What is the “Press Release” of Your Idea?

Idea-as-press-release turned advertising on its head. Up to that point, the model for advertising had been interruption. (You're watching something interesting on TV and then the advertiser interrupts the interesting thing and forces you to watch something that's not interesting.) Then one day, somebody said, “Hey, what if we stopped trying to interrupt the interesting thing and became the interesting thing?” P. J. Pereira continued with:

When I started in advertising I was taught to ask if my ideas were big. Today, I'd rather ask if they are interesting enough to be worth experiencing on-demand—not only as on-demand TV, but any form of user-initiated media consumption…. The good news is people don't mind being advertised to, as long as the ads are interesting.¹

A cardinal example of idea-as-press-release was CP+B's “Whopper Freakout” for Burger King. Their internal press release read: “Burger King to see how town reacts after discontinuing America's favorite burger.” That was the headline. Only this copy followed: “BK will set up cameras in a franchise and record people's reactions when told Whopper is no longer on menu.” whipple5freakout

The shocked reactions of customers said more than any commercial ever could have. And what could've been just another boring television spot turned into a huge YouTube hit and became one of CP+B's most celebrated case histories.

At its core, press-release thinking is pure Barnum & Bailey hoopla. From a distributed CP+B memo, I quote, “We ask what idea will make the client famous? It's a great way to think bigger than just a TV spot or a website because it will force the idea to be about something bigger than 30 seconds of random theater.”²

So, the bottom line is this: Ask yourself, “Is my idea cool enough that the press would write a story about it?” And I don't mean a story in Ad Age but the News at 6. If your idea has heft, if it's truly amazing, you should be able to describe it as news and in the form of a press release.

A tall order, I know, but it gets easier when you quit trying to come up with “advertising ideas” and work instead on coming up with ideas worth advertising.

(Highlight that last one. It's a biggie.)

“Will People Talk About This Idea?”

Here's why you want a press release-worthy idea: You want people to talk about your idea.

Alex Bogusky put it this way: “If you're about to spend advertising dollars on a campaign and you can't imagine anybody's going to write about it or talk about it, you might want to rethink it.” He suggests asking (as do I), “Will people talk about this idea?”

Asking such a question raises the bar by forcing you to think bigger than just “doing an ad.” Anyone can do an ad, but to do something so cool it ends up on the 6 o'clock news? Now that is remarkable. Interestingly, something is “remarkable,” says Seth Godin, when people make remarks about it. Which means if you want people to go, “Wow, they really did this??” you have to really do it.

What you get for your trouble is the best kind of advertising you can buy: word-of-mouth. We believe friends more than we believe some commercial.

When IKEA needed to advertise a grand opening sale, they didn't “do an ad.” They got people talking by putting a living room full of their sleek furniture on the public sidewalk out in front of a Toronto train station. Attached to the furniture were little notes that read: “STEAL ME.” The copy went on to ask:

What better way to make a friend than to say, “Excuse me, want to help me steal this sofa?” The two of you will then be able to look back at this day and say, “Hey, remember that time we stole that sofa?” And you'll laugh. Of course, you and your new friend could always just go to IKEA and buy a Klippan sofa, seeing as they're only $250.

Passersby didn't quite believe what was happening at first, but after the first two strangers helped each other cart off a couch without the cops rolling up, the whole ensemble disappeared in an 8-minute scene of helpful, harmonious larceny.

Of course, the creative team was across the street filming the whole thing to post as content on the Web. IKEA repeated the exercise for a store opening in another city, and this time someone dropped a dime to the local news and the event was covered from a helicopter overhead. Roughly 10 grand to pull off, a quarter mil of free airtime, no TV commercials, and man did people talk about it.

With practice, you will be able to start thinking bigger than just “doing an ad.” Of course, not every job that slides across your desk will require this type of thinking—just the really fun ones, the big ones, and of course, new business pitches.

Try Something Naughty. Or Provocative

Naughty is one way of putting it. Other words apply. Do something devilish, disobedient, provocative, sneaky, mischievous, willful, wayward, bad, or recalcitrant. At every turn of the way, question authority.

The indomitable Mark Fenske seems to agree and in fact suggests great work and great creative people share those descriptors. “The words used to describe great work—disruptive, unexpected, eccentric, subversive, bold, funny, emotional, frank, unusual—these are the same words folks use to describe people they want to fire, or who get kicked off teams, or detained at airports.”³

Naughty is good. It gets your client talked about, and with the capabilities of today's social media, talk value is at an all-time high. So go over the line once in a while and see what happens.

Dowdy old Kmart stepped over the line in 2012 with its controversial video titled “I just shipped my pants.” Originally made just for YouTube by DraftFCB Chicago, the spot pushed shoppers to the company's website for free shipping.

In the commercial, Kmart shoppers all express unusual delight with the news that “Wow, I can ship my pants right here? You're kidding.” The cheerful Kmart sales associate chirps, “Yep, you can ship your pants right here.” When views shot past 10 million and #ShipMyPants started trending on Twitter, the client started airing the spot late night on a few cable channels.

As expected, whiners rushed to the Internet to voice outrage: “I don't like the play on words here. Especially for a family store,” wrote one, while a less prim customer wrote on Kmart's Facebook, “For every 1 customer you've offended, you've gained 1,000 fans with this.” Adweek's Barbara Lippert agreed: “People are talking about it. People are writing about it. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

Given it's an opt-in medium, YouTube has begun to be the testing grounds (and burial grounds) for controversial ideas. Bud Light's fabulous “Swear Jar” is worth a visit, but for my money, the most outrageous YouTube spot ever was for Bud Light Lime. “I got it in the can for the first time last night. I loved it.” Yes, you're probably inferring what they were implying. The naughtiness continues, creeping closer and closer to the edge. One worried man asks the camera, “Who told you I like getting it in the can?” whipple5can

Bottom line: Do something you're not supposed to do. Break a rule; the more sacred the rule, the better.

“Are You Sure They'll Even Let Us do This?”

The creative teams who came up with “Shipped my pants” and “I love getting it in the can” certainly had doubts their clients would let them film, let alone air, those ideas. So it likely will pay to give special attention to ideas that crack you and your partner up. “The client will never go for this…. but wouldn't it be cool if they did?”

If you find yourself asking this question, sit right down and figure out how to execute the idea and how to sell it. It means your idea is outrageous, or oversized, or too-much, or will upset or offend the status quo. These are all very good things because they get people talking about your idea.

One caveat: Just because people talk about an idea is not sufficient proof it's a great one. That old saying, “There's no such thing as bad PR,” is complete and total BS. Doubters are free to call British Petroleum and ask them how that whole Deepwater Horizon thing worked out for them.

While we're on the subject of BS, I encourage you also to avoid doing “prankvertising.” You've seen them. An elaborately staged prank scares the bejesus out of someone and then the voiceover goes something like, “Having a heart attack? Try new Digitalis.” Scaring strangers in order to make money is despicable. On the other hand, surprising folks with happy moments, that's different. Look up WestJet's “Christmas Miracle” online. Or better, Coca-Cola's extraordinary “Small World Machines.”

“The Reverse Side Also has a Reverse Side”

I like this old Japanese proverb. I like the feeling it suggests of tumbling down the rabbit hole into a Wonderland where all things and their opposites are equally valid.

Steve Dunn, a fabulous art director from London, put it this way: “One thing I recommend is at some point you should turn everything on its head. Logos usually go lower right, so put them top left. Product shots are usually small, make them big. Instead of headlines being more prominent than the body copy, do the opposite. It's perverse, but I'm constantly surprised how many times it works.”⁴

Winsor and Bogusky hit on the same thing in Baked In. They encourage people to figure out how to do something “perfectly wrong.” I, too, recommend it highly. In fact, I like calling this kind of idea “rong.” When something is perfectly wrong, dude, it's rong.

The key here is the word perfectly. To design something wrong is easy. A little wrong is no good, and a lot wrong is even worse—whereas rong? Rong can be perfect. The key is that the idea must be in direct opposition to all prevailing wisdom. Kind of like what Orson Welles said when planning production of Citizen Kane: “Let's do everything they told us never to do.”

But before we go down the rabbit hole, let's agree we're not being different just for the sake of being different. Yes, we should zig when everyone is zagging, but we must have a reason to zig, one beyond just a desire to be different. Bill Bernbach said it best:

Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are not right if in your ad you stand a man on his head just to get attention. You are right if [it's done to] show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets. Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws…makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the…product advantage.⁵

Question the Brief, the Media, Question Everything

The most important word a creative person can use is “why?” Sir John Hegarty (the H of BBH) agrees, writing:

The word “why” not only demands we constantly challenge everything, but it also helps the creative process. It's like that wonderful thing children do. They constantly ask: Why? Why is it like that? Why do we do that? Why can't I go there? Why? Why? Why?⁶

Obviously as a junior creative person, you can't swagger around the agency hallways badmouthing briefs and feeding the ones you don't like into the nearest paper shredder. But you owe it to the problem-solving process to be skeptical about everything, including even the way the problems are teed up. Fortunately, at the good agencies, briefs aren't etched in stone and can be evolving documents representing the best thinking so far.

In addition to questioning the brief, question also the choice of media. The client may have asked for a commercial, but a TV spot may not be the smartest way to solve the problem. We can also challenge how a given medium is used. Why can't radio be used for something besides retail; to sell, say, a thought instead of a car? What if we mailed our posters and posted our direct mail?

This isn't just to let our media freak flag fly. Instead, consider where a message or an experience from your brand would be seen less as an ad and more as content.

The most brilliant twist of media I've personally seen was a spot that ran on the porn channel in hotels. (I know, I know, I said no pee-pee jokes, but here's the brilliant exception to the rule.) Virgin Atlantic wanted to tell business travelers about the nice new seats in their transatlantic flights, and how they went allllll the way back. The team figured—cynically and correctly—that a day in the life of a traveling businessman might include a quick visit to the in-room adult channel. So that's where they placed their commercial, smartly labeling it “Free Movie.” When you pressed “PLAY” you saw a 12-minute video that looked and sounded like porn but was really just a long, raunchy infomercial full of double entendres about the pleasures of flying across the Atlantic in a seat that goes all the way back. The idea was so naughty, its very existence drew tons of free media coverage.

And finally, question the accepted norms of your product category. If your product is wedding dresses, who's to say you can't write the headlines in mud? If your product is beautiful, show something ugly. If your product is insurance, try designing it like a poster for a rock concert. Encircle the logo for your bank client with hot dogs. I'm not saying doing this stuff will make your idea great. But you ought to at least search as far outside the boundaries of convention as possible.

Doing things rong is great. It gets your client talked about. So go way over the line once in a while and see what happens.

“Nothing worked. So then I thought I'd try the wrong shape. And it worked.”

—James Dyson, billionaire

Try Doing Something Counterintuitive With the Medium

Using a medium “incorrectly” is another form of rong, For example, why not write a 25-word outdoor board? Or put your poster in exactly the wrong place, like they did with this one for The Economist (Figure 7.2).

Why not use radio for something besides retail? What if you embedded a radio spot in your transit poster? What if you used a huge outdoor board to do the work of a classified ad?

To promote the release of the horror movie The Last Exorcism, Lionsgate used Chat Roulette, a notoriously pervy website where horny college-age males hoped their video feed would be randomly paired up with women who couldn't wait to undress for creepy men like themselves. What the frat boys didn't realize was the pretty girl they had stumbled upon would stop in midstrip and turn into a demon. Talk about creating an experience for a brand (Figure 7.3).*

Does It Really Have to be an Ad? If So, does It Have to be a Flat Page?

Try a pop-up, a gatefold, a scratch and sniff, a computer chip, something, anything.

Typically, liquor companies trot out these print extravaganzas during the holiday season, spicing up their inserts with talking microchips and pop-up devices. Also, there are less expensive tricks you can try. Sequential ads. Scratch-off concepts. Die cuts. Different paper stocks. Acetate film. There's even magnetized paper now. What can you do with the ad itself to make it more than just an ad?

I've seen an ad for a beer that could be folded into a bottle opener. As well as an ad for solar heating printed on paper that photo-reacted to sunlight.

Perhaps my favorite ad of this type was done for Nivea sun protection for kids (Figure 7.4). In 2014, Nivea ran an ad made out of GPS-enabled paper. Readers could tear out the ad, fold it into a bracelet, and wrap it like a wristwatch around their child's arm. Paired with the free app, parents could then track their children's whereabouts even on crowded beaches.

Remember, too, a stunt doesn't always have to involve inserts. Check out the cool ad for the U.S. Air Force from GSD&M shown in Figure 7.5. Dummy editorial copy on the left side is burnt to a crisp by the afterburners on the F-15.

Do not Sit Down to do an Ad. Sit Down to do Something Interesting

Do we always have to do an ad? An ad says “click to the next page” or “turn off the TV” when it should say, “Pretty cool, huh? Where do you wanna go next?”

So, question everything. Do you really need to stick a logo in the lower right-hand corner? Does it really need to be an ad? Can it be four 5-second TV spots? Can it be an interactive display in Times Square? In Red Square? Can you turn a building into a QR code? Can your TV campaign be a soap opera? Or an opera opera? Can you make it a video game? An alternate reality game (ARG)?

The client doesn't necessarily want you to make an ad. What they want you to do is make something so interesting people lean in to see what it is. Remember the advice from Howard Gossage, quoted in Chapter 3: “People read what interests them. Sometimes it's an ad.”

(We'll talk more about this stuff in Chapters 9, 10, and 11.)

Instead of doing an Ad, Change the Product, or Make a New One

You're never going to be at the agency one day and get a job request saying, “Change the product.” But this is precisely what smart agencies are doing more and more, and they're making a bunch of money for their clients in the process.

The reason they do it is either to create a product difference worth advertising, or to find a new way to bring the brand promise to life; to create a “proof point” that the brand really is what it says it is, really does what it says it does. Burger King's promise of “have it your way” came to life when Crispin sold the idea of a new product, “Chicken Fries”—fry-cut chicken in a round cup that fit in a car's cupholder. Chicken Fries didn't exist until Crispin made them up, and once they did, Burger King had something new to talk about that paid off the brand promise of “have it your way;” in this case, have chicken your way.

What can you do to change the product to create a story you can talk about? Start from the bottom up, at the store level or with any direct customer experience, and then solve the customer's problem by creating or changing the product to bring the overall brand promise to life. Look at every little facet of the company, every contact point with the customer. How can it contribute to the brand story and help prove it? How can you bring it to life through the lens of the big idea you came up with in the first place?

The Highest Form of Rong—Stupid

There are times when a reasonable approach to advertising is probably not your best bet. This is when I recommend stupid.

This special kind of advertising is becoming more common. It appeals to a younger audience, and for the right product, stupid's often very smart.

The candy category was one of the first adopters of stupid. Altoids, “The Curiously Strong Mints,” were brought to the U.S. by Leo Burnett with a campaign that included these bizarre print ads (Figure 7.6).

Candy's a good example of a category that can use stupid to good effect, mostly because candy isn't a considered or thoughtful purchase. It's not a product that needs any explaining nor is it an expensive product. And it certainly isn't a product that can take itself seriously.

Skittles is probably the highest-profile campaign in this category. They created a long-running series of absolutely insane commercials almost dada-esque in their rejection of logic and rationality: A giraffe eating a rainbow is milked producing Skittles. A girl has Skittles eyebrows. A piñata man angrily tells a coworker he is not filled with Skittles.

The only things the commercials have in common are: people eating Skittles, an insane situation, and a tagline with the format “_______ The Rainbow.” There are many insane Skittles commercials on YouTube, and the series is so popular it's hard to tell which were posted by Skittles' ad agencies and which are fan-created.

Stupid isn't right for expensive products. But a breakfast cereal is perfect. In Canada, Shreddies introduced its new “Diamond-shaped Shreddies.” (The old Shreddies tipped on its side.) It was very stupid, people got it and loved playing along (Figure 7.7).

Stupid's not right for products with no real difference. Nor is it right for serious purchases. I probably wouldn't want to put my life savings in First Stupid Bank, nor my ambulance to pull up in front of St. Stupid. But that too could change. There was a time when car and home insurance ads were the most boring things on TV. Nowadays, car insurance companies are all vying to see who can be stupider than the Martin Agency's GEICO work.

Stupid's star is rising. Part of the reason may be most people are just so over advertising. They get it already; been there, seen that, seen it all—serious, heartfelt, funny, every stinkin' button has been pushed.

Stupid, on the other hand, is refreshing in its naiveté. Stupid is without guile. Stupid says take me or leave me. On top of that, there's no way to contest stupidity, or argue its veracity. (“Now wait a darn moment, giraffes can't eat rainbows.”) If you've heard the old saying, “You can't argue with a sick mind,” you understand how there's no rational response to stupid.

Obviously, stupid has special appeal to younger people who think everything is stupid. Diesel's remarkable “Be Stupid” campaign rang this bell with perfection (Figure 7.8). Then there's Old Spice, whose rejuvenation was handled with enviable stupidity by Wieden+Kennedy, in commercials like the classic “I'm on a horse.”

I remember with great fondness a stupid campaign I did while at Fallon, working with Bob Barrie (Figure 7.9). The assignment was new product development for a large beverage marketer. They had a new soft drink they wanted to sell to teens. Our tagline was “Resist Boredom.” Every execution went like this: show something boring, drop a 100-ton weight on it, cut to product and tagline.

Open on a mime. What? He's trapped inside a box…? Thud.

No voiceover. No music. Unless the music was from boring musicians like marching bands in which case…thud. (Actually that one ended Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.)

Two things before we leave stupid:

1. Be careful with stupid. If you go for stupid and do it poorly, even a little off-key, viewers won't know you were trying to be stupid and so you'll just look stupid. Failures in this category are excruciating to look at, like watching a stand-up comic dying on stage.
2. Treat yourself to these stupid classics on YouTube: Fallon's “Brawny Man,” Skittles' “The Touch,” and Old Spice's “Mom Song.”

whippleBrawny whippleSkittles whippleMomsong

Working Way Out Past the Edge

Picasso probably learned to draw a realistic head before he began putting both eyes on the same side of the nose.

Getting the eyes in the right place has been the subject of the first chapters of this book. Once you learn how, it's time to go further out. So take everything I've said so far and just chuck it. Every rule, every guideline, just give 'em the old heave-ho.

Let's assume you know how to sell a vacuum cleaner in a small-space ad with a well-crafted headline. Let's assume you know how to put a great visual idea on paper and how to come up with the sort of idea that makes colleagues who see it go, “Hey, that is cool.”

Doyle Dane art director Helmut Krone had this to say on the subject:

If people tell you, “That's up to your usual great standard,” then you know you haven't done it. “New” is when you've never seen before what you've just put on a piece of paper. You haven't seen it before and nobody else in the world has ever seen it…. It's not related to anything that you've seen before in your life. And it's very hard to judge the value of it. You distrust it, and everybody distrusts it. And very often, it's somebody else who has to tell you that the thing has merit, because you have no frame of reference.⁷

There's going to come a point in your job when the compasses don't work. When you're so far out there that up ceases to be up, west isn't west, and “hey, great ad” is replaced with “what the hell is this?” Perhaps this is how the lay of the land looked when Brian Ahern and Philip Bonnery at Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, came up with the ad for 42 Below Vodka shown in Figure 7.10.

What rules, what advice in this book could possibly have led a creative team to come up with this? None that I can think of. There is no bridge across some chasms. Only leaps of imagination can make it across. We're not talking about small increments of experimental thinking anymore, or reformulations or permutations, but entire new languages. New ways of looking at things.

Once you've learned to draw a realistic head, this creative outland is where you're going to need to go. This point is important enough I've devoted this whole, albeit short, chapter to it. The last rule is this: Once you've learned the rules, throw them out.

Any further advice I give at this point is counterproductive to the creative process. It's as if I'm looking over the artist Jackson Pollock's shoulder saying, “I think you need another splat of blue over there.”

But even out in deep space, there is one rule you are obliged to obey. You must be relevant.

You're never going to get so far out there that you can dare not to be relevant to your audience. No matter how creative you think an idea is, if it has no meaning to your audience, you don't have an ad. You may have art. But you don't have an ad.