FINDING THE IDEA
Coming up with a winning idea for advertising requires a sound understanding of the product, the market and the client expectations. That goes without saying but how do we actually do it? What’s the process? Luke Sullivan summed it up really well in his book on advertising when he said “the creative process is like washing a pig. It’s messy, it has no rules, no clear beginning, middle or end, it’s a pain in the ass and when you’re done, your not even sure if the pig is clean or even why you were washing it in the first place.
Having said that though there are a few things you can do that most creative’s agree on. I’m going to just refer to the item that you’re designing for as a service but all these steps could be applied to a product, person or place.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
The philosopher John Dewey once said "A problem well stated is a problem half solved" and in this he is right. Good advertising is problem solving, so the first step is finding the problem. State the problem as a series of questions - "why would someone use my service rather than one of the ones that is already out there?" - and pose questions from a number of perspectives and more specific as you go. Come at your service from every angle and state all its problems, list them down and then see if you can solve each one.
CASE STUDY - Heinz Sauce
David Sykes is an advertising photographer and has worked on Heinz sauces for a range of different creative agencies. Below are three ads for different sauces with different ways of attacking the problem. They have each asked a different question. The first asks how the product is used. The second asks where it's used and the third questions the name of the product and finds a play on words (in this cause hot spicy becomes hot temperature.)
___________________________________________________________
ASK THE WRONG QUESTIONS
Don’t forget that the audience may not have all the background facts on the service that you have. The naive question sometimes turns up things you might have overlooked. Put yourself in their shoes – what would you ask if you were them? Why would you buy into this service?
CASE STUDY - VW Snowplough (1960)
One of VWs best known ads in Europe had very slow beginnings as the creative team struggled with how to show the reliability of a Beetle in winter. The big problem they came up with was that in Europe, often overnight the roads would be covered in snow, often many feet deep making it impossible to drive. No make of car could get through that, at least not without the help of a snowplough. The team decided that getting a snowplough driver as a spokesperson would be a good idea, maybe as a voice over, talking about how rough the winter could be and how reliability meant everything, fade out on an image of the car. On the way to record the drivers voice one of the team innocently asked a question that changed the whole ad.
___________________________________________________________
CREATE A LIST OF ASSOCIATIONS
Think about your service and then start writing down every image, representation, connection, icon that can be associated with it. Don’t edit, just get them down. Lets go back to the Red Ferrari what sorts of things could we write down about it?
Fast, speedy, expensive, fiery…
And then we could pick out ‘fast’ – what could we associate with that? Start another list. This isn’t going to take you long but you do need to put some time into it – think of it as a form of mind mapping without all the annoying little pictures and lines.
___________________________________________________________
FIND THE CENTRAL TRUTH
This can be a pretty hard one, or at very least a confronting one but its what all successful creatives point at as being the most important. What is the core human truth of the service when you strip away all the marketing rubbish and social hype. Red Ferraris aren’t anything to do with high-class engineering, they are about “hey look at me, I’m better than you.” What about these ones, what are the core truths if we’re honest with ourselves:
Calvin Klein boxers
Vegemite
New Scientist Magazine
Gift Vouchers
CASE STUDY - Wonderbra (1994)
In 1994 Wonderbra decided it needed a new focus away from the functional qualities promotion that had worked so well in their native Canada (and still does today) and conducted a study into why women were buying their bras. This is what they came up with:
___________________________________________________________
Lets have a look at some of these ads and have a look at how they have found a truth: First up Georges BBQ.
Then ESPN finds a truth through a threat from the girlfriend/wife.
IG Parental Control with a campaign that confuses more than instructs. Maybe it's for Furries? By advertising agency Neogama/BBH, São Paulo, Brazil.
And one I was so shocked to find that I just had to show you:
___________________________________________________________
INSPIRATION & EXTRAS
Each week I throw up things I find that relate to what we've been discussing or working on that week. Sometimes it might be things that relate to your major assessment and sometimes just stuff I thought was worth seeing. If you find something you think we should be showing or something we just have to see let us know in class or throw an email over to me at matt@billyblue.com.au and I'll get it up here or on the Bluni inspiration site.
___________________________________________________________
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING (caution swearing)
___________________________________________________________
CASE STUDY - Lurpak Butter
Lurpak, rather than sell themselves, sells what their product is used with. Their tag-line reinforces it “Good food deserves Lurpak” - recently they have started taking it further by developing tag lines for the other foods.
