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.

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