Not all ads need a big idea. Instead, they must focus on finding new ways to say the same thing again and again, writes creative strategist Zac Martin.
February 8, 2019 9:22
by ZAC MARTIN
There’s a famous joke called The Aristocrats:
A family walk into a talent agent’s office. The agent asks what their act is. The family get on stage, and do the most vile things to each other. Eventually, the agent asks what the act is called. “The Aristocrats.”
It’s a favourite among comedians, a rite of passage. The setup and the punchline always remain the same, but each person can make it their own, riffing on the middle. Usually it’s an excuse to be as filthy and offensive as possible. This is South Park’s version:
Good advertising works the same way.
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Effective brands find new ways to say the same thing again and again. Gareth Price says: “Advertising must find new ways of repeating itself.”
This is the power of a brand platform, like Specsavers’ Should’ve Gone To Specsavers and Snickers’ You’re Not You When You’re Hungry. Consistent messaging for decades, not weeks. Sadly it’s often the first thing a new agency or client kills.
I love what UberEats are doing, in the early stages of building their Aristocrats:
This is good advertising. It’s product heavy, uses celebrities to grab attention, and is establishing a clever brand mnemonic in the doorbell.
And it has longevity. As sponsors of the Australian Open, the template was adapted with some very cute executions like this:
The effectiveness in these is not a big idea. They aren’t creatively sexy. But they are good advertising. It’s far from boring and fits their brand platform template. Mark Ritson would call it “disruptively consistent”.
Not all ads need a big idea.
This camping store won’t be winning any creative awards, but the campaign will work its guts off. This car ad doesn’t have a human insight or big idea, and yet is distinctive and positions them as the fun SUV. Especially if they run quirky ads like this for the next decade.
As I write this we’re hours away from Superbowl. There will be plenty of big swings, and many of them will hit. But if you’re ever worked in an agency, you know getting to a big ideas is hard, and making one is even harder.
So instead of worshipping the big idea, maybe try briefing a long one.
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Nice one Zac. Agree.
There was a time I was coaching a production business and one of their clients was a giant low cost retailer. The creative director hated working on that work and thought it didn’t have a solid brand. We used to resource this account with different operators working simultaneously with no real creative direction and they were under the time pump to produce whatever they could in the time they had. This created a really low end ‘cheap’ looking suite of work. The creative director used to fight tooth and nail against this. This was one of those accounts that this work that was churning out actually was their brand. It said lowest cost in town and it sold it’s butt off for them. We can be very precious sometimes in this industry.
There is something for every brief and every client and a one size fits all approach certainly doesn’t work. Including your approach above wiped over everything of course too. Nicely said though.
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As Andrew Killey will confirm, 30 years ago the punchline wasn’t The Aristocrats, it was The Debonaires.
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And I’ve been a proud member of the Debonaires Lunch Club for many years. Although no-one’s actually told the joke yet!
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It was also ‘The Sophisticates’. Seems though, that ‘The Aristocrats’ was the initial punchline, first cited in 1975.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats
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