Is that the mantra for the lifestyle genre of advertising that occupies our screens? TV ads showing beautiful people in beautiful places enjoying a Corona. Or was it a Perroni? I’ll never know because they lost me in the opening frames and I had Wordle to do.
Creating advertising no one remembers
Advertising that isn’t noticed, whatever the channel, makes no business sense. I’m talking about stuff that is beyond ‘forgettable’. Because to forget something, it must have been lodged in your brain at some point. Too much advertising makes ZERO impression:
A TikTok of brand X food devoured by a creator who assures us it is delicious. Instagram content of brand X car driving through whatever terrain the machine was designed for. A video of a beautiful person advertising brand X cosmetics because they’re beautiful. I won’t go on but, depressingly, I could.
From my experience, there are two reasons why this happens.
1. Research says it works. Research is a fabulous tool. Just not always
2. The ads are made by people who don't consider the world beyond the boardroom
If your campaign ticks off all the research learnings, but nobody looks at it, you’ve failed. It is the reality of how an idea lives in the wild that matters, not the office.
If there’s one thing you can do..
How to create advertising that works?
To be outstanding, brands need to stand out. A campaign has two opportunities to make an impression:
1. In its native channel where, if it’s successful, it will be consumed
2. Beyond its native channel. When the work is so good that people share it through conversation, WhatsApp groups or reposts because it entertains them
According to WARC, ‘Creativity is the most effective when it is distinctive, emotional, novel, well-branded and has some longevity’.
Creative effectiveness comes from a) creativity and b) reach - whether that's paid for eyeballs or organic/viral. So, in essence, brands and marketers need to adopt a more disruptive approach to generate results and cut through the noise.
Red Bull lept from their own social channels into everyone else's by flying people from the moon. They recently attempted the world record for the longest slackline (tightrope walking but wobblier). They failed, but 24 million people still watched it on IG alone. Win win..
DoorDash won the Super Bowl and Cannes by entertaining and giving away everything in every Super Bowl ad.
Oatly gets noticed by being frank. The company made organisational shifts to accommodate risk-taking when it replaced its marketing department with a creative department. Did it work?
2012-16, Oatly sales increased by £20 million
2016 Oatly replace marketing with creative
2017-21, Oatly sales increased by £175 million
Those three brands are well used in case studies. Such case studies may seem unachievable in the reality of budget and timings. Here’s some everyday examples.
Cadbury’s disrupt with quiet reality. A telly ad where a kid discovers the ice cream carton was returned to the freezer empty cuts through because of its realism. It shows a totally different world to that lifestyle wallpaper mentioned earlier.
Tony’s Chocolonely challenged the confectionary market by not associating as a chocolate maker first and foremost. Instead, they’re on a journey to eradicate child slavery in chocolate.
Mike Cessario, a former graphic designer, hydrates young people at parties with 'Liquid Death', a viral water in a recyclable can branded to look like a trendy beverage. It's worth $1.4 billion by not following the category norm.
Poem Portraits by Es Devlin, in association with Google Arts and Culture, disrupted the controversy around AI replacing humans by using words from 19th-century poets and machine learning as a creative tool to make something compelling, human and unique.
The Immigration Museum disrupted the England football frenzy by taking a team sheet and crossing out players born overseas or were children / grandchildren of immigrants.
Ideas with legs
Brave advertising doesn’t need a huge budget or massive stage. Your disruptive idea needs to have legs. Do you mind if I clumsily add another example … A while back, Phantom Framer, whoever that was, disrupted an entire town by framing street signs to promote a local picture framing shop. Budget: £0. Reach: Faye Barker interviewed me live on ITV News.
Some argue that if you’re advertising somewhere like TikTok that you must conform to trends rather than disrupt. For me, that doesn’t stand up. If you’re harnessing a trend for your brand you have to disrupt that trend for your brand to be noticed. For Durex my team jumped on the ‘What’s in my bag?’ trend by slipping in lube, condoms and a fun size vibrator. It was on-trend but the take-out was for Durex.
In-house creative departments, like Oatly’s, are no longer new news. I set one up at AB InBev five years ago. In-housing adds an agility to marketing as processes happen quicker, conversation is more fluid and, as Oatly proved, being a part of the brand you are advertising enables risk taking. But it’s not just in-house creative departments that can provide this. The virtual agency model has also bloomed in recent years, accelerated by our ease with working online since lockdown. Leveraging this solution, brands can access to a global talent pool and can scale up and down their marketing.
Be outstanding
I’m a part of PlatformAlt5, a curated bunch of talented individuals from advertising, editorial content, music, strategy, PR, journalism and more. We too recognise the logic of being brave. PlatformAlt5 exists to help ambitious brands and makers to realise their creative potential. By working with brands with those ambitions, we get to make the work that excites us, and our clients.
We know we have a single opening frame to engage people’s brains before they engage their swiping thumbs, which is another argument for being brave. Cliché shots of food / cars / people do not make the impact necessary. It’s not hard to think of something arresting. Did you ever see Acne’s bum/bag campaign?
Beyond the aesthetic, we can also stop the swipe by appealing to people’s opinions. Marmite’s love /hate campaign and Jaffa Cakes' recent putting an end to the cake / biscuit question are examples of engaging the brain, not just the eye. When I worked in Canada, rather than simply advertise Big Mac Bacon, I questioned its integrity. Is a thing still that thing if you change that thing? Is a Big Mac with bacon still a Big Mac? The joy of that idea was how successfully it lived in each channel - a factor that is vital for any campaign. People will see your advertising on billboards when watching TV or scrolling on their phone. The Big Mac Bacon idea was big enough to make a compelling video as two mates debated the existential question. We broke Google records with a digital ad where you could vote either way. Influencers were given free reign to choose their own sides. And the debate raged on in the comments of every social post. The results? McDonald’s Big Mac Bacon sales were 37% higher than forecast. The regular Big Mac also sold more- 14% higher than forecast.
Both these figures and Oatly’s prove that whether you’re a lesser known brand or a global icon, being brave pays. Standing out from the bland gets noticed. Thanks to shares, likes and conversation, daring creative can make more impressions than a dull campaign with a huge media spend. Creativity punches above its weight and can achieve sales above projections.
There’s another fundamental truth of doing adventurous marketing. It’s fun. Imagine the meetings where brand teams discussed hurling people out of planes and poking fun at cow juice. That spirit of creativity makes marketing plans a joy to work on. So don’t just do it because of the increased number of impressions and sales that bravery inevitably achieves. Do it because it will make you feel good.
Ready to elevate your brand above the noise? Start here to join the content revolution.
