Advertising is at the very soul of marketing. It is the art of persuasion, the home of branding and where the most extraordinary marketing thinking over the years has occurred. It remains the real laboratory of mind-changing communication because most people like good advertising in the same way most people like a good joke.
Was it like Don Draper, Joan, Peggy and Peter when you were in advertising, I’m sometimes asked. In Britain it was much more dramatic. The language was worse, there was more violence – chairs were thrown in rage – the girls wore micro skirts, we gambled and we never stopped talking, drinking or eating. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s it was a fabulous way of living. It became extraordinarily self-important. ‘Labour isn’t working,’ said Saatchi & Saatchi’s poster for the Conservative Party, and this was claimed to have won an election. It was said, when advertising was at its hip-swaggering peak, that consumers didn’t drink the beer, they drank the advertising.
Maurice Saatchi seemed to think so when he said in the Financial Times in 2006:
‘Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising. The funeral rites have been observed. The gravediggers have done their work. The mourners are assembled. Most of them are embarrassed to say they ever knew the deceased. ‘Advertising?’ they say. ‘I’m not in that business.’ At the age of 50, advertising was cut down in its prime.’
Everyone who lived through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s whether bankers, journalists or admen, thinks things have got worse, but the party that creates spectacular communication can never end. It thrives but with less theatrical exuberance than before.
Brilliant advertising seduces you and sweeps you off your feet – that’s what brilliance always does. Competent advertising gives you rational and emotional reasons to consider buying a brand. But because the modern consumer is bored by most advertising, mere competence is not enough.
Brilliant advertising, according to Martin Lindstrom in his book Buyology, literally lights up our caudate nucleus in the same way that nuns’ caudate nuclei light up when asked to think about Jesus. Lindstrom examines brainwaves, but to those of us who spent much of our lives in advertising we can define what ingredients make the best advertising:
That list could go on but the key word is ‘very’ because brilliant advertising has an extreme impact and can never be ignored.
The process of trying to excel is worth the agony and angst because advertising still provides the motor-power for a lot of marketing campaigns. It’s the ignition to great ideas. Even if you don’t spend a fortune on placing advertisements, simply going through the discipline of thinking about how to create a stand-out piece of advertising will make you think harder and more effectively about how to sell your brand.
Recently advertising has been put under pressure by all sorts of alternative marketing, not least digital. Far fewer people watch TV so it’s harder to reach mass audiences. Its role as the king activity is past in financial terms but not in influence – the advertising idea, whether presented by a meerkat or a man-man personality like Isaiah Mustafa (for Old Spice), is what any integrated campaign needs to adhere to and work.
You need to see of a lot of advertising and become a student of it. The more advertisements you see, the more you will understand how they work.
People consume advertising in a different way nowadays. Their attention span is much shorter. They are also advertising literate – which is to say they are beginning to understand how it works – and are peculiarly resistant to hard sell.
The current need, given this short attention span, is for a phrase or even a word that describes the emotional or functional property you are seeking to own. Advertising occupies a world of very fast ideas.
Advertising needs to work fast. How few words do you need? You must define a piece of territory, a particular attribute or characteristic that you want to own and around which the advertising ideas and other expressions of marketing will spin.
Possibly the greatest adman of all time was Bill Bernbach, the founder of the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. He was very opinionated. Here’s one of his opinions:
‘However much we would like advertising to be a science – because life would be simpler that way – what was effective one day will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.’
Advertising, he says, is a cross between magic and art, and the key is not just the ‘what’ of the idea, it is also ‘how’ that idea is executed. So here’s a brilliant tip from Bill:
Advertising is the source of most great marketing communication ideas, because over time the best storytellers have very often been advertising men or women. Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Adrian Lines, David Putnam Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie, Wendy Perriam, and so on, all started their careers in advertising.
When people talk about your advertising you might be getting somewhere.
People take life less seriously than most businessmen. Your product will not be top of their minds. Get used to that.
Advertising is the art of précis and drama all in one. It has been brilliant at creating simplistic and memorable snappy straplines including these:
Wonderbra – ‘Hello Boys’
Heineken – ‘Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’
Stella Artois – ‘Reassuringly expensive’
Heinz – ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’
The Economist – ‘How to win at board games’
Castrol – ‘Liquid engineering’
‘If an idea makes me laugh that’s a sure sign it’s a good idea.’
(Lou Centlivre, executive managing director, Foote Cone and Belding 1985)
Advertising is a distilling process whereby we learn how to make a great sales pitch. Richard French, doyen of the trade, once said, ‘I’m a professional liar: I used to work in advertising,’ but he was laughing as he said it. He knew advertising was the engine of modern marketing. He also knew how to get your attention.
Despite a vast amount of work to prove how it works, advertising is an art, not a science. When he spoke about mathematics, Bertrand Russell got it spot on: ‘The subject in which we never know what we are talking about nor whether what we are saying is true.’ The same can certainly be said for advertising.
This is a bit like explaining how to be a brilliant chef or brain surgeon in 100 words – it can’t be done. If you can, get a pro to do it for you. The ROI will always be better. But let’s shortcut on creative methodology because everyone needs to know broadly how to create good advertising to be able to judge, when presented with advertising, what good or brilliant actually looks like.
It’s this simple:
If your employees think you understand that brilliant advertising is worth 100 times more than good advertising they’ll want to rise to the challenge.
If they think you like advertising and the way it’s created they’ll warm to you.
If you take them out to lunch they’ll love you.
Creatives are insecure people. One of London’s top copywriters said, ‘I’m not as good as my last piece of work. I’m as good as my next piece of work and I don’t know where that idea is going to come from.’
Trevor Beattie is one of London’s most successful creative people and agency owners. He doesn’t mince his words. As the creator of FCUK for French Connection, why should he? He despairs of the creative poverty that’s existed for several years through lack of courage and a sense of pragmatism rather than adventure. He says something interesting about brilliance. It’s better to be bad than mundane, he argues, because mundane is invisible and thus irrelevant.
Tell your agency mundane is not an option.
Not exactly Lloyd’s Bank or Procter & Gamble are we, Mr or Ms Small Business? It’s all very well talking about millions of pounds and TV but your budget is … I’m embarrassed to mention it.
Don’t be. The process of thinking in advertising, big or small, is pretty much the same. You are looking to find that magic sales pitch expressed with wit and brevity that makes people take notice.
A great ad sometimes only has to be seen once to work. How many times do you have to hear a Status Quo track to decide you liked it? Mediocrity needs repetition. Brilliance doesn’t. Which is good news if you only have a small budget.
All you need is brilliance. ‘Simples,’ as that brilliant meerkat said. But here’s the best news of all. Creative people are driven by creativity more than money. So if you are prepared to let them have their head and follow the process of ‘how to do it’ described above, lubricated by the occasional glass of wine, you may be pleasantly surprised.
One caveat. This is your brand, your business, your life. Do not ever go with something that your gut tells you is wrong, however smooth-selling the arguments are. It’s easier to find another advertising idea than another business.
Always trust your gut.
And remember this. Whether big or small, in the current world of media choice and ‘white noise’, quite simply getting attention, which is the scarcest commodity there is, is your biggest problem. If that isn’t a leveller, nothing is.
Here’s a bit of wisdom from Sam Delaney at an RSA conference on advertising: ‘Advertising has too much talent to fail. It’s a bit like a cockroach.’
Tell that to your creative department.
18.222.155.187