Years ago, breakfast TV called me up and asked if I’d come on and talk about alcohol advertising.
I’d done a lot of beer ads over the years so I agreed.
While I was waiting to go on, I was talking to another guest, a young woman who told me she had been asked along to discuss her alcohol problem.
When we were introduced to the camera, she described how as a young girl she’d been addicted to alcohol and eventually had to go into rehab.
Then the host, Ben Shephard, turned to me and asked how I felt about the advertising industry targeting children and ruining their lives.
I said that wasn’t what we did at all, in fact legally we couldn’t do that.
He said, obviously the advertising industry targeted children and young people to sell more alcohol.
I said that wouldn’t make any sense, most beer is drunk by men in their twenties and thirties so obviously that’s who it makes most sense to target. No brand had more than 10% share of the market, so why would you try to grow the market when you’d be giving away 90% of any growth. The whole point of all beer advertising was to get existing drinkers to switch brands, otherwise you’d be wasting your money.
He said obviously all the flavoured alcoholic drinks were aimed at children.
I said I hadn’t worked on anything except beer, but my guess was the flavoured alcohol drinks were aimed at women, the sort of thing they’d drink on hen-nights.
But I was talking to someone who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand what strategy was.
This is understandable for someone who doesn’t work in advertising, but there’s no excuse for people who do.
And yet I think most people in advertising are guilty of the same lack of thinking.
They copy someone else’s execution without realising what the thinking was behind it.
For instance, BMW are currently using the strapline Bayerische Motoren Werke on their ads, VW have used the strapline Das Auto on their ads.
They’re obviously both using a German-sounding strapline to copy Audi’s strapline Vorsprung Durch Technic.
But they’ve copied Audi’s execution without realising what Audi’s thinking was.
In the UK, no one knew Audi was German, research showed that Audi could charge a lot more for their cars if people knew they were German.
So Audi used the German language in their strapline to establish that they were German, and it was really successful.
So successful that VW and BMW decided to copy it.
But it’s superfluous for BMW and VW because everyone knows they are German, so copying Audi’s execution serves no purpose.
A strapline should summarise your point of difference, it’s the final thought you leave consumers with that unifies a campaign across different ads.
Audi used ‘Vorsprung Durch Technic’ to tell consumers they were German.
VW copied it with ‘Das Auto’.
But in German, ‘Das Auto’ simply means ‘The Car’, is there anyone who didn’t know VW was a car?
Compare that with VW’s old strapline ‘If Only Everything Worked as Well as a Volkswagen’.
This told you what made a VW different: it’s more reliable than other cars.
BMW copied Audi with ‘Bayerische Motoren Werke’ which is just BMW’s full name so it adds nothing.
Compare that with BMW’s original strapline ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’.
This told you it’s not just a big comfy limousine like a Mercedes, it’s fast and agile.
These lines identified a problem and addressed it as an opportunity, instead of just copying someone else’s execution.
That’s why it’s Planning’s job to identify a problem or a point of difference that needs communicating and give that as the brief to Creative as the strategy.
Planning should stick to strategy (big picture) not executions.
As Stephen King (the father of planning) said “Planners must guard against becoming mere ad fiddlers”.
Originality doesn’t start in the creative dept, it starts with the brief.
If the strategy is exciting and different so will the advertising be.
If the strategy is formulaic and boring so will the advertising be.