Ordinary Advertising

A reader might be excused for thinking that the only advertising I ever pay attention to is print. But that’s not true. For example, remember that Starbucks Chantico ad I was raving about a few days ago? Well, just now I was walking down the street and saw a bus shelter ad for the same brand. Very well done. Same style of art direction and type with the headline: A museum of chololate on the campus of the Uniiverity of Chocolate.

So see, I don’t just look at magazine and newspaper ads. On the other hand, in the school of advertising I was brought up in, print played a very fundamental role and I still thinks there’s something to be said for that.

The reason print ads were so critical to many of the masters of extraordinary advertising–Ally, Gargano, Bernbach, Scali, McCabe, Ammirati, Puris, Clow, Wieden, Kennedy, you name them–was because it is damn near impossible to do an extraordinary print ad without an idea in it. So a lot of these giants reasoned, correctly I believe, that if you could do a terrific print ad for a brand, you could translate that idea into anything–TV, radio, a brochure, website, whatever.

Look at this Chantico product. The idea is unimaginably, surreally, almost unbelievably chocolatey. You can translate that into anything. I can literally hear the radio ad for that campaign even if there really isn’t one.

The tricky thing with broadcast advertising is it’s really easy to hide the fact that there’s no idea in the ad behind a lot of production pyrotechnics. But if there’s no idea to an ad there’s little chance it will be extraordinary and even littler chance it will leave any sort of resonating message with people. I mean that’s what’s going on with the Chantico work. People aren’t walking away reciting the headlines, they’re walking away thinking “wow, that stuff must be REALLY chocolatey.

Try this game sometime. Force yourself to watch a few TV commercials you might have otherwise ignored–or look at your own company’s advertising–can you write the idea down in just a few words. If you can’t then remember the words of the Broadway impressario, David Belasco: “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.”