Uncover the Central Human Truth About Your Product

Veteran copywriter Mark Fenske says your first order of business working on a project is to write down the truest thing you can say about your product or brand. You need to find the central truth about your brand and about the whole category—the central human truth.

It's unlikely the truest thing will be mentioned on the client brief. But you can hear it being talked about on blogs or read it in customer reviews on Amazon. Sometimes the truest thing is what the client wants to say; more often, it's not. Products are the clients' children, and it's no surprise they want to talk about its 4.0 GPA and how it's captain of the football team.

Bringing truth into the picture, however, is the single best thing an ad agency can do for a brand. The agency can bring an objective assessment of a brand's strengths and weaknesses, and if it's a good agency, they'll discover a brand's most relevant truth and then bring that alive for people.

This is not a science, and we all see different truths in a brand, but more often than not, we'll agree when someone hits on a real truth. Here are four brands and my personal perspective on the truest things about each one.

Krystal burgers: Not sure it's food, but I want 24 of 'em.

Crocs: The client will say “comfortable.” Correct answer is “ugly.”

eHarmony: I will just DIE if someone finds out I use an online dating site.

Canadian Club: Old-school rotgut that dads drink while watching football in the basement.

Here's the weird part. Clients will spend massive amounts of time and money to uncover these brand truths and then—frightened by the results—proceed to cover them all back up with BS. (“Let's put some lipstick on this pig.”) But marketing sleights-of-hand are kind of like the garage mechanic coming 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 you to believe about their brand. The problem is they don't own the brand and they don't own the truth; customers do. So it isn't surprising what happened, for example, when Las Vegas tried to rebrand itself as a “family-friendly” destination in the mid-'90s—huge fail. Fortunately, R&R Partners came along and helped the client tell the truth: The city is One Big Bad-Ass Party. And “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” came to life.

There are ads to be written all around the edges of any product. But we'll be talking about getting to the ideas written right from the essence of the thing. In Hoopla, Alex Bogusky was quoted, “We try to find that long-neglected truth in a product and give it a hug.”² Notice he said they find this truth, they do not invent it. Because nobody can invent truth. The best ideas are truth brought to light in fresh, new ways.

Remember, we're talking about truth here, not what a client or a creative director wants you to say. Amir Kassaei, CCO 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, of superficial gloss that looks great in an awards jury room but does not matter in the real world.³

Before we move on, as an example of what truth looks like, check out this ad for the American Floral Marketing Council created by my friend Dean Buckhorn (Figure 4.2). Dean could have done something about how beautiful flowers are; he didn't, and 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.

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 in order to get the ideas flowing.

Your goal here is to make the customer feel something. And the stronger the emotion you can elicit, the better. My friend Ryan Carroll of GSD&M says:

If you are trying to be funny, then make me actually laugh, not just go “Oh, that was funny.” If you are trying to stop me in my tracks, then I should be floored. This is what advertising is supposed to do and sadly, I see it too rarely in portfolios. I'll see a headline campaign that's well written but, if it leaves me feeling nothing; it's just cleverly communicating some point. Why not go for the emotional jugular in every piece?

The one thing many fans remember about the series Mad Men was that pitch Don Draper made to Kodak. Maybe you remember the scene, when he was selling the campaign for Kodak's new slide “Carousel” (a round container for slides, an improvement over the straight trays sold at the time). The emotion of the screenwriter's words – not surprisingly an ex-ad person—the emotion seemed perfect for the product, and I remember much of it by heart to this day. whipple5carousel

Draper: My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, and this old pro copywriter, a Greek named Teddy, and Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device [gesturing to the Kodak Carousel] isn't a spaceship; it's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards…takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel. It's called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels…around and around…and back home again…to a place where we know we are loved.⁴

Study your product, brand, or category, and find the emotional center. Once you've discovered it, the words and the ideas and the truth will start to flow.

Identify and Leverage the Central Conflicts Within Your Client's Brand or Category

In my experience, the best strategies and the best work usually come from a place of conflict.

Sadly, many of the strategies you'll see will look more like a client's company mission statement: “We believe fresh foods mean better health.” Better, I think are strategies built on top of—and powered by—either thematic or cultural tensions. When a strategy can be built on top of one of these tensions—like a volcano along the edge of two tectonic plates—great work is built into the strategy and fairly bursts out of it. There's a natural energy at these points of cultural stress, a conflict of ideas, opinions, or themes that can be a fertile place for ideas of force and substance.

Look for polarities. Where you find them, you will also likely find this tension I'm talking about. As an example, in the financial category, the conflicts we play with might be rich vs. poor, trust vs. anger, spending vs. saving, or money vs. love. Where you find tension, where you find opposing energies, you will find story. We'll talk a lot more about finding these points of tension and polarity in Chapter 8.

Find a Villain

Find a bad guy you can beat up in the stairwell. Every client has an enemy, particularly in mature categories, where growth has to come out of somebody else's hide.

Your enemy can be the other guy's crappy, overpriced product. It can be some pain or inconvenience the client's product spares you. If the product's a toothpaste, the villain can be tooth decay, the dentist, the drill, or that little pointy thing Laurence Olivier used on Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. (“Is it safe?”) A villain can come from another product category altogether, in the form of what's called an indirect competitor. Parker Pens, for example, could be said to have an indirect competitor in e-mail.

First, Say It Straight. Then Say It Great

To get the words flowing, sometimes it helps to simply write out what you want to say. Make it memorable, different, or new later. First, just say it.

Try this. Begin your headline with: “This is an ad about.…”And then keep writing. Who knows? You might find, by the time you get to the end of a sentence, you have something just by snipping off the “This is an ad about” part. Even if you don't, you've focused; a good first step.

Whatever you do, just start writing. Don't let the empty page (what Hemingway called “the white bull”) intimidate you. Go for art later. Start with clarity.

Restate the Strategy and Put Some Spin on It

Think of the strategy statement as a lump of clay. You've got to sculpt it into something interesting to look at. So begin by taking the strategy and saying it some other way; any old way. Say it faster. Say it in a bad English accent. Say it in slang. Shorten it. Punch it up. Try anything that will change the strategy statement from something you'd overhear in an elevator at a sales convention to a message you'd see spray painted on an alley wall.

Club Med's tagline could have been “A Great Way to Get Away.” It could have been “More Than Just a Beach.” Fortunately, Ammirati & Puris had the account, and it became: “Club Med. The Antidote for Civilization.”

Be careful, too, not to let your strategy show. Many ads suffer from this transparency, and it happens when you fail to put enough creative spin on the strategy. Your ad remains flat and obvious; there's no magic to it, and reading it is a bit of a letdown. It's like Dorothy discovering the Wizard of Oz is just some knucklehead behind a curtain.

In his book Disruption, Jean-Marie Dru described this kind of idea:

You can tell when ads are trying too hard. Their intentions are too obvious. They impose themselves without speaking to you. By contrast, there are some that grab your attention with their executional brio, but their lack of relevance is such that after you've seen them they leave you kind of empty. Great advertising combines density of content with the elegance of form.⁵

Density of content and elegance of form. Great advice.

Put the Pill Inside the Bologna, Not Next to It

Don't let your concept get in the way of the product. Bernbach said: “Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise…not ourselves. To kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product.” This can happen, and when clients kill work for this reason, they may be right.

From more than one client, I've heard this dreaded phrase: “Your concept is a ‘visual vampire.’ ” What they mean is the concept's execution is so busy it sucks the life out of their commercial message. Be ready for this one. Sometimes clients use the phrase as a bludgeon to kill something unusual they don't like. But sometimes, a few of them are right.*

This usually happens when the product bores you. Which means you haven't dug deep enough to find the thing about it that's exciting or interesting. Or maybe you need to reinvent the brief. Or perhaps you need to reinvent the product. But instead, you settle for doing some sort of conceptual gymnastics up front and tacking your boring old product on the backside, hoping the interest from the opening will somehow bleed over to your sales message. But the interesting part of an ad shouldn't be a device that points to the sales message; it should be the sales message.

To understand what it means to make your whole ad or commercial be the sales message, consider the analogy of giving your dog a pill. Dogs hate pills, right? So what do you do? You wrap the pill in a piece of bologna.

Well, same thing with your commercial's message. Customers hate sales pitches. So you wrap your pitch in an interesting bit, and they're more likely to bite.

Unfortunately, most students take this to mean: “Oh, I see. All I have to do is show something interesting and funny for the first 25 seconds and then cut to the product.” The answer is no—because the customer will eat up the 25 seconds of interesting bologna and then walk away, leaving the pill in the dog dish. You've got to wrap that baby right in the middle of the meat. The two have to be one. Your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message; it must be the sales message.

Remember Bernbach's advice: “The product, the product, the product. Stay with the product.” Don't get seduced by unrelated ideas, however cool and funny they are.

Stare at a Picture that has the Emotion of the Ad You Want to Create

Once you've decided what the right emotion is, it may help to put up some pictures that put you in the mood. Think about it: Have you ever tried to write an angry letter when you weren't angry? Oh, you might get a few cuss words on paper, but there's no fire to it. The same can be said for copywriting. You need to be in the mood.

I once had to do some ads for a new magazine called Family Life. The editors said this wasn't going to be just another “baby magazine,” which are very much like diapers—soft, fluffy, and full of…My point is, they wanted ads that captured the righteous emotion of the editorial. Raising a child is the most moving, most important thing you'll ever do.

To get in the mood, I did two things. First, I reread a wonderful book by Anna Quindlen on the joys and insanities of parenting called Living Out Loud. I'd soak up a couple of pages before I sat down to write. Then, when I was ready to put pen to paper, I propped up a number of different stock photos of children, including the picture shown in Figure 4.3 of a cute little kid in a raincoat sitting in a puddle.

As you can see in the ad reprinted here, the idea didn't come directly out of the photo, but in a way it did. It's worked for me. You may want to try it.

Let Your Subconscious Mind do It

Where do ideas come from? I have no earthly idea. Around 1900, a writer named Charles Haanel said true creativity comes from “a benevolent stranger, working on our behalf.” Novelist Isaac Singer said, “There are powers who take care of you, who send you patience and stories.” And film director Joe Pytka said, “Good ideas come from God.” I think they're probably all correct. It's not so much our coming up with great ideas as it is creating a canvas where a painting can appear.

So do what Marshall Cook suggests in his book Freeing Your Creativity: “Creativity means getting out of the way.…If you can quiet the yammering of the conscious, controlling ego, you can begin to hear your deeper, truer voice in your writing,…[not the] noisy little you that sits out front at the receptionist's desk and tries to take credit for everything that happens in the building.”⁶

Stop the chatter in your head. Go into Heller's “controlled daydream.” Breathe from your stomach. If you're lucky, sometimes the ideas just begin to appear.

What does the ad want to say? Not you, the ad.

To hear what the ad wants to be, sometimes I picture the surface of my pad of paper as the bottom of one of those toy Magic 8 Balls. (You remember, the ones where the message slowly floated to the surface?) I try to coax the idea up from under the pad of paper, from under my conscious mind.

Try it. Just shut up. Listen.

In The Creative Companion, David Fowler says, “Maybe if you walked around the block you could hear it more clearly. Maybe if you went and fed the pigeons they'd whisper it to you. Maybe if you stopped telling it what it needed to be, it would tell you what it wanted to be. Maybe you should come in early, when it's quiet.”⁷

(We'll revisit this subject in Chapter 9.)

Try Writing Down Words from the Product's Category

Most of the creative people I know have their own special system for scribbling down ideas. Figure out what works for you. For me—let's say we're selling outboard engines—I start a list on the side of the page: Fish. Water. Pelicans. Flotsam. Jetsam. Atlantic. Titanic. Ishmael.

What do these words make you think of? Pick up two of them and put them together like Legos. Sure, it sounds stupid. The whole creative process is stupid. Like I said, it's like washing a pig.

“Embrace the Suck”

If your brand has some sort of obvious shortcoming (it's ugly or tastes bad), try seeing what'll happen if you address that directly and really own it. Denying it is inauthentic, and as long as the benefits outweigh the negatives, it's all good. Plus, customers will love you for your candor and transparency.

We touched on this already while talking about Buckley's cough syrup in Chapter 3.

“We're Avis. We're only number two. So we try harder.” Totally believable. More important, I like a company that would say this about themselves. People love an underdog.

Perhaps the biggest underdog of all time was Volkswagen. VW was the king of self-deprecation. The honesty of the voice (ironic in light of the brand's 2015 fraud) that Doyle Dane Bernbach created for this odd-looking little car turned its weaknesses into strengths. The ad shown in Figure 4.4 is a perfect example.

Then there's Jeppson's Malort, a horrible-tasting liqueur. (“Tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak,” wrote one reviewer.) Jeppson's embraces its awful taste with print ads headlined, “When you need to unfriend someone in person.”

Allow Yourself to Come Up With Terrible Ideas

In Bird by Bird, her book on the art of writing fiction, Anne Lamott says:

The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really crappy first drafts. That first draft is the child's draft, where you let it pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her.⁸

Same thing in advertising. Start with some flat statement like “Free to qualified customers” and just go from there. If it sounds like I'm asking you to write down the bad ideas, I am; there's something liberating about writing them down. It's as if doing so actually flushes them out of your system.

Also, remember this: Notebook paper is not made only for recording your gems of transcendent perfection. A sheet of paper costs about one squintillionth of a cent. It ain't a museum frame, people. It's a workbench. Write. Keep writing. Don't stop.

Allow Your Partner to Come Up With Terrible Ideas

The quickest way to shut down your partner's contribution to the creative process is to roll your eyes at a bad idea. Don't. Even if the idea truly and most sincerely blows, just say, “That's interesting,” scribble it down, and move on. Remember, this is not a race. You are not in competition with your partner. You're competing with your client's rival brands. Just throw back whatever they've said with your idea tacked on. In Creative Advertising, author Mario Pricken likens this conceptual back-and-forth to a game: “…a kind of ping-pong ensues, in which you catapult each other into an emotional state resembling a creative trance.”⁹

Share Your Ideas With Your Partner, Especially the Kinda Dumb, Half-Formed Ones

Just because an idea doesn't work yet doesn't mean it might not work eventually. I sometimes find I get something that looks like it might go somewhere, but I can't do anything with it. It just sits there. Some wall inside prevents me from taking it to the next level. That's when my partner scoops up my miserable little half-idea and runs with it over the goal line.

Remember, the point of teamwork isn't to impress your partner by sliding a fully finished idea across the conference room table. It's about how 1 + 1 = 3.

That said, I feel the need to remind you not to say aloud every stinking thing that comes into your head. It's counterproductive. I worked with someone like this once, and—in addition to trying to concept in a state of irritation—I ended up with a bad case of “idea-rrhea” that lasted the whole weekend.

Spend Some Time Away from Your Partner, Thinking on Your Own

I know many teams who actually prefer to start that way. It gives you both a chance to look at the problem from your own perspective before you bring your ideas to the table.

Tack the Best Ideas on the Wall. Look for Patterns

Actually tack the ideas on the wall, and don't edit too hard. Any idea that has something going for it goes on the wall. As you continue to post ideas, you will begin to see ideas that overlap or share some trait; maybe a visual one, maybe verbal. Reposition these ideas to form their own cluster, and then stand back and keep looking for patterns.

Come Up With a Lot of Ideas. Cover the Wall

It's tempting to think the best advertising people just peel off great campaigns 10 minutes before they're due. But that is perception, not reality. My friend Jay Russell, the executive creative director at GSD&M, told me he remembers looking at more than 2,000 ideas—fairly polished, worked-out ideas—for a Microsoft Android campaign when he was at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He said the pile of ideas he had stacked in the corner of his office came up to his waist. And this is without being mounted on foam core, people.

As a creative person, you will discover your brain has a built-in tendency to want to reach closure, even rush to it. Evolution has left us with circuitry that doesn't like ambiguity or unsolved problems. Its pattern-recognition wiring evolved for keeping us out of the jaws of lions, tigers, and bears—not for making lateral jumps to discover unexpected solutions. But in order to get to a great idea, which is usually about the 500th one to come along, you'll need to resist the temptation to give in to the anxiety and sign off on the first passable idea that shows up.

Learn to breathe through this anxiety and the ideas will start to come. Once they do, put as many of them up on the wall as possible. Linus Pauling says: “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.…At first, they'll seem as hard to find as crumbs on an oriental rug. Then they start coming in bunches. When they do, don't stop to analyze them; if you do, you'll stop the flow, the rhythm, the magic. Write each idea down and go on to the next one.”

Which leads to our next point.

Quick Sketches of Your Ideas Are All You Need During the Creative Process

Don't curb your creativity by stopping the car and getting out every time you have an idea you want to work out. Do details later. Just get the concept on paper and keep moving forward. You'll cover more ground this way.

Write. Don't Talk. Write

Don't talk about the concepts you're working on. Talking turns energy you could use to be creative into talking about being creative. It's also likely to send your poor listener looking for the nearest espresso machine because an idea talked about is never as exciting as the idea itself. If you don't believe me, call me up sometime and I'll describe the movie Inception to you.

Work. Just work. The time will come to unveil. For now, just work. The best ad people I know are the silent-but-deadly kind. You never hear them out in the hallways talking about their ideas. They're working.

I saw a cool bumper sticker the other day: “Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise.”

Write Hot. Edit Cold

Get it on paper, fast and furious. Be hot. Let it pour out. Don't edit anything when you're coming up with the ads. Then, later, be ruthless. Cut everything that's not A-plus work. Put all the A-minus and B-plus stuff off in another pile you'll revisit later. Everything that's B-minus or down, either kill or put on the shelf for emergencies.

“The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend.”

—Novelist Isaac Singer

Once You Get on a Streak, Ride It

When the words finally start coming, stay on it. Don't break for lunch. Don't put it off 'til Monday. You'd be surprised how cold some trails get once you leave them for a few minutes.

Never be the “Devil's Advocate”

Nurture a newly hatched idea. Until it grows up, you don't know what it's going to be. So don't look for what's wrong with a new idea; look for what's right. And no playing the devil's advocate just yet. Instead, do what writer Sydney Shore suggests: play the “angel's advocate.” Ask: What is good about the idea? What do we like about the idea? Coax the thing along.

Can You Use the Physical Environment as a Medium?

Bowling balls, arcade games, candy store windows. Who says they can't be advertising media? To promote its mobile search capabilities, Google and agency 72andSunny turned everything from drum skins to skateboards to ice cream trucks into display ads by doing nothing more than posing a question, in the form of a headline, smack onto the surface of things—all over New York City (Figure 4.5). On a roving ice cream truck a sign asked, “OK Google, why is a sundae called a sundae?” In the window of the Papa Bubble candy store, the campaign wondered, “OK Google, when was the first lollipop made?” Every question was then answered with the simple line, “Ask the Google app”—a reminder that search is as mobile as you are.

“Do I Want to Write a Letter or Send a Postcard?”

In his book Cutting Edge Advertising, ¹⁰ Jim Aitchison offers up this early fork in the road: Do you want to write a letter or just drop a postcard? Picture it as a sliding scale, with all visual on one side and all verbal on the other. What's the right mix for your product and your message?

A postcard, says Aitchison, is an idea that's visually led. A single visual and sometimes a small bit of copy are all that are needed to make the point. Figure 4.6 is a good example of a postcard from Land Rover via its Chinese agency, Y&R Beijing.

On the other hand, a letter is an ad that's predominantly copy-driven. It's probably better for ads that have to deliver a more complex message. Just the sheer weight of the body copy adds a sense of gravitas to the product regardless of whether the reader takes in a word of the copy. Here's another ad for Land Rover, this one done by my friends at GSD&M (Figure 4.7).

You'll see both letter ads and postcard ads throughout this book. Give special attention to how each visual or verbal format serves the different messages that the brands are trying to convey.

Can the Solution be Entirely Visual?

The screen saver on the computers at London's Bartle Bogle Hegarty read, “Words are a barrier to communication.” Creative director John Hegarty says, “I just don't think people read ads.”

I don't think most people read ads, either—at least not the body copy. There's a reason they say a picture is worth a thousand words. When you first picked up this book, what did you look at? I'm betting it was the pictures.

Granted, if you interest readers with a good visual or headline, yes, they may go on to read your copy. But the point is, visuals work fast. As the larger brands become globally marketed, visual solutions will become even more important. They translate, not surprisingly, better than words.

The ad for Mitsubishi's Space Wagon (Figure 4.8) from Singapore's Ball Partnership is one of my all-time favorites. The message is delivered entirely with one picture and a thimbleful of words. What could you possibly add to or take away from this concept?

Relying on one simple visual means it assumes added responsibilities and a bigger job description. You can't bury your main selling idea down in the copy. If readers don't get what you're trying to say from the visual, they won't get it. The page is turned.

Coax an Interesting Visual Out of Your Product

Many years ago when he was a little boy, my son Reed and I were playing and we stumbled upon a pretty good mental exercise using his toy car. I held the car in its traditional four-wheels-to-the-ground position and asked him, “What's this?” “A car,” he said. I tipped it on its side. Two wheels on the ground made the image a “motorcycle.” I tipped the car on its curved top. He saw a hull and declared it a “boat.” When I set it tailpipe to ground, pointing straight up, he saw propulsion headed moonward and told me, “It's a rocket!”

Look at your product and do the same thing.

Visualize it on its side. Upside down. Make its image rubber. Stretch your product visually six ways to Sunday, marrying it with other visuals, other icons, and see what you get—always keeping in mind you're trying to coax out of the product a dramatic image with a selling benefit.

What if it were bigger? Smaller? On fire? What if you gave it legs? Or a brain? What if you put a door in it? What is the perfectly wrong way to use it? What other thing does it look like? What could you substitute for it?

Take your product, change it visually, and by doing so dramatize a customer benefit.

Get the Visual Clichés Out of Your System Right Away

Certain visuals are just old. Somewhere out there is a Home for Tired Old Visuals. Sitting there in rocking chairs on the porch are visuals like Uncle Sam, a talking baby, and a proud lion, just rocking back and forth waiting for someone to come use them in ads once again. (“When we were young, we were in all kinds of ads. People used to love us.”)

Remember: Every category has its own version of Tired Old Visuals. In insurance, it's grandfathers flying kites with grandchildren. In the tech industries, it's earnest people wearing glasses in which you can see the reflection of a computer screen. Learn what iconography is overused in your category, and then…don't do that.

Check out the ad for Polaris watercraft in Figure 4.9. It's just a wild guess, but I'm thinking this is probably the first use of a hippo in the Jet Ski category.

Avoid Style; Focus on Substance

Remember, styles change; typefaces and design and art direction, they all change. Fads come and go. But people are always people.

They want to look better, make more money, feel better, be healthy. They want security, attention, and achievement. These things about people aren't likely to change. So focus your efforts on speaking to these basic needs, rather than tinkering with the current visual affectations. Focus first on the substance of what you want to say. Then worry about how to say it.

Show, Don't Tell

Telling readers why your product has merit is never as powerful as showing them. Figure 4.10 shows the classic ad by BMP in London for Fisher-Price's antislip roller skates; it is a good example of the benefits of showing your story over telling it. It's one of my all-time favorites.

Saying Isn't the Same As Being

This is a corollary to the previous point. If a client says, “I want people to think our company is cool,” the answer isn't an ad saying, “We're cool.” The answer is to be cool. Nike never once said, “Hey, we're cool.” They just were cool. C'mon, think about it. The Beatles didn't meet in the third-floor conference room and go over a presentation about how they were going to become known as cool. They just were cool.

As Miss Manners politely points out, “It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.”

Move Back and Forth between Wide-Open, Blue-Sky Thinking and Critical Analysis

It's like this: Up there in my brain, there's this poet guy. Smokes a lot. Wears black. He's so creative. And chicks dig 'im. He's got a million ideas. But 999,000 of them suck. He knows this because there's also a certified public accountant up there who tells him so:

“That won't work. You suck.”

The CPA is a no-nonsense guy who clips coupons and knows how to fix the car when the poet runs it into the ditch on his way to Beret World. Between the two of them, though, I manage to come up with a few ideas that actually work.

The trick is to give each one his say. Let the poet go first. Be loose. Be wild. Then let the CPA come in, take measurements, and see what actually works. I sense I'm about to run this metaphor into the ground, so I'll just bow out here by saying, go back and forth between wild dorm-room creativity and critical dad's-basement analysis, always keeping your strategy statement in mind.

Think It Through Before You do the Ol' Exaggeration Thing

Sometimes I think there's this tired old computer program inside every copywriter's and art director's head. I call this programming circuitry the exaggeration chip.

Say you're doing an ad for, oh, a water heater. The exaggeration chip's first 100 ideas will be knee-jerk scenarios about how cold the water will be if you don't buy this water heater: “What if we had, like, ice cubes coming out of the water faucet. See? 'Cause it's so cold, the water faucet will have like ice cubes, see? Ice cubes…'cause…'cause they're cold.”

Granted, there are plenty of great commercials out there using exaggeration to great effect. I'll just warn you the e-chip is typically the first mental program many creatives will apply to a problem.

Buy a lottery ticket and you'll be so rich that ______________. (Fill in with I'm-really-rich jokes here.)

Buy this car and you'll go so fast that ______________. (Insert cop-giving-ticket jokes here.)

It's just a little too easy. But here's the other thing. The e-chip will rarely lead you to a totally unexpected solution. You'll likely end up somewhere in the same neighborhood as you started, just a little further out on the wacky edge, but still nearby. A place you will likely share with everybody else who's working the problem with an e-chip. In which case, it'll simply come down to who has the wackiest exaggeration.

I'm not saying it's off-limits. Just be aware when you're employing the e-chip. Pete Barry further cautions that if you're going to do an exaggeration scenario, make sure you base it on a truth; otherwise, you only have a silly contrivance—as in this cousin of the e-chip which Teressa Iezzi identified in her book The Idea Writers: the “I'm so distracted by the awesome nature of the product that I didn't notice (insert outrageous visual phenomenon here!!).”¹¹

A tired old idea to which we say: “Meh.”

Consider the Opposite of Your Product

What doesn't the product do? Who doesn't need the product? When is the product a waste of money? Study the inverse problem and see where the opposite thinking leads.

Recently, I saw a great opposite idea in a student book. It was a small poster for a paint manufacturer that painters could put up after their job was finished. Above the company's logo, this warning: “Dry Paint.”

Interpret the Problem Using Different Mental Processes

From a book called Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams, I excerpt this list:¹²

Put on Different Thinking Caps

How would the folks at today's top agencies solve your problem? R/GA or Razorfish, for instance. How would they solve it at Droga5? At Goodby or Wieden? How would they approach your problem at Pixar? At Google?

Shake the Etch-A-Sketch in your head, start over constantly, and come at the problem from wildly different angles. Don't keep sniffing all four sides of the same fire hydrant. Run like a crazed dog through entire neighborhoods.

Pose the Problem As a Question

Creativity in advertising is problem solving. When you state the problem as a bald question, sometimes the answers suggest themselves. Take care not to simply restate the problem in the terms in which it was brought to you; you're not likely to discover any new angles. Pose the question again and again, from entirely different perspectives.

In his book The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy, Tom Monahan puts it this way: “Ask a better question.” By that he means a question to which you don't know the answer. He likens it to “placing the solution just out of your reach,” and in answering it, you stretch yourself.¹³

As philosopher John Dewey put it: “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” It can work. Eric Clark reminds us just how it works in his book The Want Makers.

In the 1960s, a team wrestled for weeks to come up with an idea to illustrate the reliability of the Volkswagen in winter. Eventually, they agreed a snowplow driver would make an excellent spokesperson. The breakthrough came a week later when one of the team wondered aloud, “How does the snowplow driver get to his snowplow?”¹⁴

If you've never seen it, the VW “Snowplow” commercial is vintage Doyle Dane. A man gets in his Volkswagen and drives off through deep snow into a blizzard. At the end, we see where he's driving: the garage where the county snowplows are parked. The voice-over then quietly asks, “Have you ever wondered how the man who drives a snowplow…drives to the snowplow? This one drives a Volkswagen. So you can stop wondering.”

Don't be Afraid to Ask What Seems—At First—to be an Astonishingly Dumb Question

That blank slate we sometimes bring to a problem-solving session can work in our favor. We ask the obvious questions people too close to the problem often forget. In the question's very naïveté, we sometimes find simple answers that have been overlooked.

Avoid the Formula of Saying One Thing and Showing Another

“Your kids deserve a licking this summer…” and then you have a picture of some kids with lollipops. Get it?

Again, this isn't a rule. But if you use this sort of setup, make sure the difference between word and picture is breathtaking. The polarity between the two should fairly crackle. A good example is the ad from Leagas Delaney shown in Figure 4.11.

Whenever You Can, Go for An Absolute

Best is better than good.

It's not often the product or brand you are working on is the best. But when it is, set up camp there. In today's market there are often very few differences between a product and those of its competitors. What usually happens here is the client or agency ends up trying to leverage some rice-paper–thin difference that 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; go for an “-est.” Quietest, fastest, cleanest; that's all people will remember anyway. All the rest of the claims in the middle are forgettable.

Metaphors Must've Been Invented for Advertising

They aren't always right for the job, but when they are, they can be a quick and powerful way to communicate. Shakespeare did it: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

In my opinion (and the neo-Freudian Carl Jung's), the mind works and moves through and thinks in and dreams in symbols. Red means anger. A dog means loyal. A hand coming out of water means help. Ad people might say each of these images has “equity,” something they mean by dint of the associations people have ascribed to them over the years. You may be able to use this equity to your client's advantage, particularly when the product or service is intangible such as, say, insurance. A metaphor can help make it real.

What makes metaphors particularly useful to your craft is they're a sort of conceptual shorthand and say with one image what you might otherwise need 20 words to say. They get a lot of work done quickly and simply.

The trick is doing it well. Just picking up an image/symbol and plopping it down next to your client's logo won't work. But when you can take an established image, put some spin on it, and use it in some new and unexpected way that relates to your product advantage, things can get pretty cool.

As soon as I put those words on paper, I remembered an execution from the marvelous British campaign for The Economist. Reprinted here (Figure 4.12), an unadorned keyhole is simply plopped down next to the logo. One stroke is all it takes to give the impression this business magazine has inside information on corporations. So much for rules.

Still, I stand by the advice. Symbols lifted right off the rack usually won't fit your communication needs and typically need some spin put on them.

Verbal metaphors can work equally well. I remember a great ad from Nike touting their athletic wear for baseball. Below the picture of a man at bat, the headline read, “Proper attire for a curveball's funeral.” In Figure 4.13 another verbal metaphor is put to good use to describe the feeling of flooring it in a Porsche.

In film, metaphors can stand up and walk and talk. A favorite of mine is the metaphor Motorola developed to sell their new Moto X phone (Figure 4.14). Comedic actor T.J. Miller personified the competitor's “lazy phones” and demonstrated the frustration of having to touch your phone to unlock it, or the fuss of having to look for apps or passwords. Just talking about Moto X's touchless controls or showing them would've been boring, but the videos Motorola released online were so entertaining, they gathered over 7 million views within three days of release. whipple5lazyphone

“Wit Invites Participation”

Part of what makes metaphors in ads so effective is how they involve the reader. They use images already in the reader's mind, twist them to the message's purpose, and ask the reader to close the loop for us. There are other ways you can leave some of the work to the reader, and when you do it correctly, you usually have a better ad.

In a great book called A Smile in the Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design, authors Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart say “wit invites participation.”

When wit is involved, the designer never travels 100 percent of the way [toward the audience].…The audience may need to travel only 5 percent or as much as 40 percent towards the designer in order to unlock the puzzle and get the idea.…It asks the reader to take part in the communication of the idea. It is as if the designer throws a ball which then has to be caught. So the recipient is alert, with an active mind and a brain in gear.¹⁵

Their point about traveling “only 5 percent or as much as 40 percent” is an important one. If you leave too much out, you'll mystify your audience. If you put too much in, you'll bore them.

Testing the borders of this sublime area will be where you spend much of your time when you're coming up with ads. Somewhere between showing a picture of a flaming zebra on a unicycle and an ad that reads “Sale ends Saturday” is where you want to be.

Check out the marvelously subtle ad shown in Figure 4.15. It's from Ogilvy Brasil for Band Sports, an all-sports cable TV network. Don't you love it when that little >CLICK< happens in your head when you suddenly get it?

The Wisdom of Knock-Knock Jokes

Consider these one-liners from stand-up comedian Steven Wright: “If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose?…When you open a new bag of cotton balls, are you supposed to throw the top one away?…When your pet bird sees you reading the newspaper, does he wonder why you're just sitting there staring at carpeting?”

Well, okay, I happen to think it's funny. In the last bit, for instance, the word newspaper begins as reading material and ends as cage-bottom covering. A shift has happened and suddenly everything is slightly off. I don't know why these shifts and the sudden introduction of incongruous data make our computers spasm; they just do.

You may find jumping from one point of view to another to introduce a sudden new interpretation is an effective way to add tension and release to the architecture of an ad. That very tension involves the viewer more than a simple expository statement of the same facts.

Creative theorist Arthur Koestler noted that a person, on hearing a joke, is “compelled to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination.” Authors McAlhone and Stuart add: “An idea that happens in the mind, stays in the mind.…It leaves a stronger trace. People can remember that flash moment, the click, and re-create the pleasure just by thinking about it.”

A good example is the famous poster for VW from the United Kingdom, shown in Figure 4.16. As a viewer, you don't need it spelled out; in your head you quickly put together what happened, backward.

“And that, dear students,” said the professor of Humor 101, “is why the chicken crossed the road.” Suddenly, that's how this section on humor feels to me. Pedantic. So I'll just close by saying jokes make us laugh by introducing the unexpected. An ad can work the same way.

Don't Set Out to be Funny. Set Out to be Interesting

Funny is a subset of interesting. Funny isn't a language. Funny is an accent. And funny may not even be the right accent.

Funny, serious, heartfelt—none of it matters if you aren't interesting first. Howard Gossage, a famous ad person from the 1950s, said, “People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad.”

Learn to Recognize Big Ideas When You Have Them

There will come a time when you see a great idea in a One Show annual, a campaign that'll make you go, “Damn! I thought of that once!” It's a hard thing to see, “your” idea done, and done well. That's why you have to be smart enough to pursue a promising idea once you've stumbled onto it. I'm reminded of a line by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.”

See that one idea you have up on the wall? The one that's so much better than the others? Investigate why. There may be oil under that small patch of land. A big idea is almost always incredibly simple. So simple, you wonder why nobody's thought of it before. It has “legs” and can work in a lot of different executions in all kinds of media. Coming up with a big idea is one skill. Recognizing a big idea is another skill. Develop both.

Big Ideas Transcend Strategy

When you finally come upon a big idea, you may look up from your pad to discover that you've wandered off strategy. Well, sometimes that's okay. Good account people understand this happens from time to time. If you've come up with an incredible solution they can help retool the strategy to get the client past this unexpected turn in the road.

My friend Mike Lescarbeau compares an incredible idea to a nuclear bomb and asks, “Does it really have to land precisely on target to work?”

Don't Keep Running After You Catch the Bus

After you've covered the walls—and I mean covered the walls—with ideas and you've identified some concepts you really like, stop. This isn't permission to stop because you're tired or you have a few things that aren't half bad. It's a reminder to keep one eye on the deadline.

Blue-skying is great. You have to do it. But there comes a time (and you'll get better at recognizing it) when you'll have to cut bait and start working on the really good ones. You have a fixed amount of time, so you'll need to devote some of it to making what's good great.