Here is a method you can apply in your own agency and with your clients. It will allow you to set some trackable standards. To produce great creative, you must follow four rules.
1. Put yourself in the shoes of the prospect.
Think about the way prospects actually look at advertising. Imagine a sky full of stars, millions of them visible to a stargazer on a clear night. Yet the eye focuses on only a few bright ones. So it is with advertising. Prospects single out the ads that attract them like bright stars. Those are the ads they read and react to. To be great, advertising must stand out. To be a better creative agency, you must work hard to make your ads into bright and shiny stars.
2. All great advertising has a dramatic execution element.
Dramatic execution is what enables an ad to stand out in a sky full of stars. Instead of talking at you, great advertising engages you totally. It captures your attention and holds it. It appeals to your reason, your imagination, and your emotions. It is critically important that your agency's work has a dramatic execution element. Consider TBWA's Absolut Vodka campaign, which turned a commodity product into a cultural icon. Or Liquid Death, a water brand that marketed itself like a heavy metal act, committing so fully to an unexpected execution that it turned a commodity into a cult brand nobody saw coming.
3. Does the execution dramatize a persuasive buying idea?
A buying idea has the power to change the way a prospect thinks and feels about a product. Sometimes it is expressed verbally, in a compelling set of words. Sometimes it comes through a visually significant image, an attitude conveyed, or a personality the advertising takes on. The buying idea grows from a profound understanding of the target audience. It takes the strategy and restates or visualizes it in a way that makes the prospect want to go there. It lifts the strategy, making a connection between the strategic proposition and the prospect.
The buying idea yanks the benefit out of the strategy and makes it relevant to the buyer. It makes something they never thought of seem self-evident. It makes them say: "Ah, I get it. I want it."
The buying idea makes what you are selling buyable.
The buying idea lies somewhere between strategy and execution. It is communicated by the execution. It expresses the strategy. But it is separate and distinct from both.
The first ad in the "Got Milk?" campaign featured a gigantic image of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It made you want to go right out and buy some milk to go with that image. Heinz's "Draw Ketchup" campaign made the same point from a different angle. Heinz asked people around the world to simply draw ketchup. Almost universally, without prompting, people drew a Heinz bottle. The buying idea was not "Heinz makes great ketchup." It was "Heinz is ketchup." That single consumer insight did more for the brand than any product claim ever could.
To identify the buying idea and separate it from the execution and the strategy, keep asking: what is in the advertising that will move the prospect from the first "what" to the second "what?" From what the consumer thinks and feels about the product before seeing the advertising, to what they think and feel after? If you cannot make that transition, there may be no buying idea, even if the execution is engaging.
4. Is the buying idea based on a consumer-perspective strategy?
In most cases when you are evaluating advertising, the strategic development has already been done. But strategies rooted in a genuine insight about the consumer or the consumer's relationship to the product contribute tremendously to the effectiveness of the buying idea and the quality of the creative work.
Apple and Chiat/Day nailed this with the "Think Different" campaign, reflecting Apple users' self-perception as more creative, more innovative, and proudly outside the mainstream, while reinforcing Apple's product innovation promise. The strategy did not describe the product. It described the person who used it.
The three elements of great advertising
The best advertising has three elements in some measure:
- A dramatic execution
- A persuasive buying idea
- A consumer-perspective strategy
The relative importance of these three elements can vary. Some ads have executions so astonishing they offset a modest buying idea and a somewhat ordinary strategy. In others, the buying idea predominates, carrying work that is merely competent in its execution. In still others, the greatest contribution comes from the strategy itself, an insight so sharp it almost does not matter how it is expressed.
However, the very best campaigns, those that change deep-seated perceptions and remain fresh and effective for years, are the ones in which all three elements are big.
That is the standard worth chasing. Not two out of three. All three.
