I started a new Blog yesterday... one where I start to put the ad thoughts that I have in my head out into the ether.
This is the only time the two blogs will touch - but looking for early numbers boost
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More pre-amble today I’m afraid. Think of it as that little salad thing that they bring out before your main course, you didn’t ask for it but you welcome it as a sign that the steak is on its way and find yourself really rather enjoying it despite yourself.
For those of you of an impatient nature may I remind you of the mantra at many a Playboy party – “We’ll get to the models in a moment, but first Heff wants to make a little speech.”
The biggest change in planning in the time that I’ve been doing it has been the question that we ask on the brief. That’s pretty fundamental. The words haven’t changed much, but the question these days is entirely different. Back in the early 90s the toughest box on the brief to fill out was the one that ask a version of this question
“What do we expect this advertising to do to people?”
It was a tough question mainly because the answers were very limited and so you were always looking for a nuance.
The thinking was pretty simple.
If your advertising was an argument then it would Persuade them to change their behavior by delivering a killer fact. That could have been a USP ‘this is the only one that doesn’t cause anal leakage.’
This was pretty much the standard one. Our job was to argue people into submission. To come into their homes and say ‘You think that your whites are white now. You’re wrong, we’re right. Now switch.”
When writing what was called a ‘Persuasion” brief (a euphemism that I’m sure could be applied to water boarding in Gitmo today – ‘persuasion sessions’ perhaps?) the TONE box used to be very important indeed. How you argued became how you differentiated. Were you going to whip out the evidence with a flourish, or were you going to try to hide it behind some entertainment. Were you “Now with Super-Stain-Bleacher” or were you ‘You can’t get better than a Kwik Fit Fitter?” replete with jingles and funny dances.
Lots of pharmaceutical advertising is still Persuasion and USP based. Claratin makes you less sleepy than Baratin that works in two ways instead of the one way that Daratin, the fastest one works.
There were of course certain strategies that grew up around this. Jim Carroll of BBH put it very well when he talked of Cowboys and Crusaders. The big brands, he claimed, try to define all of the rational points that are relevant in the market. They tell you what you should be looking for, then claim them all as their own.
So Scottex tells us that Bathroom Tissue should be ‘Soft, Strong and Long.” – we buy their argument and their demos and they become huge.
That leaves only two strategies for smaller players.
They can abide by the rules and start to argue against one of the points – “we’re softer or stronger or longer”
Or they can try to introduce a new point of argument, convincing people that this is what’s really important. So you suddenly find brands that are “recycled” or even brands that are “prettier”
The trick here was always to try to bring the category identifiers down by claiming parity there… they’re ALL soft, strong and long – this one does all of that AND…
I still play the game of trying to spot these ads during the rare moments that I’ve not delayed my viewing of American Idol by enough to whiz past everything paid for. They tend to have a sentence that starts with “Sure….”
The second strategy that we used to try during the days of “What will this advertising do to people?” was to move beyond the rational and into the emotional. We were going to SEDUCE them. The ESP (emotional selling proposition) was a defining to 80s advertising as Thatcherism was to society (though she’d have denied its existence) – and its legacy was about as long.
The ESP led agencies to say things like “We’re not here to sell things to people, we’re here to make them want to buy”
This strategy was about FOSTERING DESIRE and everyone wanted to do it, because it meant bigger budgets, glamorous work and awards galore.
The word that acted as lube to this strategy tended to be ‘aspiration’ – we suddenly realized that we didn’t have to show our brands in relation to people’s actual lives. They didn’t have to argue that they could solve a real life problem and leave hands that did dishes as soft as your face – no, they could promise to be a gateway to a more fabulous, imagined life. One full of yachts and beaches and Yasmin Le Bon. Yes, you too could be Duran Duran.
Ask any British person between the ages of 35 and 45 to give you an example of this style of advertising and they’re very likely to show you a Bacardi cinema ad. In this a yacht serves as ‘the last bus home’ and beachside bar as ‘your local pub’ etc. and the line “If…. You’re drinking Bacardi”
There were other ways in of course – but the shift here was from winning the argument rationally to winning it by proving that you were a better gateway to a better life. It made for some great work. Instant Coffee became fodder for glossy soap-opera affairs, small cars migrated to Château in the South of France and phallic chocolate bars were consumed only by gorgeous people in bathrooms bigger than the average British house.
The really clever people managed to mix both messages. Levis advertising always took a rational point (shrink to fit, button flies, double stitched) and wrapped it in a heady mix of sex, rebellion, hormones and glamour.
‘Aspiration’ is a word still bandied about by clients but the days of the Imperial Leather family on their private jet now seem as naïve and dated as the Two Tarts in A Kitchen (there’s a cleaned up phrase) advertising of the 50s.
So the question when I started was
“What will this advertising do to people?”
These days that question has changed. We’re asking something else entirely. These days the brief asks the question
“What will people do with this communication?”
It’s a fundamental shift. And one that I think one of the big agencies summed up very nicely when a terribly bright young planner there wrote this
“For too many years we’ve been in the business of Interruption. We found content that people were interested in and we got in the way of their enjoyment. Found an article that you love, we’ll put an ad in the middle of it. Want to know what happens next on your favorite TV show, find out… after the break. Want to get information online, click to close our banner.
Well technology has changed and the age of interruption is dead.
We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in, and be what people are interested in.”
The agency loved this, put it on their website, told clients about it, wrote it on their walls, put the young planner in their ‘high potentials group’ and then laid him off during a round of cutbacks – proving that in advertising you’re only as big as your byline.
But it does sum up the change and it does explain the sudden panic around agencies regarding ‘What to do?” in this brave new world,
I’m hoping that this book can provide a clear framework for thinking about what we do when the question changes and we’re all asked
“What will people do with this communication”
Or as I like to think about it – what do we do when the soundtrack is no longer Duran Duran singing “Rio” but Lily Allen singing her diary?
Tomorrow we’ll get to the meat of that one…