Advertising, Where the Truth Lies

Bill Bernbach said, “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” And he has company.

McCann employs a famous slogan, “Truth well told.”

They held the Coca-Cola account for over 40 years persuading global youth to enjoy the real thing in perfect harmony, with nary a mention of obesity or Type 2 Diabetes.

Selective truth then, but certainly well told.

So just what is advertising truth?

If brand X claims to contain ingredient Z and it does, is that enough?

Not necessarily, but regulatory issues aside, advertising truth is clearly not the same as legal, or scientific truth.

Advertising truth is more akin to recognition than any kind of absolute.

It’s flexible; what philosophers term relativism and Stephen Colbert calls truthiness.

Advertising truth is determined largely by how people relate to an ad.

While a jury of 12 will suffice in a court of law, a jury of millions can sit in judgement of an ad.

If a majority recognize the truth of an ad, then it’s probably fair to say the ad is truthful.

I was chatting with a client the other day, reviewing some creative I’d presented.

They were concerned it exaggerated the benefit that their software delivers.

I said, “You know those Dos Equis ads with The Most Interesting Man in the World?”

They replied, “I love those ads.“

I said, “Yeah they’re great, but you know he can't really speak French—in Russian*.”

The Dos Equis campaign succeeds not because it’s truthful—it clearly isn’t.

It succeeds, because it’s essentially honest.

“I don’t always drink beer but when I do… ’’, The Most Interesting Man in the World says.

Wait a sec there’s a guy telling me he doesn’t always drink the product.

That’s different, I can trust this guy.

And because of this honesty, the campaign is credible.

In advertising, honesty can wear a certain amount of hyperbole.

Hyperbole is part of the language of advertising and consumers embrace it, as long as it is rooted in credibility.

Conversely, when an ad lacks credibility, consumers tune out in a nanosecond.

They’ve been exposed to advertising all their lives, and are much better at decoding it than clients and agencies give them credit for.

And they understand while truth in advertising is flexible, credibility is mandatory.

Because, put simply, if the consumer believes something, it’s true

Of course figuring out just what a consumer will believe is the tricky part.

But it’s credibility not truth that determines this.

As Seth Godin said, "Facts are irrelevant. What matters is what the consumer believes."

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*He can speak French—in Russian, is one of many excellent one-liners from the Dos Equis campaign.

What if Good Enough is Enough?

Not long ago, but in a different century, the late great Jay Chiat coined the phrase “Good enough is not enough”. There was a time when I whole-heartedly agreed with him.

Advertising was a craft, and I was a damn fine craftsman.

My clients’ deserved nothing less than excellence.

And when excellence required casting commercials in New York, or shooting them in Paris, it was a small price to pay.

Besides it was fun.

Chiat’s dictum remains a mantra for creative agencies to live up to.

Currently Bartle Bogle Hegarty subscribe to a similar POV:They keep at it until they get to great.

There’s no doubt outstanding creativity deserves to be applauded.

Did you see the British Airways digital billboards that won a Grand Prix at Cannes?

It’s brilliant, but I doubt it will persuade anyone to change airlines.

Still, as a creative director, it’s almost heretical if you don’t subscribe to the creed of “Good enough is not enough”.

Only hacks would knowingly present their clients with less than the very best, right?

Wrong.

As Tom Goodwin, SVP Havas Media commented, “The last few Cannes Lions festivals show all the signs of the industry unbundling itself further from reality. At a time when businesses face existential challenges, we seem determined to provide silly, self-serving solutions.”

Maybe what worked in the twentieth century doesn’t work so well in the twenty-first.

At least not for the SMEs and startups who will be driving tomorrow's economy.

Many of them operate in highly specialized niches against a few direct and indirect competitors.

They don’t need the perfect Super Bowl commercial.

They need to be mostly right, right now.

That means strategic and tactical agility that delivers creative that’s better than their direct competition, to boss the category they operate in.

All I have to do is make them top-of-mind with a well-defined target, by putting as much daylight between them and their competition as possible.

And do this as fast as possible because the creative we’re working on today, will very possibly cease to be relevant in 12 - 18 months.

That makes my job simple—but not easy.

I’ve written about the unattainability of perfection before.

Art for art’s sake is a good maxim—for artists.

But not so suited to practitioners in the advertising trade, challenged by limits of time and budget.

Maybe we need a different skillset for different times.

Good enough is probably still not enough.

But mostly right, right now—undoubtedly is.

If You Build It...

In Barcelona on June 7, 1926 an unkempt old man shuffled along the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. He was so deep in thought; he didn’t hear the tram that knocked him unconscious.

When the police arrived at the accident, they searched his threadbare clothing for identification.

Finding none, they assumed he was a beggar.

So they took him to the pauper’s hospital at Santa Creu Hospital where he received rudimentary medical care.

By the time a priest confirmed the old man’s identity the following day, his condition had deteriorated and he never regained consciousness.

On June 10, 1926 Antonio Gaudi, one of the most influential architects of the Twentieth Century, died aged 73.

Two days later, thousands of Barcelonians came to the funeral for the architect whose remarkable buildings adorned their city.

They mourned the man who had lain unconscious and unrecognised in the street.

Gaudi’s buildings were flamboyant, but he was not.

Unlike many of his contemporaries he didn’t crave publicity or celebrity.

The man responsible for so much beauty was a deeply devoted Catholic and the last 10 years of his life had been dedicated to building the cathedral Sagrada Familia.

‘’The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God” Gaudi said, and the building is infused with his love of nature.

Its exuberance originally divided the city.

George Orwell called it, “the ugliest building on earth.”

Gaudi had first become involved with the project in 1883 and gradually it became an obsession.

During the last few months of his life he slept on site in a cot next to his workshop.

He knew the cathedral could not be finished in his lifetime, but it was as if he could not bear to be parted from the nascent building.

Asked about the monumental undertaking he replied, “My client is not in a hurry.”

It was just as well, construction was estimated to last 200 years.

When he died, not even a quarter of the cathedral was finished.

So his close associate Domenec Sugranes became the first of several architects to take charge of the project.

Progress continued to be slow, construction relied entirely on donations.

There were always obstacles, during the Spanish Civil War; the crypt was set on fire.

Eventually conditions improved and following the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, entry fees from visitors would largely fund construction.

In 2005 the still unfinished Sagrada Familia was declared a UNESCO heritage site.

It remains unfinished today.

Even with the introduction of computer aided design and automated stone carving, completion is not scheduled until 2026.

That year that will also mark the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death.

There’s a growing movement to make Gaudi a saint.

It’s certainly miraculous that such a colossal undertaking started with a pencil and paper—with an idea.

The New Door-to-Door

Not so long ago business was simpler. You had a brand.

You advertised it.

It was called brand advertising.

You had a sales force.

They knocked on doors (figuratively or literally) and sold your brand.

There was a clear delineation between advertising and selling.

Now the distinction is blurred beyond recognition or no longer exists.

You’re selling to someone on their mobile while they’re waiting for the bus and watching videos on Facebook.

Screen-to-screen selling is the new door-to-door.

It’s versatile. It can sell you Grumpy Cat or financial services with a couple of clicks on Apple Pay.

It’s infinitely scalable.

It’s granularly trackable.

You don’t need an army of sales people demonstrating your vacuum cleaner house by house.

All you need is a great demo video and Fulfillment by Amazon.

Screen-to-screen selling is the future, but the switch from traditional advertising can be a tricky one to make.

Tricky enough that eCommerce accounted for a mere 6.5% of overall retail sales in 2014.

While marketing fundamentals haven’t changed that much, the peripherals are quite another story.

Half the lessons learned from a hundred years of marketing history no longer apply.

And no one seems entirely sure which half.

Here are a few things we do know:

Only one opinion counts and it’s not the agency’s. It’s not even the client’s.

The only opinion that matters is the click-through rate.

And there, in a nutshell is the good and the bad of digital advertising from a creative perspective.

It’s good knowing what works and precisely how well it works.

It’s not so good when what works isn’t what you hoped would work.

Say your finely crafted headline is out-performed by a meat and potatoes headline.

Once this happens, there isn’t much you can do about it.

It’s hard to argue with analytics.

And digital produces lots of analytics.

Sooner or later they will make a mockery of your judgment and kill your favorites.

When this happens you either learn to roll with it, or face a lifetime of frustration.

And this happens on a macro level too.

When Y Combinator’s Paul Graham was asked to invest in Airbnb—here’s how he reacted, in his own words:

“I thought the idea was crazy. … Are people really going to do this? I would never do this.”

Clearly not a potential customer, but he still became an investor.

He didn’t go with his gut, he went with the numbers.

And today Y Combinator’s seed investment is worth north of half a billion.

Here’s another thing we know.

Benefits don’t need to be spelled out. If your phone has 24 hours of battery life, while continuously web surfing over a 4G LTE network, people will quickly figure out they need to recharge it less.

Increasingly, features are benefits.

And unless your product benefits are mind-blowingly esoteric, or earth-shatteringly new, you probably don’t need to explain them.

This is nothing new. Back in the 60’s David Ogilvy wrote, “Headlines that promise a benefit sell more than those that don’t.”

A phrase which has often been misunderstood to mean: Headlines with a benefit sell more than those without one—which is not the same thing at all.

The key word is promise.

Let’s look at one of Ogilvy’s most famous ads: The benefits are inferred not stated.

The clock can be heard because the engine is quiet.

The engine is quiet because it is well-engineered.

The benefits of good engineering are twofold.

Passengers can hold a conversation without shouting, and a well-engineered engine is presumably, a reliable engine.

But the reader has to join the dots to get there.

The headline doesn’t directly promote these benefits; it just nudges you towards them.

It’s the promise of a benefit that does the heavy lifting.

And online, a feature is often enough of a promise for the benefit to be understood.

Consumers are savvier than they were in the 60’s.

And that’s good news, because it allows for more direct sales communication.

Something Ogilvy, a former door-to-door kitchen stove salesman, would have appreciated.

What he would have made of screen-to-screen marketing, sadly remains conjecture.

Are You the Sort of Brand that wants to go Steady on a First Date?

Are you the sort of brand that subtly pops up a subscribe box when I’ve been on your site for less than 15 seconds? Well hold on a sec we hardly know each other. Or the sort that sends 2 emails a week if I do give you my email address? One enticingly titled: Place subject line here.

That’s not you is it?

Maybe you’re the one that tried to sell me a vacation 2 days after I already booked one with you.

You’re not that sort of brand are you?

If you are, it isn’t working and it’s not you it’s me.

You see I’m just not that sort of consumer.

I want to be wooed, not harassed.

Know Thy Selfie

The ancient Greeks prized self-knowledge greatly. Know Thyself was inscribed above the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at the sacred site of Delphi.

And modern philosophers from Schopenhauer to Lou Reed pretty much concur,  the attainment of self-knowledge is a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness.

A pursuit that may prove tricky when our zeitgeist is not conducive to quiet contemplation.

Who cares, seeing ourselves is way more fun than knowing ourselves.

We enjoy seeing ourselves on Facebook, YouTube, and of course in selfies.

I used to think the charm of selfies was a result of their arm's length limitations.

Clearly, not everyone agrees, enter the selfie stick to ensure our selfies are flawlessly focussed in HD.

Our narcissism appears to be boundless, there’s even a selfie stick company called narcisstick.

With or without a selfie stick, we capture our own images like never before.

We walk around with phones full of them.

But as we focus on ourselves more, do we know ourselves less?

This isn’t entirely a philosophical question.

Because if, we’re worse at knowing ourselves, how as marketers does this affect our insight into the minds of consumers?

Perhaps it doesn’t, maybe self-knowledge has nothing to do with understanding consumer behaviour.

Maybe, but I doubt it, because empathy is key to understanding other people’s behaviour.

And how can we learn empathy if not through self-awareness.

John E. Kennedy called advertising, “Salesmanship in print.”

And as any good salesman will tell you, the foundation of salesmanship is asking the right questions in the right order.

This is an entirely rational process where empathy is required to see a situation from a prospects point of view.

Kennedy was writing in 1908, today salesmanship in pixels is more apt, but the fundamentals have changed less than we may think.

A more modern and opposite take is Daniel Kahneman’s assertion in his inspirational book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that consumer behaviour is largely irrational.

The truth lays somewhere in the middle.

As Ad Contrarian points out in a brilliant post, just as light can simultaneously be a wave and a particle, consumers can act rationally and irrationally in the same moment.

The selfie stick embodies their duality perfectly, and also allows them to capture the moment for posterity.

Doing Business Like a Nine Year Old

I was chatting with a client the other day. He was recounting a conversation with his nine-year old son, who asked him what Daddy did at work all day.

The kid replied, you talk with your friends on the phone.

At first I thought, that’s so nine-year-old-cute.

Then I thought, what if doing business was really like that —just chatting with friends.

It made me think of something someone once told me.

They claimed it was a Japanese proverb, although I have my doubts.

Research leads me to conclude, it's more likely they were embellishing to add a little provenance.

Which is disappointing because it deserves to be a Japanese proverb.

Whatever the provenance it says: if you can’t do business on a handshake you shouldn’t do business at all.

Meaning if someone is honest their word is all you need.

And if they’re dishonest a 50 page contract won’t be enough to save you.

There's something to it.

I once had a contract and a lawyer, and still ended up settling for 20 cents on the dollar when the client had financial difficulties.

Another time I managed a challenging year-long project on the strength of a five-line email and every thing ran smoothly.

Then how do you do business like friends, or more like friends?

There are undoubtedly many definitions of friendship although honesty, transparency and kindness are probably prerequisites.

Perhaps not words that immediately spring to mind in a business context.

Which despite the much hyped win/win paradigm, many people still approach like a zero-sum game.

Maybe we need more nine-year-olds in the boardroom.

Or maybe we just need to think more like nine-year-olds.

A Mosquito on the Dance Floor

It’s a cliché that small things can make a big difference. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas.

(OK, not in reality, but certainly in chaos theory and pop culture.)

This notion is acknowledged by authorities as diverse as the Dalai Lama: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”

And Malcolm Gladwell: “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible.

All you have to do is find it.” But finding it is often, easier said than done.

Even if, or maybe especially when, it is under your nose.

Everything But the Girl got started almost accidentally, in the quirky post-punk British music scene of 1982, by singer Tracey Thorn and guitarist Ben Watt.

They could plausibly be described as somewhat reluctant semi-pop stars.

Like many musicians their career has had ups and downs.

1994 saw EBTG on a definite up.

Tracey had layered her velvety vocals on a Massive Attack track that was a global hit for the trip hop pioneers.

The bands 8th album, Amplified Heart had been released and the duo were busy playing smaller club venues to promote it.

They even enjoyed a minor UK dance hit with a remix of Missing, one of the album tracks.

Things were pretty good.

But they were about to get better.

In 1995, a house DJ called Todd Terry remixed the now largely forgotten track for the U.S. market.

Not only was it a great remix, DJs around the world spontaneously started playing it.

First it was a dance floor hit.

Next it became an anthem and then it crossed over and became a global sensation.

Missing spent 11 weeks in the UK charts, it was number one in Germany and Italy and most of Europe.

It reached number 2 in Billboard’s U.S. charts.

And the surprising thing is the remix didn’t change that much.

Todd Terry just tweaked the rhythm track.

As he said, “I didn’t have to do a lot. They did the production: I just made it dance.”

But what he did made all the difference.

And the record went on to sell around 3 million copies worldwide.

How about your stuff, is it dancing?

Or could it use a remix?

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Listen to the original or the remix