Ordinary Advertising

One of my all-time favorite partners, Mark Moffett, once told me that one of the more endearing mannerisms of Ed McCabe was to jump up and down in the hall bellowing those exact words to all his teams working to come up with a new campaign.

Not a bad question, nor a bad place to start on the road to extraordinary advertising. However, in certain categories this can be a maddeningly tough question to answer. Which is why we sometimes see ad campaigns that attempt to skirt the issue–by simply telling us what the brand isn’t, instead of what it is. But this short cut typically leads to a dead end, for example in the case of these recent ads for AT Kearney.

The AT Kearney ads all use the same headline: “What did your consultants leave behind?”, which is then matched up with different visuals meant to suggest the answer is: “In way worse shape than we were before.” In one ad, there are a bunch of workers under water. In another, the office floor is littered with bear traps. There’s a conference room in which all the people are hanging from the ceiling light fixtures. And papers flying all around an office as if a typhoon had just struck.

All clever, engaging images, which is what makes this approach dangerously appealing, especially to creative people. Unfortunately, it tells us virtually nothing about how AT Kearney differs from its peers in the management consultant arena. Sure, the body copy attempts to finesse its way out of this jam, but I don’t think it makes it. First of all, maligning the category you’re in is rarely a smart selling tactic. And second, when your competitive set is populated with esteemed names like McKinsey, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bain and The Boston Consulting Group, you’d better be careful slinging that mud.

Clever visuals are often a part of extraordinary advertising, but only a part. And yes, you can use what you aren’t, as Rolling Stone did so brilliantly with its Perception/Reality campaign of years ago, as long as you also give equal emphasis (as that campaign certainly did) to what you are. And answer Ed’s question.