A legal unfair advantage

Admit it.

Some of your favorite commercials don’t do much to get you to actually do business with the advertiser. Their main objective is to be funny. They usually are, too. Of course, that shouldn’t be the main objective.

How often do you remember a commercial but couldn’t come up with the name of the advertiser if someone held your family hostage? Or you can name an advertiser, but it’s not the right one? Creativity for its own sake isn’t advertising. It’s art. And while we all love us some art, art won’t pay the bills.

What’s missing is a strategy behind the creativity. Sure, you can get by without a creative strategy — if you repeat yourself over and over and over. But over and over and over costs money. A lot of it. A creative ad, website, commercial or web video that drives home your selling proposition can do the same job — probably better — for much less.

An ad built around a joke isn't enough, unless the joke is based on your selling proposition.

And to those who say, “But advertising is all about awareness and those funny ads draw attention,” we’d say this: Awareness from creative advertising built around a reason to do business with you is the better than awareness for just the joke.

Three examples:

Perhaps you remember the great “Got Milk” campaign from a few years ago. Their strategy was what they called “milk deprivation.” The “Mayhem” campaign for Allstate is based on a strategy of the unexpected things that you might have to pay for yourself if you bought cut-rate insurance. How about those great “None of our business” spots for DuckDuckGo? Strategy: the information about yourself you give up to most browsers.

Milk, insurance and internet privacy and you’re not. Got it. But the point holds. All three of them employ a creative strategy to advance a Brand message.

Don’t misunderstand. We’re all in on creativity. As Bill Bernbach said, “creativity is the last legal unfair advantage we can take to run over the competition.” And we’ve won a whole lot of creative awards for our work. But we’re proud to say that we’ve never stooped to gratuitous creativity.

Gratuitous creativity isn’t that hard to do. It’s only if you want your work to be based on a client’s selling proposition that it gets hard.

But worth the effort.

________________________________________________________________________

 "The medium is the message."

Marshall McLuhan wasn’t talking about advertising when he coined that phrase, but we think it applies anyway.

If you want prospective customers to see you as a for-real provider of goods or services, it’s important that you look like one. That is to say, if you’re going to promote yourself with ordinary, home-grown advertising and an amateurish website, you’re telling your prospects that you think home-grown and amateurish is good enough. That’s not a message you want to deliver.

The past couple of years have been tough and many of you have been cornered into making do with a bit of DIY that really didn’t do the job. Well, it’s time to move on from that.

Besides, if you think about it, perception being what it is and people being what they are, a better look can help you charge more. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

It won’t cost you that much to get a professional to build your website, develop a marketing communications program or produce creative materials. And it won’t cost you anything to expect the people you have already hired to do those things to do them well. But there are significant dividends for you in the perception department if you do.

We know a guy who doesn’t know a lot about wine, so he usually selects one with what he thinks is a good-looking label. His rationale is that, while he knows vineyards aren’t in the design business, he figures if they aren’t going to go to the trouble to have a good label design done,  how can he believe they are going to make the effort to produce a good wine?

His thinking may be his very own, but the underlying approach makes sense. To paraphrase Forrest Gump “quality is as quality does.”

Your advertising and web presence are expected to do a lot of things. But one of them is to be interesting and well-done enough to get people to be impressed with you and want to look inside or learn more.

So do that.

________________________________________________________________________