When Charlie Sheen was young, he lived for pleasure, mainly drugs and sex.
He had a budding film career, but work took second place to an orgy of hedonism, literally and figuratively.
Naturally, this ended up in the courts, which meant it ended up in the news media, which meant his film career pretty much ended up.
Charlie Sheen’s drug-taking and use of prostitutes was beyond scandalous.
In court, a judge commented, “So you pay these women fifty thousand dollars a month for sex?”
Charlie Sheen simply answered, “No, I pay them fifty thousand dollars to leave after sex.”
Even his father commented on his lifestyle.
He said Charlie hadn’t understood that life was like a salad: you have lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber, that’s the salad but on its own it’s pretty tasteless.
So you add mayonnaise, which gives the salad taste.
He said Charlie had confused the salad with the mayonnaise.
He knew the mayonnaise tasted great so he didn’t bother with the salad, he just wanted a plate of mayonnaise.
So that was the way he lived his life, all mayonnaise and no salad.
But that wasn’t the way to make a salad, and that’s what Charlie would have to learn.
Which is pretty much where we in advertising find ourselves, all mayonnaise and no salad.
Many years back, when advertising started it was just information repeated over and over.
Boring and tasteless: like a salad without dressing.
So, to make it palatable, we added some dressing.
We added good music, good lighting, good editing, good casting.
Then we added emotion, and purpose, and warmth, and social responsibility.
Then we added planning, and strategy, and data, and algorithms.
And we never noticed that there wasn’t anything about the product anymore, we had a large plate of mayonnaise and no salad.
All mood and no content, all emotion and no reason, all heart and no brain, all brand and no product, all taste and no substance.
And we can’t seem to understand why it isn’t working.
We make lots of nice little films with good music, good filming, good voices.
The voices make points about peace, and love, and responsibility, and hope.
They don’t mention anything as crass as the thing being sold, what it is, what it does, why you should buy it, why it’s better than anything else.
We got rid of the boring part, the salad, and kept the tasty part, the mayonnaise, it should be even better.
We can’t seem to understand that advertising, like a salad, needs both.
Advertising is delivery system.
The point is to deliver information, to do it in an interesting, enjoyable way because that makes people more likely to notice and remember what we’re delivering.
But if we forget what we’re delivering, if we only concentrate on the enjoyable part, we lose the whole point of doing it.
Like putting beautiful wrapping-paper on an empty box: it looks great but when you open it up there’s nothing inside.
It’s not our job to deliver empty boxes, even if the wrapping-paper wins awards.
We know a box that’s attractively wrapped is more likely to get opened, that’s the only reason for making the boxes attractive.
That’s why we have to make the experience enjoyable, of course.
But there needs to be some salad with the mayonnaise.
Woh awesome
Dave,
Appreciate the blog, I have a question about this and how much it is the result of a lack of product innovation. The ads running in the US for Dawn Powerwash hit on rational points, product demos, and a very “Does what it says on the tin” tagline of “Spray, wipe, and rinse” sung and set to jingly music. The reason it stands out to me is that it’s the first product in the FMCG category that stands out as actually doing something new/different than the alternatives in what feels like forever.
Fashion advertising has always just been the wrapping paper. It just strikes me that with a lack of real differentiation or clear positioning in a number of categories, we’re at a point where the brief may be “Just make us look cool”. Which is mostly a long way of saying that for huge chunks of the market it’s possible that advertising resembles fashion advertising because like fashion, there are no substantiative differences.
None of this is to say that advertising people aren’t full of shit, just that the overall lack of real innovation may also be part of the problem.
Griffin,
In my experience advertising is driven by clients.
Agencies will do whatever the client wants.
The client has never been trained in advertising.
So the client doesn’t want to look stupid.
So the client does what everyone in their sector is doing.
So everything looks the same.
I agree with you, Dave.
Agencies do the biddings of the clients.
If only we could have more ‘admen’ on the client side, the world would be better for it.
I’ve been an adman for years and just recently switched to the client side to change the status quo. Wish me luck.
Dave,
You were very fortunate. You worked in arguably the best times of advertising, with some brilliant people like Paul A (bless his soul) when you told clients the best way to sell their produce and they listened to you. These days, the client finds the new best agency, says “you sell my produce” then they take all the ideas that are really good for selling their produce and say “actually my ideas based on your ideas are better than your ideas” and agency goes you’re right!
Exactly.
Just egg-free mayo.
Not ego-free,
unfortunately.
Intelligent advertising is a well dressed salad. Both EI + Wisdom.
But such ads seem to appeal to audiences – have our tastes changed and the industry adapting to it? or has the industry evolved to this and the audience simply has been shaped and changed by it that they have fooled themselves into what constitutes a good ad or a bad ad?