Most advertising seems to make no sense.
That’s not a secret, we all know it, it’s all around us.
But we believe someone, somewhere must know what it means, so it must make some sort of sense.
It got sold, someone bought it.
It obviously made sense to the person that bought it.
And it must have been sold in logical steps.
So to make sense of the ads, all we have to do is reverse the process.
Just logically peel back the layers of the onion.
Step by step.
Then we can see what the original idea was that everyone thought the ads were delivering.
It’s a logical challenge, working something out.
Like working out a crossword clue.
So let’s take an example, a new campaign.
It’s for a supermarket and everyone is dancing in their kitchens.
So the first question is: why are they dancing in their kitchens?
No problem, it must be a metaphor.
Obviously the food won’t actually make you dance.
So the dancing is a metaphor for having fun.
Okay, why are they having fun?
Obviously this is for people who enjoy being in their kitchens, they enjoy food.
To them it’s fun.
So what does that have to do with the supermarket?
The answer is it’s another metaphor.
It’s a metaphor for the fact that this supermarket is known for good quality food.
So people who think food is fun will like this supermarket.
Of course we can’t just say that their quality is what makes them better than other supermarkets.
Not according to current thinking.
We have to show an insight.
And we have to show the way it contributes to the consumer’s life.
So we’re not just selling food, we’re selling fun.
Dancing is fun, so we’re selling a feeling that’s as much fun as dancing.
And now we can see the process by which this advertising was sold.
This supermarket is known for better quality food.
But that alone is boring, so how can we bring that to life?
We can say we make the kitchen fun, so we’re selling fun in the kitchen.
The metaphor for that is dance.
So if you want your kitchen to be fun, shop at our supermarket.
And we’ll film real people, dancing in their own kitchens.
And we’ll have a catchy track that people will want to download.
And now we’ve managed to deconstruct the ad.
We know what it means.
Unfortunately that’s only one ad.
Given that every ad all around us looks the same, they all have to be deconstructed the same way.
That’s a lot of work for a consumer watching TV.
You have to wonder if most ordinary people could be bothered.
Given that we’re each exposed to roughly 2,000 ads a day.
Between TV, laptops, smart-phones, cinema, radio, posters, OOH digital, newspapers, magazines, door drops, pre-rolls, banner ads, pop ups, facebook, twitter, bus cards, cross-track, taxis, and the rest of the advertising blizzard.
Yup, everyone gets 2,000 ads each, every day, thrown at them.
So do we really think we need to be making advertising that has to be worked out like crossword clues?
Or can we think of another job we should be doing?
“So the dancing is a metaphor for having fun”
lol
I don’t like crosswords.
Hi Dave
Sorry to contact through your comments. I lecture at Nottingham Trent Uni and am focussing on how to help our students develop their creativity. It would be brilliant if you could come to Nottingham and give a lecture to the School of Art & Design and maybe do some workshops. Love that you chose the ploughman’s.
Cheers
Si
Hi Dave, Your story reminds me of a TVC I once saw with people arguing in a DIY store.
The couple were shouting at each other over a Kitchen or a Toilet. Funnily (and it wasn’t)
I can remember the brand, not for the right reason but because the idea of arguing in
your own kitchen was one of the most repulsive things imaginable to my way of thinking
and I remember thinking to myself when I saw it, this store is going to be empty next week
in the middle of what should be one of their busiest sale periods.
I also remember thinking, “Who would go in their shop now?” If you go in there, you’ll be
branded as an argumentative, nasty, awful person. Bad advertising has power negatively too.
The agency lost the business 3 months later. It was no surprise to me, but I think it came
as a shock to the agency. Ironically when I worked in Advertising I got the nickname
“Mr Retail” and I made an absolute fortune for my clients, but it seems nobody these days
wants to make serious money any more. They just want people kissing in slow motion for a Cafe
where nobody can remember the brand name, so I teach English now and thoroughly enjoy it.
It’s a great shame because many people like me have left the industry, and all the manufacturing
and big product industries has lost an absolute fortune over it.
What a lot of agency creatives could never understand was that Retail Advertising was the
backbone of an agency. It paid the salaries, It paid for the fast cars, the big lunches, the
expensive pitches and costly photographers that financed all the award winning work that cost
a fortune and delivered very little revenue in return. Many creatives turned their noses up at it
when it paid their salaries. The truth is, a lot of them couldn’t do it, and some who could couldn’t
be bothered. I loved working on the advertising monsters. The uglier the better. It was fun.
What a lot of online advertisers still don’t seem to understand is “A hit isn’t a sale”.
Superb. Thanks.
Any advertising that needs to be deciphered is missing the point. As you say, we are unconsciously bombarded with advertising in one form or another thousands of times a day, but when we watch TV we are a somewhat more captive audience.
I’m currently staggered at the number of ads that require decoding to make even second base on the playing field. There are strutters facing off against builders in a very entertaining/annoying way, and I honestly have no idea what they are ‘selling’. And a large Mercedes spins down a high street into a parking space to try and convince me of something else.
When I saw the mentioned dancing in the kitchen commercial, I knew it was Sainsbury’s, by the typography.
I didn’t notice any metaphors, because in my book a metaphor is a figure of speech. I prefer to call visual playfulness ‘symbolism’.
Tesco is doing something equally crossword puzzle worthy.
I shop at Sainsbury because it’s across the road from Aldi, and I can’t get everything on my list from Aldi. So I get what I can from Aldi, then finish up in Sainsbury. Each time I do so, I follow someone else doing the exact same thing. Maybe that’s happening all over the country where a Sainsbury is the closest major supermarket to an Aldi or Lidl. Now that would be the beginning of an insight.
It is the beginning of an insight Caroline. here’s a little experiment for you that I did in Moscow and it works. On the Moscow Metro most underground exits have a set of four doors in a line. If there is no-one in front of you, choose a door and walk through it. I guarantee you, nine times out of ten, the person following you will go through the same door. (and the person following them will use the same door too!) I’ve even caught myself following people through the underground barriers. waiting for someone to clear their ticket when there are other free barriers available. Now go to your supermarket and watch the tills. Watch how people queue. Everyone joins the queue that takes the longest time. It’s possible that this is the way people (unknowingly) manage to air their frustrations about life by taking it out on the queue, or the poor sales assistant.Human nature is amazing, illogical and crazy and that’s why I don’t believe in scientific number crunching to guarantee marketing success. There’s much more to being a human being than that.
In one of Dave’s posts he mentioned about reaction times. He mentioned how Emotion happens first, then logic follows. Enjoy your shopping queues and your tube journeys. Advertising is not about sitting at a computer writing grand scientific theories or counting beans. That’s for scientists and accountants. Sadly the scientists have nothing to do, so they’ve moved into Advertising because there’s more money in it than Science, but Advertising is not a Science because Science has no emotions, and that’s exactly where Online Advertising falls down. It’s all based on projections of accounted numbers not real people. Advertising, to me is all about people-watching. That is where all the great campaigns come from.
Even better, an ex colleague of mine came up with an award-winning idea for an ad whilst walking through a specific door at Euston station one morning. He needed more great ideas, so he went back to Euston station and walked through the same door at the same time and got another great idea. Bingo!
So after saying that Advertising is not a Science I’ll now be criticised under Skinner’s S-R Theory (Stimulus Response Study). That’s fine by me. I don’t care, because talkers just keep talking, but doers do. Everyone was horrified by Donald Trump’s actions yesterday except the people who voted for him. Why? Because he did what he said he was going to do, and that is what Americans wanted. Yesterday, Brexit was delayed after the British public voted to leave because interfering law-makers got in the way of the voice of the people of this great country. It’s the key difference between America and England, action and talk. That’s why the UK is in such a mess. Too many talkers and not enough doers. You go to an American Bank with a great idea, they’ll take a risk and lend you the money. Go to a British bank and they’ll take the shirt of your back for having initiative and if you fail they’ll destroy you.
Hi Dave, do people really need to decipher it though? It seemed pretty simple to me.
Not saying it’s great, but I don’t see it as unclear.
Andy
Emotion V Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM
Thanks Kev. Fascinating stuff. I will watch people closely. The logic follows emotion point reminds me of a time we were working on a campaign approach based on the idea that if we increased desire, that would motivate people to take a particular action. But the psychologists working with us told us the evidence suggested that it was better to increase self-efficacy than desire – people would be more inclined to take the action if they thought that they could do it, and once they proved they could do it, they would want to do it more. A virtuous circle. Conversely, if they didn’t think they could do it, nothing in the world would persuade them they wanted it, because that was a sure fire route to misery. And they were right. I appreciate it doesn’t hold true in every situation, but it did in ours, and it showed me that you can’t just pick any old emotion, you’ve got to pick the right one.