Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.
Good advertising, it has been said, builds sales. But great advertising builds factories.
You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen,” said Bernbach (long before the advent of positioning). “But you've got to say it in such a way people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.
Advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists, but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.
However much we would like advertising to be a science—because life would be simpler that way—the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.
Ten minutes of work at a real agency should be enough to convince a cynic that you can't sell a product to someone who has no need for it. That you can't sell a product to someone who can't afford it. And that good advertising is about the worst thing that can happen to a bad product.
Advertising is what happens on TV when people go to the bathroom.
A brand isn't just the name on the box. It isn't the thing in the box, either. A brand is the sum total of all the emotions, thoughts, images, history, possibilities, and gossip that exist in the marketplace about a certain company.
A guy named James Webb Young, a copywriter from the 1940s, laid out a five-step process of idea generation that holds water today.
You gather as much information on the problem as you can.
You read, you underline stuff, you ask questions, you visit the factory.
You sit down and actively attack the problem.
You drop the whole thing and go do something else while your subconscious mind works on the problem. “Eureka!”
You figure out how to implement your idea.
Eventually, you get to an idea that dramatizes the benefit of your client's product or service. Dramatizes is the keyword. You must dramatize it in a unique, provocative, compelling, and memorable way.
And at the center of this thing you come up with must be a promise. The customer must always get something out of the deal.
If you want to be a well-paid copywriter, please your client. If you want to be an award-winning copywriter, please yourself. If you want to be a great copywriter, please your reader.
Bill Bernbach: “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.” The best answers always arise out of the problem itself. Out of the product. Out of the realities of the buying situation.
You have more than enough to work with, even in the simplest advertising problem. You have your client's product with its brand equities and its benefits. You have the competition's product and its weaknesses. You have the price–quality–value math of the two products. And then you have what the customer brings to the situation: pride, greed, vanity, envy, insecurity, and a hundred other human emotions, wants, and needs—one of which your product satisfies.
Each brand has its own core value. Dan Wieden says it another way: Brands are verbs. “Nike exhorts, IBM solves, and Sony dreams.”
People don't have time to figure out what your brand stands for. It's up to you to make your brand stand for something. The way to do that is to make your brand stand for one thing. Brand = adjective. Everything you do with regard to advertising and design—whether it's creating the packaging or designing the website—should fall under that one adjective and then continue to adhere to absolutely draconian standards of simplicity.
When you sit down to create something for a client, you are competing with every brand out there. You're competing with every marketing message that's running on every platform on every device on the face of the planet. You're competing for attention with every TV commercial ever aired, every text message ever sent, each billboard on every mile of highway, the entire bandwidth across the radio, and every one of the 100 quadrillion pixels on the Web. All those other advertisers want a piece of your customer's attention. And they're going to get it at your client's expense.
A brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world: a corner of someone's mind.
Empowerment marketing, on the other hand, emphasizes not where we're deficient but instead appeals to our human desires for personal growth, for fulfillment. Here, says Sachs, the product isn't the hero, only a means to carry out a human drive to find fulfillment based on our core values.
This generation knows you're trying to sell them something and you know they know, so let's just drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible.
Strategy is what we want to happen, and tactics are how we'll do it. Listed below are 10 tactical approaches you can mess around with to get your mental engines started. (And you'll need to get 'em started, because we start concepting in two pages. Yikes.)
Do a straight-on us versus them approach.
Show life before and after the product.
Is there a compelling story about the heritage behind your brand?
Can your brand dispense some smart advice about the whole category?
Is there a story in the founders of the brand?
Or in their original vision?
Can you turn a perceived negative attribute of your product into a positive?
Can you demonstrate on camera or online your product's superiority?
Can you move your product out of its current category and reposition it in another?
Can your brand be insanely honest about itself, admitting to some shortcomings while winning on the important thing?
Instead of trying to change how people think, change what they do.
Veteran copywriter Mark Fenske says your first order of business working on a project is to write down the truest thing you can say about your product or brand. You need to find the central truth about your brand and about the whole category—the central human truth.
Study your product, brand, or category, and find the emotional center. Once you've discovered it, the words and the ideas and the truth will start to flow.
Customers hate sales pitches. So you wrap your pitch in an interesting bit, and they're more likely to bite.
Remember, styles change; typefaces and design and art direction, they all change. Fads come and go. But people are always people. They want to look better, make more money, feel better, be healthy. They want security, attention, and achievement. These things about people aren't likely to change. So focus your efforts on speaking to these basic needs, rather than tinkering with the current visual affectations. Focus first on the substance of what you want to say. Then worry about how to say it.
Interpret the Problem Using Different Mental Processes From a book called Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams, I excerpt this list:
build up
dissect
transpose
eliminate
symbolize
unify
work forward
simulate
distort
work backward
manipulate
rotate
associate
transform
flatten
generalize
adapt
squeeze
compare
substitute
stretch
focus
combine
abstract
purge
separate
translate
verbalize
vary
expand
visualize
repeat
reduce
hypothesize
multiply
understate
define
invert
exaggerate
Best is better than good.
Write with a smooth, easy rhythm that sounds natural.
Obey the rules of grammar and go easy on the adjectives.
Short sentences are best, especially online.
One-word sentences? Fine.
End with a preposition if you want to.
And if it feels right, begin a sentence with “and.”
Just be clear.
Through it all, remember, you are selling something.
Easy to forget when you start slinging words.
The first paragraph of copy in many ads is usually a waste of the reader's time, a repetition of what's already been said in the headline. Get to the point. It's time for the details. Put your most interesting, surprising, or persuasive point in the first line if you can.
Five Rules for Effective Speechwriting from Winston Churchill Begin strongly. Have one theme. Use simple language. Leave a picture in the listener's mind.
End dramatically.
When You're Done Writing Your Body Copy, Go Back and Cut It by a Third
You've got to find something your client can call his or her own: a shape, a color, a design—something that is unique.
Simpler is almost always better.
There's an old parable about problem solving called Occam's razor. It states when you have two correct answers that both solve the problem, the more correct answer is the simplest one because it solves the problem with fewer moving parts. It solves the problem more elegantly.
Now, about that headline. Is it doing something the visual can't do? And that logo—isn't there some way we can incorporate it into the visual? Ultimately, Neil reduced his ad to one thing. He suggested I do the same with my next ad. Get it down to one thing. Sometimes it's just a headline. Sometimes a picture. Either way, he said, the math always works out the same. Every element you add to a layout reduces the importance of all the other elements. And conversely, every item you subtract raises the visibility and importance of what's left.
One last thing I noticed about simple. It doesn't age.
It gets easier when you quit trying to come up with “advertising ideas” and work instead on coming up with ideas worth advertising.
What you get for your trouble is the best kind of advertising you can buy: word-of-mouth. We believe friends more than we believe some commercial.
The words used to describe great work—disruptive, unexpected, eccentric, subversive, bold, funny, emotional, frank, unusual—these are the same words folks use to describe people they want to fire, or who get kicked off teams, or detained at airports.
Bottom line: Do something you're not supposed to do. Break a rule; the more sacred the rule, the better.
Consider where a message or an experience from your brand would be seen less as an ad and more as content.
Once you've learned the rules, throw them out.
You cannot logic your way to an audience's heart. People are not rational. We like to think we are, but we're not. If you look unflinchingly at your own behavior, you may agree few of the things you do, you do for purely rational reasons. Consumers, being people, are no different. Few purchases are made for purely logical reasons. Most people buy things for emotional reasons and then, after the fact, figure out a logical explanation for their purchase decision.
Trust your intuitions; trust your feelings. As you try to figure out what would sell your product to somebody else, consider what would make you buy it. Dig inside. If you have to, write the damn strategy after you do the ad. Forget about the stinkin' focus groups and explore the feelings you have about the brand.
Someone once told me, “The things about yourself you fear are the most personal are also the most universal.” Trust your instincts. They are valid.
Learn the rules in this book. Then break them. Break them all. Find something new. It's out there.
All drama is conflict. Every story you've ever heard, read, or seen has had conflict at its core.
Conflict is what makes things interesting. Tension makes us lean in to see what's goin' on.
Negative ads work because people behave like animals. We are wired to heed warnings.
Without is Usually More Interesting than With
The best strategies and the best work usually come from a place of conflict and tension: strategies built on top of—and powered by—tensions.
Wherever you find polarities or opposing energies, you'll find conflict. And where you find conflict, you'll find the rudiments of story. The trick, then, is to pit these opposing energies against each other and look for stories to emerge.
If you can't fit your idea in a small space, it's probably not a very big idea.
Being creative is hard. Being creative on demand is harder. Being creative full time, that takes discipline.
It takes effort and struggle to create simplicity and grace.
From the New York Times, I quote: “Employees in info-intensive companies waste 28 percent of their time on unnecessary e-mails and other interruptions.”
You cannot pursue greatness and comfort at the same time.
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse. But over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things—that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.
People, advertising isn't brain surgery, okay? Brain surgery can be learned.
Failure is nothing to be ashamed of; not swinging for the fences, is.
Failing harder is good, and when it comes to digital, failing faster is even better.
Working on one thing at a time is like facing a rhinoceros; working on 10 things at a time is like playing badminton.
Tell yourself it will come. Don't keep swinging at the ball when your arms hurt. Maybe today's not the day. Give up. Go see a movie. Come back tomorrow. Pick up the bat and keep trying. Be patient.
Learn to Enjoy the Process, Not Just the Finished Piece
They understand digital isn't simply a technology, or a platform, or a medium. Digital is a way of life. People live digitally. It's an entirely new behavior, a way in which people find, watch, share, and even produce the content we now call advertising.
So as we move into the new world, we'll expand our definition of advertising to include anything that brings a brand to life for customers. This could take almost any form: a mobile app, a blog, a game, a movie or TV show, a retail experience, a book, a song, an online service, a new product; pretty much anything but advertising.
What problem are we trying to solve?
What do we want to happen?
With whom are we trying to connect, influence, or engage?
What can we do for them: solve a problem, provide service, entertain, inform?
What is the context for engaging with them?
What cultural or media trends are our customers already following that make sense for us to align with?
Is it consistent with the brand's position and purpose?
What digital platforms are the most relevant?
Could customers and prospects be potential cocreators or sharers?
What will inspire them to participate?
Does greater participation make the experience more appealing, i.e. the network effect?
Are we making something temporary or enduring?
Can we create something of social value?
We are still in the business of building brands, not just generating a bunch of likes or clicks. As you pursue that instant, real-time affirmation of your creative ideas, don't forget they all need to add up to something greater.
Brands give clarity and meaning in a world where there is so much content and so much vying for the customer's attention.
Ben Malbon, another Google employee who leads a group of technologists, producers, and creatives, suggests you limit a team's size. In a recent talk, he explained the 7, 10, 4 Principle: Seven people do the work of seven people. Ten people do the work of seven people. And four people do the work of seven people.
Never let the team get larger than two pizzas. If you can't feed the team with two pizzas, the team is too big.
If you want to conceive and produce digital ideas, you need a digital approach to how you think, the brief you write, the team you assemble, and the way you work. Like the old saying, “It's simple. All you have to do is change everything.”
In the future, advertising will be like sex. Only losers will pay for it.
We share an idea for two reasons: because it makes us look good to share cool stuff or because we think the person with whom we share could use it or would enjoy it. Undercurrent strategist Mike Arauz said it best: “We tell our friends about your brand not because we like your brand, but because we like our friends.”
Provide social currency: You have to give users and viewers something that will make them look good to share. If they appear smart, cool, or in the know, they're more likely to pass it on. So be novel, interesting, provocative, or outrageous. Hey, that sounds an awful lot like any great advertising, doesn't it?
Connect to a trigger: Your idea or video should connect to something that triggers it. If you can hitch it to something that everyone is thinking and talking about, those thoughts will trigger an awareness and interest in your concept.
Tap into emotion: This should go without saying, but we all relate to emotional messages. Humor may be the best emotion if you can pull it off, but surprise and even anger work, too.
Make it Public: We may not want to admit it, but we tend to copy the crowd. So the more visible we can make an idea, and the more we can show others experiencing it, the more likely they'll join in. The Ice Bucket Challenge worked because we saw everyone else doing it and felt compelled to join in. Tell a story that's easily passed on: Holy shit, Red Bull dropped a guy in a parachute out of spaceship and he landed safely.
Be interested in what people are interested in. Compete for their attention on their terms, not yours.
Anyone creating content these days should spend 50 percent of their creative energies on the idea and 50 percent on its distribution.
If there's one significant difference between the analog way of advertising and the digital way of advertising, it's this: We used to say things and talk about our client's products. Today we're better off if we do things that get other people to talk about our client's products.
Here's the formula I see work effectively over and over again: Do > Invite > Document > Share. Do something interesting, but on strategy, of course. Conceive the idea so that it allows people to participate, and find a way to invite them to join in. Document the event so it lives beyond the event and becomes content. Make it shareable across every relevant channel.
Instead of saying something, do something.
Instead of controlling the content, invite people to create it with you.
Instead of producing some message-based interruption, document the participation and the creation of the content.
Instead of relying exclusively on paid media, share the story via owned and earned media.
Instead of Coming Up with Advertising Ideas, Come Up with Ideas Worth Advertising
Put another way, a brand isn't what it says. A brand is what it does, even in its advertising.
As you can see, our toolbox is no longer limited to words and pictures. We may still make ads, but we are no longer ad writers. As Teressa Iezzi wrote in her book by the same title, we are Idea Writers now. We're not in the business of just making ads. We're in the business of injecting ourselves into the culture, the conversation, the moment, and perhaps most important, the technologies and digital environments people are using to find content, information, and advertising that helps them.
Make sure your client exercises some restraint in how much content they post. Maybe a couple of times a day to start. Or practice my rule of thirds. Make one-third of your content interesting stuff from other sources that your community might find useful. Make one-third of your content a celebration of your community's content. And then one-third can be about your client's brand.
Knowing how and when to use YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and all the other tech platforms is essential. Which is why your brand shouldn't be cross-posting, a term that refers to posting the same piece of content everywhere. Instead, consider why people use different media. Consider from what devices they're accessing those platforms and what kinds of information they're looking for. And then create accordingly.
Remember, it's no longer about delivering messages. It's about adding value, being relevant, and understanding how to best use each particular platform.
First, start with context and create something relevant to that context.
Second, make the ad or the app interactive and immersive.
Third, take advantage of all the technology smartphones offer. You have location awareness, photography, video, and the accelerometer (to name a few) as ingredients in your creative recipe.
Fourth, make it social. If nothing else, the big advantage of carrying phones around is how they keep us connected to people.
Fifth, use all the data that's out there. It can be flipped quickly into great content.
And finally, as Google would say, “Don't make campaigns; be a companion.”
What's the Difference Between a Digital Developer and a Creative Technologist? Your new best friends are technologists, developers, and people who know how to make stuff. When ads were primarily print, radio, and TV commercials, they were made out of words and pictures. It made sense the creators were copywriters and art directors. But today advertising includes apps, websites, microsites, digital experiences, and mobile technologies. All these things are made out of code by people who know front-end languages (like HTML5, CSS, Javascript). They make digital experiences look easy to users. They also know MVC (model, view, controller) frameworks like Rails, Django, and Cake, which control the nuts and bolts of an application. And finally, they know social technologies and the APIs (application protocol interfaces) that let you tie into Twitter, Facebook, and other popular platforms. These folks are called creative technologists or digital developers; sometimes both. Ideally, they know how to build digital apps and experiences, as well as how to concept creative ideas and solutions.
The best creative technologists should be as good creatively as they are technologically. That way they can contribute to the entire creative process, from concept to execution and work with writers, art directors, designers, and producers. In reality, however, some are better at the making (code) and may not be as strong conceptually. Do yourself a favor and learn how to work productively with all kinds. It takes a village to make great ideas that work in a digital format.
The next best thing to writing code yourself is being good friends with someone who can; not just because they know how to build that idea you've been thinking about, but because they can add to it and amplify it, and even teach you what's possible with new technologies. With their help you can approach problems from new perspectives.
Instead of absorbing basic knowledge about all the other skills outside your area of expertise, find one or two and become an expert at those as well. It'll help you become more of a recombinant thinker and increase your value to any creative organization.
Become an expert at something other than art and copy. You'll make better contributions to open-ended assignments and be more sought out as a member of any team.
Done Beats Perfect. Lean Toward Action “Move fast and break things.”
In the closing keynote at SXSW 2015, Eric Teller, head of Google X (their research division) said, “The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your ideas.” He was referring, of course, to things like Google Glass and the self-driving car, but it applies to digital content as well. Fail faster. P.J. Pereira, chief creative officer at Pereira and O'Dell, put it this way: “Think like a marketer. Behave like an entertainer. Move like a tech start-up.” “Never solve a problem from its original perspective.” —Chic Thompson, author of What A Great Idea
Be interested in what people are interested in. Compete for their attention on their terms, not yours.
The most important part of any television advertisement is its conclusion, the last five seconds. That's the part that resolves, explains, summarizes, or excuses the preceding twenty-five seconds. If you're not clear about the last five seconds, you're not clear about anything, because that's where your premise gets pounded home. Try to write the last five seconds first. If you can't, you don't need to write a spot, you need to develop a premise for a spot.
Audiences will forgive almost anything in the first half of a movie and almost nothing in the second. A Good Video Should Entertain
Your work should speak for itself. You should speak for you.
