You know how salad ingredients are pretty boring on their own?
Lettuce, tomato, cucumber.
On their own they don’t have much taste.
So we add some mayonnaise, and pretty soon we have a tasty salad.
Fresh and crispy and flavourful.
But now we decide, since all the taste is in the condiment, we don’t need the boring part of the salad.
No boring lettuce or tomato or cucumber to get in the way.
All we really need is the tasty part that everyone loves: the condiment.
So we get rid of the lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and just serve up a plate of delicious mayonnaise.
But would we really expect anyone to eat a plate of mayonnaise?
Well we’ve just used exactly that logic to get advertising into the state we’re in at present.
Advertising started off with boring product claims.
Straight ads about why one product was better than another.
But this was dull, no one wanted that.
So everyone decided to make it more interesting.
We added nice music, beautiful photography, some jokes.
And when we added all that, people liked the advertising much more.
But then we figured, if people are enjoying the beautiful photography and the nice music, we don’t need the boring bit.
We can get rid of all the product information, all the logos, the voice-overs.
So we began serving up advertising that was nothing but beautiful photography and nice music.
Pretty much like serving up a plate of mayonnaise.
And we wondered why it wasn’t working.
If we were serving up nothing but the nice bit, how come nobody wanted it?
How come ad-blocking grew by 30% in 2016?
That’s 615 million people who can’t bear to watch this new advertising.
And how come everyone agrees advertising is worse than it’s ever been?
We’re serving up the part everyone likes, a nice plate of mayonnaise.
No boring logos, or information about what makes the product different.
Just the nice part.
Because we’ve all read the books that say emotion works and reason doesn’t.
That people respond with the emotional part of their brain, not the rational.
So we’ve thrown out the rational part.
And we’ve filled the entire space that’s left with nothing but emotion.
Nice music and beautiful pictures.
But we forgot one thing.
Take-out isn’t the same as what’s put in.
Martin Weigel, of Wieden & Kennedy, put it succinctly.
“Sometimes nothing is so effective at evoking an emotional response as a ‘rational’ message.”
The audience may not take on board everything we say, but they can still be swayed by how we say it.
The rational is what we say the emotional is how we say it.
In advertising, as in food, we need to flavour the what with the how.
If we throw out the what we are left with just a large plateful of how.
A large plateful of nothing but mayonnaise.
So is that really why Publicis have decided to pull out of Cannes?
Very good.
If you don’t have some kind of rational proposition you have no start point for an idea. And you give the buyer no ability to rationalise the purchase (which I have heard described as a functional alibi).
BBH’s brilliant launch commercial for the Audi 100 “If you want to be on the beach before the Germans, you’d better buy an Audi” is a great case in point. The values (slightly mocking humour, brilliantly realised) were made relevant by the product proposition.
However I do question your assertion that ad blocking comes from the public getting fed up with blandness of execution. Surely it has more to with unpleasant foot in the door direct marketing tactics that feed off inappropriate surveillance. I don’t want Google snooping my emails so that they can sell my data on…
As much as I respect Dave Trott I think the exact opposite has occurred. Using his analogy I’d say it was all lettuce and no mayonnaise. The reason ad blocking has increased so dramatically is advertising’s descent into the world of logic, legal arse covering and the need to get right, absolutely right every time…no risks taken, no inspiration followed. In other words it has negated it’s role as an entertainer and now dithers around as some vapid educator embracing a ludicrously PC world, inhabited by a multi-cultural overkill that’s squeezing the very life out much of it’s product. l won’t ‘back in the day when I was in the business as a writer’ but things were very different then, advertising was watched because it was entertaining, often times more entertaining than the programmes it appeared in. Advertising was a water-cooler conversation but now, because so much of it is just a bore, that the conversation has become Ad blocking and how to achieve it. Bring back strap lines, bring back jingles, bring back ABM, amongst others, and get rid of the creative carthorses with bloody degrees and no discernible talent. Advertising has been subsumed by the wishes of clients and their tedious political agendas. In today’s climate, the Cinzano ads would never have been made, nor the BT classics or Smash or many hundreds of others because they weren’t the product of ‘getting it right…absolutely right…one hundred percent right every time’ NO, they got it seventy eight percent right and let twenty two percent fly and it was that twenty-two percent that saw them fly. The public aren’t fools, stop treating them with contempt and they’ll stop treating your 30 seconds of creative glory by blocking it. My solution would be to double -up on the mayonnaise and double down on the lettuce but throw in a few walnuts just to add a little extra crunch. Over to you Mister Trott or anyone else who cares to engage.
“The audience may not take on board everything we say, but they can still be swayed by how we say it.”
Remember than Oil of Ulay campaign in 1990.
The mum & daughter that everybody thought they were sisters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO8K5lESAd0
Rational claims, scientific waffle, clear benefits — and tremendous emotional pull.
You don’t see much of that now.
I don’t think it’s the ‘mayonnaise’ people are blocking, Dave.
It’s the relentless tide of ‘re-targeted’ crap offering desperate deals on stuff you’ve either bought already or decided against buying at all. Being stalked and nagged isn’t going to change your mind either way. The targeting may be absolute precision, but the effect is total alienation.
To your broader point, how did we manage to do such a poor job of educating the current generation of marketers and ad people? Or do they really think technology has changed everything and the basic principles of human communication no longer apply?
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