you wouldn't have had the faintest idea what the hell this half a minute of nonsense what about.

And there are many commercials aired every day that you watch with the same huge question mark hanging over your head generally because some smartarse had assumed that you'd understand it.

Exactly the same applies when a commercial includes a character from a film or TV soap that they assume you know about, or an expensive singer, musician or actor and they assume that you're one of their greatest fans.

I have also seen the most bizarre 48-sheet posters that relate to some cult TV programme that is only shown on an obscure American import channel at 3 in the morning. What?

I have sat with incredulity in client's boardrooms as they called for a different campaign every 3 months because (and I quote) "people have seen that ad already and will get bored with it!" and have assumed that everyone in the target area buys every newspaper, searches each page for OUR ads, cuts them out and pins them on their bedroom wall and looks at them every night. Sheesh!

I'm sure that you could give 1000 people a newspaper, let them read it for 15 minutes, (which is, apparently, approximately the daily average adult 'read-time') take away the paper, give it back to them in 3 months time and I suspect that hardly anybody would identify any ad as being identical to any that they saw 3 months earlier.

Indeed, in this instance it would be far, far more effective if it IS identical.

Equally, an advertiser should never assume that people will read their ad anyway however shock-horror that opinion is, as that is quite dependent on the power of the ad creatively, the media selection, position and frequency.

Assumption is usually created by familiarity.

You may live and breathe a product, you may even own the company, you know that it's the best in the market (as, incidentally, do all your competitors believe about theirs) you have proofs of your ads pinned on the wall in your office and you see them every day - and you talk about your product for perhaps 8 hours a day.

And, amazingly, you assume that everyone else is as aware of, and is as excited about, your brilliant product as you are, but the truth is very different indeed.

Advertising, marketing, brand development and brand management are all long-term, extremely complex areas and if there's one thing that all experienced communication experts would agree on, it would be that you should never assume that your audience knows who you are NOR assume that they know what you're talking about NOR assume that they have the same perception of what YOU think THEY think of YOU!

Of course there are many ways that this nasty little habit can be cured, by way of research, focus groups and campaign testing and there are many great advertising campaigns that have carefully avoided the A-word, but at the very least we should all be aware of the existence and dangers of Assumption .

I assume that makes sense?

David Wood. 2009