Many years ago, when I was a junior at BMP, I used to get the tube at Paddington.
Waiting for the train, you’ve got nothing to do but look at the cross-track posters.
I looked down the platform and, at one end, was always a Jack Daniels’ poster.
It was a 16-sheet (one third of a long 48-sheet) and I’d usually walk the length of the platform to read it.
It stood out because every other poster was in full colour, Jack Daniels was in black & white, rough type and a simple woodblock illustration like the label on the bottle.
And as I had nothing to do I read every word of it, they were always intelligently written, always about the craft that went into the product.
Just the way an ad for an expensive whiskey should be: crafted like the whiskey itself.
Fast-forward a few years and the posters began to have photographs added.
Then the photographs were in colour.
Then the photographs showed young people enjoying themselves.
Pretty soon they looked exactly like every other poster on the tube.
They were invisible so I didn’t bother with them anymore.
Just another client who couldn’t resist filling up the space with every gimmick available.
But of course, whatever is available to you is also available to everyone else.
And a 16-sheet poster is one third of a 48-sheet poster, so you’re competing with at least two other posters either side of yours, plus at least a dozen bigger 48-sheet posters along the cross-track wall.
In other words, if you’re not different you’re invisible, which is what Jack Daniels’ posters became.
So for years I never noticed if they were even advertising at all.
Then recently, I saw a Jack Daniels poster again, it was a cross-track and stood out from all the other posters, they’d gone back to simple black and white.
The poster now looked like the label again, the advertising was the brand.
Now the advertising is doing its job again, separating Jack Daniels ads off from everything else in its category.
Because that’s what brand advertising should do, advertise the brand.
Not advertise the lifestyle of the entire target group.
Advertising the lifestyle of the target group is what a category leader does, because it tries to GROW the market, so that would be fine for whoever owns the whiskey category (maybe Johnnie Walker?).
But Jack Daniels doesn’t own the whiskey category, it needs to TAKE SHARE.
So it shouldn’t try to GROW the market, it should DIFFERENTIATE itself from the rest of the market.
Clients love to follow category norms, it’s reassuring to do what everyone else does.
But if you follow the same rules as everyone else you look like everyone else.
Then you’re just growing the market for whoever is market leader, why would you do that?
And now, someone seems to be starting to interfere again with Jack Daniels simple black and white advertising.
The client has made them add a full-colour photograph of a full bottle of whiskey.
This is probably because it’s a ‘category norm’ to have a shot of the product (the actual liquid) in the ads, to show the whiskey for ‘appetite’.
But the actual liquid, the whiskey itself, looks just exactly like every other whiskey.
All whiskey looks the same because the manufacturers add caramel colour to obey the category norms for whiskey.
So now the ads have a full-colour photograph of whiskey just like every other whiskey ad does.
They have begun following the rules again and, if they continue, they will end up where following the same rules as everyone else always gets you.
To the place where you’re indistinguishable from everyone else.
And they will have thrown away their advantage.
Because if a brand isn’t different it isn’t a brand, it’s just a commodity.
Don’t know if there’s anything like Campari? My CD bet I would write some dreadful “no Campari son” line when I snatched the brief. Many ads were done without the pun.
Pointless. In the end, Italy insisted we went with the “woman in red”/Kelly LeBrock posters.