3
TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN: SAYING THE RIGHT THING THE RIGHT WAY.
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN simply running an ad in a magazine made you an authority. A cigarette ad could actually claim there wasn't “a cough in a car-load.” (“See, honey? It's printed right here. In a magazine.”) Facts didn't count. Authority did. Pick up any vintage magazine and see if you don't agree; almost every ad feels like a pronouncement from an authority, often a dishonest one.
The presumptuous tone of the 1950s Plymouth ad shown in Figure 3.2, would make any reader today snicker at its authoritarian cluelessness. (“Big is glamorous, dammit!”) Plymouth wouldn't get away with this today.
But back in the ’40s and ’50s, this Voice of Authority never credentialed itself, never explained, never verified. (“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”) And if you were to question these authorities, which no one ever did—the answer was some version of “Because we said so.”
The Voice of Authority said you should never have sex before marriage. Why? Because we said so. It said, eat all “five food groups.” Why? Because we said so, dammit. Amazingly this approach worked for decades. Author and sociologist David Gerlernter explained this was the result of America's “ought culture,” a culture in which everybody did “as they ought to”—as authorities told them to. And authority was everything from the church and the government to the prevailing social morals.
Figure 3.2 This car is glamorous because Plymouth says it's glamorous, dammit!
This ought culture came to full flower in the ’50s, even as various authorities were clearly doing things they ought not to. There were the lies Joe McCarthy told about Communist spies in Congress, lies about how radioactive iodine 131 wasn't contaminating the milk supply on the West coast, lies about how Gary Power's U-2 was a “weather plane,” and lies about how thalidomide and DDT were really quite A-OK. And so it went for years.
It took the Viet Nam war and the wakening conscious of a younger generation to finally do the unthinkable: to QUESTION AUTHORITY. Historically, I mark August 8, 1974, as the day the Voice of Authority died. That was the day the most powerful man in the most powerful country in the world—President Richard Nixon—resigned his office in order to avoid being tried and convicted for felonies committed during and after Watergate.
Citizens were left to wonder: if the president of the United States could be a lying felon, who was next? The pope? Increasingly since Watergate, America has seen trusted icons fall like dominoes. “America's dad,” Bill Cosby? A serial rapist. Leagues of Roman Catholic priests? Pedophiles. Bill Clinton? Lance Armstrong? Scandal after scandal; so many, in fact, the suffix -gate of Watergate continues to this day as a hashtag for scandal.
How this relates to advertising is this: we've become a nation of eye-rollers and skeptics.
We scarcely believe anything we hear in the media anymore. It's important to note that this all-encompassing disbelief and skepticism was born long before Trump and QAnon started manufacturing propaganda about “fake news.” The trust between the average citizen and authority packed its suitcase and left town years ago.
So, the relevant point here is: given this history, how can any brand ever hope to be believed about anything?
AUTHORITY GETS REPLACED WITH FAKE.
As “because we said so” started to lose its authority, more advertisers decided to simply replace their bullhorns with bullshit. Typical marketing strategies could be summed up as “Let's put some lipstick on this pig.” Unscrupulous brands played fast and loose with the truth, used deceptive pricing, hidden fees, and weasel words like “free trial” and “no risk.” Even with the FTC and FDA stepping in to keep the worst of the offenders in line, these practices continue to this hour.
Count how many products you see on the grocery store shelves that promise “Made with real cheese” or “Contains real fruit.” If those products were authentically cheese or fruit, would they feel the need to say those things? It's about as odd as if I tried to sell you a cell phone and said, “It's made with real cell phone.” Ultimately, inauthentic claims of “real” suggest something is fake.
Similarly, an asterisk suggests the claim it's attached to is not true. I submit, the average truck ad featuring a monthly payment of $1,200* can legitimately be read, “Drive this new Dodge Ram off the lot for the low monthly payment of $1,200We're lying.” You and I both know that low-low payment of $1,200* has a lawyer's briefcase full of fine-print qualifications propping it up; not to mention they likely gave that affordable price to just one truck so they could imply massive savings throughout their whole inventory.
Advertising images also reek of inauthenticity, the chief culprit being the stock photograph. You've seen the ads. The ones featuring fakey people with the fakey expressions doing fakey things: the Earnest Businessmen Sealing the Deal with a Firm American Handshake, the Hard-Working Executive Staring Thoughtfully into Her Computer Screen.
By my count, the stock photo in highest demand is Happy White Mom with Shopping Bags. To demonstrate how hungry the advertising industry is for this manufactured bullshit, Google “happy woman with shopping bags” (Figure 3.3). Then try scrolling down trying to reach the bottom of the feed. I tried, just this summer. But autumn came, as it must. The days grew shorter and, missing my loved ones, I had to log off.
“People today are experiencing an authenticity crisis, and with good reason,” wrote Frank Rose in The Art of Immersion. “Value is a function of scarcity, and in a time of scripted ‘reality TV' and Photoshop everywhere, authenticity is a scarce commodity. [W]hat people look for today, what they believe in, and are persuaded by, is authenticity”1
Figure 3.3 Try getting to the bottom of a Google search for “Happy woman with shopping bags.” I'll wait here.
To Thine Own Brand, Be True.
In Chasing the Monster Idea, author Stefan Mumaw parses authenticity into two areas: brand authenticity and audience authenticity.
“Brand authenticity is being true to the character of the brand and what the brand stands for. Audience authenticity is presenting the message to the audience in a way that treats the audience appropriately to who they are… . Marketing efforts can succeed and fail in one or both ways.”2
Seems simple enough. To create advertising that rings true we must (1) promote a message that honestly reflects the truth about a brand and (2) express this truth in a way that doesn't come across as bullshit to customers. If we don't do both, Mumaw warns, “inauthentic brand messaging leads to … doubt, while inauthentic audience exchange leads to ridicule and backlash.”
It does seem simple, but any random sampling of advertising will convince you few brands get both right. Half of them get the first part wrong, trying to make you believe a brand is something it isn't. The other half express what may well be authentic brand messages but do so in ways that are clueless or cringe-worthy.
For customers, authentic speech is ultimately about sounding human, so it's critical to get the tone of your writing right. (We'll discuss copywriting in Chapter 5.) Mumaw says, “Authenticity of emotion is a key component… . It requires us to have an understanding of our audience that goes beyond demographics. It's not about who they are but rather what they feel.” If you don't get this part right, today's skeptical eye-rollers and Gen Z authenticity narcs3 will pillory you with a thousand memes. (Witness Pepsi's clueless Kendall Jenner commercial, 2017.)
“Authenticity is the benchmark against which all brands are now judged.”
—John Grant4
Copywriters can make or break the authenticity of any campaign. Venture capitalist Mike Troiano warns, “We seem to default to a kind of Official Marketing Bullshit mode we think sounds impressive but actually telegraphs overly packaged half-truths.”5 Which is why I tell my students, please, stop “writing ads.” Don't write. Talk. Talk to the page. Pretend you're talking to an actual human being who's capable of detecting bullshit.
Pretend you're sitting with your friend at a bar and you're talking about the product you're working on, which is, say, some unremarkable chain of Italian restaurants. And your friend asks you, “So, tell me again why I should go there?” To pass the test you have to look your friend in the eye and tell her your idea, with a straight face. If your answer is like most advertising these days, it'll likely be some insipid straight-out-of-the-brief line like “The reason? Oh, you'll discover how flavors of ancient Italy tantalize your tongue and suddenly you're in Rome.”
Your friend will blink, look at you for a second, and go, “… Duuude.”
I would. Wouldn't you? But if you can speak a brand message in an authentic human voice, even a message with a sales agenda, you're simply telling someone about a cool Italian joint you heard about. You're telling them the truth.
This bar stool scenario leads me to note here that word-of-mouth advertising is the most persuasive and credible of all forms of our craft. People may not trust what brands tell them but they trust their friends. This discussion, in turn, leads to social marketing, which we'll cover in later chapters, along with customer-generated content.
“EMBRACING THE SUCK.”
Authenticity in advertising is an especially tricky proposition, given advertising is at its heart promotion and has an obvious agenda—sales. But being authentic doesn't require the absence of an agenda, only transparency and honesty and that we speak authentically.
Admitting your commercial is a paid message with an agenda is one effective way to disarm distrust. Alex Bogusky says, “This generation knows you're trying to sell them something and you know they know, so let's just drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible.”6
Bogusky, of Crispin Bogusky + Partners, was also known for kicking off client meetings by asking, “What is the elephant in the room?” He was asking, what is the truest thing that's keeping this brand from breaking through to greater growth? His agency's most noteworthy answer to this question was for Domino's Pizza. And it came from Domino's customers, who said, “Your pizza sucks.”
The campaign kicked off with TV commercials replaying focus group videos of customers saying these very things on camera. By the end of the spot, a voice-over says the brand is about to fix the problem. This acknowledgment of the elephant in the room gave Domino's the permission to authentically address how they were going to fix their product, bring old customers back, and attract new ones.
Any serious ad student should check out Crispin's case history on YouTube: “The Pizza Turnaround.” It is one of the most authentic, most effective advertising campaigns in history. When the agency won the account in 2007, Domino's stock traded at about $17 per share.7 As of this writing (2021), it's at $519.
Under-promising and over-delivering is another way to disarm distrust. Even self-deprecation can help establish authenticity. Consider again the tone of Volkswagen or Avis ads.
Admitting any kind of weakness may seem a counterintuitive way to establish trust but can be very effective. Perhaps the strongest version of admitting weakness is what some call “Embracing the Suck.”
Here we take an obvious weakness of a product and use it to accentuate the product's main strength. We can go all the way back to old examples, such as “With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good.” But for a more modern example, I'll refer you to YouTube again, this time to study Saatchi & Saatchi's campaign for Buckley's cough syrup. Watch the ads and you'll see they compare a sip of Buckley's horrible-tasting cough syrup to a sip of “public restroom puddle” or “spring break hot tub water.” This fake taste test signed off with the line, “It tastes awful. It works” (Figure 3.4). Did this approach work? Keep poking around YouTube and you'll find many fan-made videos of “happy” customers filming their horrified reactions as they treat their cold symptoms with Buckley's.
Sometimes you'll find what sucks isn't an attribute of the product, but some requirement handed down as an order by the client. It could be a crappy tagline, a jingle, or a spokesperson.
Figure 3.4 Yes, this does indeed look like a taste test between Buckley's cough syrup and “Public Restroom Puddle.”
In these situations, ad veteran Jason Elm suggests, “If your assignment involves some must-have from the client that's geeky or boring, tackle it directly.” Embrace the suck. Don't try to avoid it by doing something you think is cool and then burying this must-have down in the corner or in the last 10 seconds of a video. Tackle it directly, says Jason, because “when you embrace the suck, good ideas often spill out of the very thing your instincts tell you to avoid.”
There's a solid business reason for all this honesty and transparency. Bogusky spells it out: “There are truths to almost every product and yet most advertisers shy away from those truths.” As consumers get savvier, he continues, “the brands that are unwilling to have a real and truthful conversation with consumers will become completely irrelevant and therefore invisible.”8
So, truth and authenticity are about how we say things.
Now comes the issue of what we say. Many creative briefs boil this down to what's commonly labeled a “key message.” Meaning, what exactly should we tell customers about any given brand?
SOME THOUGHTS ON MESSAGING.
Before you put pencil to paper, there's some background work to do. You won't be doing it alone, though. You'll have help from the people in account service.
The account executives are the people in charge of a client's account at an agency. They work with the clients to define opportunities, set budgets and time lines, and a whole bunch of other stuff. They also help you present the work to the client; and the really good ones are great at selling the ideas as well. Overall, they're the liaison between client and agency, explaining one to the other, running interference, and acting as the marriage counselor when times call for it.
As it is with creatives, some account people are great, some so-so, and some bad. Try to hitch up with the smart ones and get assigned to the accounts they run. The good ones have the soul of a creative person and genuinely share your excitement over a great idea. They're articulate, honest, and inspiring, and like I said, the good ones have a better batting average at selling creative work.
Once you get into the agency business, you'll meet another team member called a strategist. The strategist is like a cultural anthropologist who studies a brand's customers looking for insights that drive their attitudes, opinions, and behavior.
So, diving into strategy, let's begin with DDB's favorite tactic: the truth.
Start with a central human truth.
Veteran copywriter Mark Fenske says your first order of business working on any project is to find the truest thing you can say about your product or brand. In fact, you should explore the truths about your product, the brand, and the whole category. Look also for the truest things you can say about your customer—the central human truth. That one thing that is undeniably, universally true.
Unfortunately, what many agencies and clients start with isn't truth, but facts. Facts about the product. Facts about the company. Clients generally love facts because they can measure them—plus, they fit on charts. Facts on charts are why you've heard “Milk builds strong bones” since you were in second grade. Problem is, nobody cares milk builds strong bones. Have you ever found yourself poking at the bone in your arm telling a friend, “No, seriously, does this feel soft to you? C'mon, feel it.”
Meanwhile, using truth, Goodby Silverstein + Partners figured how to sell milk by the trainload. Their strategist, John Steele, sent researchers into paid participant's homes to live, shop, and cook with the families. The unleveraged consumer insight they identified was this: consumers buy milk because milk “goes with things.” Think about it. Nobody sits down to pour a bowl of milk. They sit down for a bowl of cereal. Are you having cookies? Some cake? A big fat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich? Man, I hope you got some milk around. This is how the explosively effective got milk? campaign was born. Google it (Figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5 Facts on the left, truth on the right.
Interestingly, you never need to Google a truth. You generally know it instinctively. But if you don't have a feel for a certain category or customer base, you can always hear it being spoken on blogs, on the street, in customer reviews. Or from the stand-up comedians; that crowd is always getting right down to the human truths. I've had more than a few students inspired by studying comics' routines on different kinds of customers and their behavior. I remember one borrowed stand-up bit used in a hotel chain's ad about their luxurious bathrooms: “Towels so fluffy, you can barely close your suitcase.”
Bringing truth into the picture is the single best thing an ad agency can do for a client. Yet many clients will spend massive amounts of time and money to uncover brand truths and then—frightened by the results—proceed to cover them back up. They'll downplay a certain truth, minimize it. But marketing sleights-of-hand are kinda like the garage mechanic who comes out to tell you, “Well, I couldn't fix the brakes so I made your horn louder.” Clients will often deny these truths and cling tenaciously to what they want people to believe about their brand. The problem is clients don't own the brand and they don't own the truth; customers do.
Remember, we're talking about truth here—not what a client, a researcher, or a creative director want you to say. Amir Kassaei, of DDB Worldwide, put it this way:
Our [industry's] only reason for existence is to find or create a relevant truth—and to be honest, not only to the people we're talking to and want to sell something to, but to ourselves. Great ideas that change behavior happen only when they're based on a relevant truth. That's when they make an impact on societies and cultures and add value to people's lives. But as people get more connected and live a more advanced lifestyle, they'll be more critical of bullshit. People know more than ever, faster than ever. And that is a great thing because it will force us to be more critical of bullshit. As an industry, we have to stop falling into the trap of phony ideas.9
One last cool thing about leveraging human truths. In addition to making your messaging authentic, human insights will make your whole campaign more interesting. Check out this ad for the American Floral Marketing Council created by my friend Dean Buckhorn (Figure 3.6). Dean could have written something about how beautiful flowers are; he didn't. He instead focused on one of the truest things you can say about flowers—the use of flowers as a ticket out of Casa di Canine.
Figure 3.6 The headline could have been something boring like: “We have a wide variety of beautiful flower arrangements. One's just right for your budget.”
What is the emotion at the center of the brand?
Emotional appeals connect with customers more deeply than rational ones and finding that emotion is often all you need to get the ideas flowing.
Study your product, brand, or category, and find the emotional center.
Deciding which emotion to leverage is something you'll do early in the process. And the answer is always a combination of what your product is and whom you're talking to. If you're working on a website for a hospital, well, pie-in-the-face humor probably shouldn't be on the list.
Pick a mood. A feeling. You can change your mind later, but sometimes making this decision can give you focus. “Okay, this campaign is gonna be … thoughtful.” Or it's gonna be angry, or stark, or … well, you decide. What's right for your client? What's right for the customer?
RESEARCH YOUR BRAND, ITS CUSTOMERS, AND ITS COMPETITION.
Get to know the client's customers as well as you can.
Read everything your strategists give you before putting pen to paper. Remember, most of the work you do will be targeted to people outside your social circle, perhaps people with whom you have no more in common than being a carbon-based organism.
But don't just read it. Feel it. Take a deep breath and sink slowly into the world of the person you're writing to. Read past the demographics. Maybe you're selling a retirement community. You're talking to an older person. Someone living on a fixed income. Maybe he's worried about becoming dependent on his kids. It hurts when he gets out of a chair. Recently, the idea of shoveling snow has taken on dark-red cardiac overtones. How does it feel to be this person? Screw the demographics and the HHI stats (household income). Find the emotion.
Empathize with him or her. Knowing your audience's true emotions will help ensure your ideas will be authentic.
Listen to customers talk.
Every chance you get to hear what customers are saying, listen. If there's a website or chat room about a product or brand, go there. Eavesdropping is the best way to learn what customers think, and with all the tools now available on the internet, monitoring public opinion has become too easy not to do it.
Less useful (and usually more infuriating) is to hear what customers are saying about your finished concepts in focus groups. God, I hate testing creative ideas in focus groups. There are probably just two things in the world I hate more than listening to focus group participants complain about an agency's ideas.* Focus groups hired to critique creative ideas just suck. I'm not the only person who believes describing your idea to people being paid $50 and a few free Dr. Peppers is a bane on the industry. The good focus groups are the ones customers are doing for free online every day.
Listening on social platforms may be the best place to do this, and we'll look at it more in Chapter 12. But inside the agency, the best place to turn for customer insights is the strategist. Their main purpose in life is to know what makes the customer tick.
Imagine a day in the life of your customer.
Long before any creative work is done, key members of the agency team will meet to map out a day in the customer's life. What they're looking for are customer contact points.
How does our client's typical customer spend a day? What does she do in the morning? Does she have Spotify playing while she fixes breakfast, or does she just grab something on the go? Does she drive to work? Does she have a tablet? Does she recycle? What blogs does she read? Does she watch TV news as she runs at the gym or listen to podcasts while running outside?
What we're doing here is looking for insight. It's kind of like we're trying to see the aquarium from the inside out, to move through our customers' world exactly the way they do. We're also looking for unexpected contact points with our audience. We're looking for places where customers might even welcome a cool message from our brand. Places where the right message could be less of an ad and more like information or entertainment.
Here's the thing to remember about this whole exercise: your main idea may emerge from one of these contact points—an idea you can then spread sideways and backward to fill in the whole campaign. A cool contact point can spark an idea, which you then fan into the flame of a bigger idea, and then into a full campaign.
A day in the life of a real estate agent is going to be different than a corporate executive's day. A real estate agent practically lives online and his mobile phone is parked on the car seat next to him 24/7. Meanwhile, the executive probably has people answering her phone and she gets more of her content on a desktop or by reading business pubs on the plane.
All this different-strokes-for-different-folks stuff may seem a little obvious but it's surprising how many agencies buy the media before finding the insight, or they simply use the same media plan to reach every audience. (“We'll buy TV for reach, social for frequency, and throw in a little radio for promotions.”)
During this exercise is also a good time to ask, “What would a generous brand do to get out and meet its customers?” Fallon's John King says generous brands are empathetic and tend to do things that aren't always commercially motivated; they pay less attention to their own marketing schedules and more to the calendars of their customers, “taking the time to know and understand what's going on in the audience's lives. Brands today should take cues from Google's ever-changing home page, asking how they can participate on St. Patrick's Day or Election Day instead of brainstorming ideas to ‘Drive sales in Q3!'—a concept that has no relevance to the average person's calendar.”10
Develop a deep understanding of the client's business.
Bill Bernbach said: “The magic is in the product… . You’ve got to live with your product. You've got to get steeped in it. You've got to get saturated with it.”11
The moral for writers and art directors is: do the factory tour. I'm serious. If you get the chance, go. Ask a million questions. How is the product made? What are the ingredients? What are their quality control criteria? Read every brochure. Read everything on their website. You may find ideas waiting in the middle of some spec sheet or unpacking video just waiting to be transplanted kit-and-caboodle into an idea. Learn your client's business.
Deep client knowledge will do more than help you get good ideas. Your clients are going to trust you more if you can talk to them about their industry in their terms. They'll quickly find you irrelevant if all you can speak about with authority is Century Bold versus Italic. There are no shortcuts. Know the client. Know the product. Know the market. It will pay off.
Examine the current positioning of the product or brand.
There's a book titled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, one I recommend with many caveats. (Although the strategic thinking of the authors is sound, I have many differences with them on the subject of creativity, which they declared “irrelevant.”)
The authors, Ries and Trout, maintain the customer's head has a finite amount of space in which to remember products. In each category, there's room for perhaps three brand names. If your product isn't in one of those slots, you must “de-position” a competitor to take its place.
Before you start, look at the current positioning of your product. How do the competitors position themselves? What niches are undefended? Should you concentrate on defining your client's position or do some de-positioning of their competition? Does their brand have an adjective? (Brand = Adjective.) Does yours?
Study your client's previous work.
The client or the account executives know where to find it online or in the agency archives. Study it. Maybe the previous agency tried something that was pretty cool, but perhaps didn't do it just right. How could you do it better? This will get your wheels turning as well as keep you from presenting ideas your client or their competitors have already tried.
Ask yourself what would make you want the product.
If it's the kind of product or service you can afford, buy it. The agency will likely pick up the expense. Go to their store. Sign up for their service online. Experience it. Set the product on your desk. Quiet your mind and ask, “What would make me want to buy this?”
Whenever you can, go for an absolute.
Best is better than good. It's not often the product or brand you're working on is, in fact, the best. But when it is, set up camp there.
This may be hard. In today's market, there are often very few differences between a product and its competitors. What usually happens here is the client or agency end up trying to leverage some rice-paper-thin difference nobody gives a fig about. (“Legal won't let us say anything else.”) But try your hardest not to settle for an -er. As in, a product being “quieter.” Or “faster.” Or “cleaner.”
Go for an absolute—an -est. Quietest, fastest, cleanest; that's all people are gonna remember anyway. All the rest of the claims in that middle ground are gray and forgettable.
Try to make your message incontestable.
Because an advertising idea is basically an argument on behalf of a brand, it makes sense to present a case good enough to end any further argument. With a statement that can't be refuted.
Once you've settled on your strongest statement, says Pete Barry in The Advertising Concept Book, think of a counterargument you might hear from some loud guy at a bar. Picture this guy in your head and create a comeback that sinks his boat. “If you [can think of a comeback] that would shut him up, you should consider working on a campaign based on this argument.”
Of course, there are products to which this advice won't apply, products that are all image, or products with no real difference worth hanging your hat on like, I don't know, paper cups. But when you have a fact at your command, use it. When you can say, “This product lasts twice as long as the competition,” what's to argue with?
The lesson? State fact, not manufactured nonsense about, oh, how “We Put the ‘Qua' in Quality.”
Try the competitor's product.
What's wrong with it? More important, what do you like about it? What's good about the advertising? As Winsor and Bogusky warn in Baked In, “Don't rationalize away what you [like about the competitor's product]. Find the truth they're exploiting that you are not.”12
Look at the competitors' advertising.
Each category quickly manages to establish its own brand of boring. Learn the visual clichés all the other brands in your category are using. Visit their websites and watch their videos. Study what they post on the social platforms. Creep through the woods, part the branches, and study the ground your competitors occupy. What seems to be their strategy? What's their look? (Those schmucks. They don't know what's coming.)
THREE FINAL NOTES ON STRATEGY.
Insist on a simple strategy.
Advertising isn't “rocket surgery.” Most people live and think in broad strokes. Like we said earlier regarding “Brand = Adjective,” ask some guy in a mall about cars and he'll tell you Volvos are safe, Porsches are fast. Where's the genius here?
You want people who feel x about your product to feel y. That's about it. We're talking one adjective here. Most of the time, we're talking about going into a customer's brain and spot-welding one adjective to our client's brand. That's all. DeWalt tools = tough. The Economist = smart.
We'll return to the virtues of draconian simplicity in Chapter 6, but for now it suffices to invoke the classic advice, KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don't let anyone make you overthink things. Try not to slice too thin. Think in bright colors.
Insist on a precise strategy.
Creative director Norman Berry wrote: “English strategies are very tight, very precise. Satisfy the strategy and the idea cannot be faulted even though it may appear outrageous. Many … strategies are often too vague, too open to interpretation. ‘The strategy for this product is taste,' they'll say. But that is not a strategy. Vague strategies inhibit. Precise strategies liberate.”13
You need a precise strategy. However, a strategy can become too precise. When there's no play in the wheel, an overly specific strategy demands a very narrow range of executions and becomes by proxy an execution itself. Good account people and strategists can fine-tune a strategy by moving it up and down a continuum that ranges between broad, meaningless statements and little, purse-lipped creative dictums masquerading as strategies.
When you have it just right, the strategy should be evident in the campaign, but the campaign should not be evident in the strategy. Jean-Marie Dru put it elegantly in his book Disruption:
There are two questions that need to be asked. The first is: Could the campaign I'm watching have been created without the brief? If the answer is yes, the odds are the campaign is lacking in content. You have to be able to see the brief in the campaign. The second question is a mirror image of the first… . Is the campaign merely a transcription of the brief? If the answer is yes, then there has been no creative leap, and the campaign lacks executional force.14
“Small rooms discipline the mind; large rooms distract it.”
—Leonardo da Vinci
Insist on a relevant strategy.
There are two things people commonly fire back at an ad or commercial. One is “Yeah, riiiiight.” The other is “So what?”
To prevent “Yeah, riiiiight,” we need to have a message that's truthful, incontestable, or measurably provable.
To prevent “So what?” we need to make sure what we're saying is relevant. It must matter to somebody, somewhere. It has to offer something customers want or solve a problem they have, whether it's a car that won't start or a drip that won't stop.
If you don't have something relevant to say, tell the clients to put their money away. Because no matter how well you execute it, an unimportant message has no receiver. The tree falls in the forest. Crickets chirp.
Remember: You have two problems to solve: the client's and yours.
You solve the account team's and the client's problem by saying exactly the right thing. That's relatively easy; it's spelled out in the creative brief. But you aren't finished until you've solved your problem—coming up with what you think is a brilliant solution. Where these two solutions overlap is the sweet spot.
Bernbach said, “Dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.” The moral? Do both perfectly.
TWO MODELS FOR STRATEGY AND MESSAGING.
First, if I may, some definitions.
A business strategy is a broad perspective of how a company will achieve its long- and short-term goals for growth. Slightly different is the marketing strategy, which interprets the goals listed in the business strategy into an actionable plan for marketing, a small part of which is the company's overall advertising strategy. To create a campaign for a particular audience, we generally work from a specific creative strategy. All of this finally boils down to a single document you will work from called the creative brief—a distillation of the customer insights, a budget, a key message, and a list of the deliverables laid out in an actionable plan.
As a junior art director or copywriter, you won't be expected to create any of these. They usually come from the account team, the strategists, or the client. But advertising students must have something to start from. So here are two simple structures that may help you synthesize all you've learned about a brand, its customers, and the competition into a solid starting place.
This first structure I learned from strategist Andrew Teagle. With Goodby and Crispin on his résumé, Andrew's pedigree is way up there, working as he did on both the got milk? and truth® campaigns. In new business pitches, I would watch as Andrew put the following image up on the screen and walk a client through his logic. It was three circles visualizing this question (Figure 3.7): “What do we have that customers want and the competition isn't giving them?”
Up on the presentation screen, Andrew would put the top left circle representing the brand. This was when he'd discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the client's offerings. Next, he'd add the circle at top right representing the customer, and he'd do a deep dive on all the findings about the target audience. He'd end with the circle at the bottom, which represented all the client's competitors, and here he discussed how customers perceived the strengths and weaknesses of the competition.
Andrew's diagram is simple but it covers pretty much everything. Answer this question and you'll likely have a good messaging platform. It's written with the customer in mind, and it differentiates your brand from the competition.
Another useful format for organizing your thinking is Figure 3.8. Its structure is a simplified version of a typical creative brief.
Figure 3.7 How some agencies derive their creative briefs.
For an example, let's pretend our client is Best Buy—the big-box retailer that sells everything from phones to computers and flat-screens to gaming systems. Best Buy wants us to create their annual holidays retail campaign.
Okay, so obviously we're targeting parents. As a parent, my personal customer insight would be I'd want to make sure there's at least one gift my kids go nuts about and run around the house yelling, “Best Christmas ever!!” So, here's how I might write my brief (Figure 3.9).
These are very simplified formats and there is so much more to marketing strategy than we can cover here. Many students start studying the creative side of advertising and end up fascinated with the psychological nuances involved in studying consumer behavior and creating strategy.
Once the client approves a creative brief, it's time to start thinking—or as we creatives in the industry call it, “concepting.” You know, that part where you sit in a room for hours, staring at our partner's shoes.
Figure 3.8 A very simplified version of the standard creative brief.
Figure 3.9 A sample brief for a holidays campaign from Best Buy.
NOTES
- 1. Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 315.
- 2. Stefan Mumaw, Chasing the Monster Idea: The Marketer’s Almanac for Predicting Idea Epicness (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011).
- 3. This wonderful term coined by a smart student, Jillian Apatow.
- 4. Fast Company, January 25, 2021.
- 5. Dave Bor, “CMO Secrets with Mike Troiano.” Acquia, January 8, 2020, https://www.acquia.com/blog/cmo-secrets-mike-troiano.
- 6. Warren Berger, Hoopla: A Book About Crispin Porter + Bogusky (Brooklyn, NY: Powerhouse Books, 2006), 160.
- 7. Fast Company, January 25, 2021. Current stock price from NYSE, August 30, 2021.
- 8. Warren Berger, Hoopla, 160.
- 9. Amir Kassaei, CCO of DDB. Quotation from campaignline.co.uk, June 4, 2015.
- 10. John King, Building,” A Generous Brand.” Ad Age, August 15, 2011, http://adage.com/article/goodworks/building-a-generous-brand/136446/.
- 11. Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach Said … (New York: DDB Needham, 1995).
- 12. Alex Bogusky and John Winsor, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves (Evanston, IL: Agate B2, 2010), 51.
- 13. Wall Street Journal, “Stars In Your Eyes: The Wall Street Journal Creative Leaders Series: 1977–1987,” June 1977.
- 14. Jean-Marie Dru, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 151.
- * For the record, the two things worse than focus groups are (1])sawing off my legs and walking into town on the stumps and (2) kissing the side of a passing train that's covered in sandpaper and then bobbing for cherry bombs in a vat of boiling ammonia. We'll talk more about these horrible creative-testing focus groups in Chapter 16.