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.
Smoking corsets and snappy straplines
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.
Is that party over?
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.
How advertising works
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:
- A good idea
- Something very surprising
- Something very funny
- Something very memorable
- Something very arresting
- Something very comforting
- Mix thoroughly and cook for about a week.
That list could go on but the key word is ‘very’ because brilliant advertising has an extreme impact and can never be ignored.
Is it worth the effort to aim for brilliance?
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.
How to create brilliant advertising propositions
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.
Listen to Bill
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 about great storytelling
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.
- The ‘reassuringly expensive’ Stella Artois campaign depended on simple but compelling and beautifully told stories, always about the allure of the brand being too strong to resist.
- VW advertising has always been strong on stories. One of the most recent, featuring a small child in a Darth Vader costume discovering the force might just be with him after all, is a beautifully observed, human and funny story.
When people talk about your advertising you might be getting somewhere.
- The US commercial for Nokia, showing a young man using the camera on his mobile to create a visual proposal of marriage to his young lady, is like Pretty Woman and Working Girl all rolled together into one mushy story.
- My research reveals the Lloyds campaign, with its fantastic animation telling the fairy story of happiness in life secured by banking with Lloyds, is a success. The music, ‘Wild Swans’, sticks to your memory like superglue. But I much prefer Muller’s ‘Wonderful stuff’ commercial because it’s easier for yoghurt to be silly than a bank. Besides which, that’s truly about what Muller can do to a grey, characterless world with its sense of joie de vivre. The cartoon concept has invaded their whole persona – packaging, everything – and just check out their great web site.
- Geico.com, the insurance company, is talked about by everyone in the States, not any specific commercial but the deluge of short parodies of the idea that there’s a better way of saving money than this dumb idea … and the dumb idea story goes here. The adverts win for sheer silliness and are distant relatives of the film series Naked Gun.
- The Old Spice advertising has transformed a tired old brand that had sat on the bathroom shelf with Brut and Lynx for too long: Isaiah Mustafa, a brilliant taut script and a story of wild fantasy that ends with the great line ‘Smell like a man, man.’
- Yeo Valley did the creative equation and turned Yeo Valley into a Yo, a west-country dairy rap brand. It’s wonderful, full of appetite appeal, organic cred and fun. It’s also beautifully filmed. It makes you glad to be alive, which is what great advertising can do.
- And Berlitz. The German coastguard, whose English not being up to much, responds to a frantic Mayday call ‘Mayday, we are sinking we are sinking’ with ‘What are you sinking about?’ It ends with Beethoven’s ‘Choral Symphony’ and ‘Improve your English. Berlitz – Language for Life’.
People take life less seriously than most businessmen. Your product will not be top of their minds. Get used to that.
- In printed media, Mastercard has unwritten stories that you have to decode. Stories about successful parents dedicating love and time to buy things for their adored children – test match ticket for son, Boyzone concert wrist bracelet for daughter. All quite ‘priceless’, it says, which it is when it works this well.
How to distil your story
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)
The essential art
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.
How to do it
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:
- Every ad needs an idea – just one. What’s an idea? A simple unifying thought. This ad is about … one or two words. More than one idea is no good. Here’s what the P (John Pearce) of agency CDP said: ‘If I throw you one ball you may catch it; if I throw you two you’ll probably drop both; and if I throw you three you won’t catch any.’ So, one ball. One idea.
- Every creative needs to feed deeply on creativity. Just for starters, watch 100 commercials or look at 200 press ads. Watch 50 recent popular films. Spend a week watching TV, drinking beer and eating pizza. The guys good at creating ads have been doing this for the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell insists is needed to achieve mastery of anything.
- Every ad needs a tone of voice, an attitude and a way of looking at life. It isn’t an abstract thing. It’s got to have a story and stories need a storyteller’s voice.
Managing your agency
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.
Thinking small
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.
The art of persuasion
- Advertising is a bit theatrical, and rightly so. It’s there to dramatise brands and move people, not just tell them stuff.
- Brilliant communication is rare but what we should all aspire to. Brilliant advertising transforms businesses.
- Advertising trades in fast ideas. Advertising is slick and quick.
- Reduce your proposition to very few words – two or three are plenty.
- Advertising is about the art of storytelling.
- It’s how you tell them, not just the story itself.
- Laughter is great stuff – make people laugh and they’ll like you.
- Never underestimate how hard it is to get a great simple ad.
- Be kind to creative people – they are not manual workers – they are trying to pin down a jelly-like substance called creativity, which keeps escaping.
- Being small is not a problem; trying to be brilliant is.