Ordinary Advertising

One of the best ways to distinguish between ordinary advertising and extraordinary advertising is when you can find two ads whose communications objective was identical, but the final result vastly different. And I’m indebted to my wife for this excellent example (and many other things she tells me).

She was flipping through Sporting News the other day and called my attention to a very cute ad FedEx had done to announce its sponsorship of a car running in the Daytona 500. Now this kind of assignment, commonly known as a “compliments of a friend” ad, is the bane of many a young creative team’s existence because they’re so hard to do well. After all, the basic message is nothing more than “tell people that we, Company X, are the sponsor of car #00. But look what FedEx did.

The main visual is nothing more than two vertical, fading black lines–what you’d see on the road after a car took off fast and put down a “patch”. Then you look down and see a small picture of the car with the line: “FedEx. Proud sponsor of #11.” A very clever solution to a tough assignment. How tough?

Well, two pages later there’s another “compliments” ad, this time for Crown Royal announcing its sponsorship of a car. And what do we find? A larger picture of the car captioned with the headline: “725 horsepower. And a brake.” Now granted, the Crown Royal creative team had a tougher number to work with, #97, but I still think they could have tried for something a little less ordinary than calling our attention to the fact that the cars at the Daytona are very powerful and the driver doesn’t have to stick his leg out the door and drag his foot to slow down.

Now I can just hear a few people out there saying “it’s just one lousy ad, Silveira, can you just take a pill or something?” To which my answer is, no, this is just too perfect an example of the tremendous waste inherent in ordinary advertising. Both of these advertisers spent maybe $50,000 to create and place these ads. And what did they get? FedEx was able to reaffirm my belief that it is a good company and worth doing business with. Crown Royal got nothing. I mean it, nothing, because I doubt anyone outside of me, the CR marketing team, the agency and maybe the driver of #96 ever even noticed the damn thing. So they might as well have taken the $50,000 out to the parking lot and burned it.

Which leaves me with this image of a bunch of executives standing around a fire when the company’s CEO happens to walk by. “What are you doing?”, he or she asks. And the executives reply, “We’re burning $50,000.” Which prompts the CEO to ask, “Whose $50,000?” And they answer, “The shareholders.”

Seems silly, but we see examples of it hundreds of times a day. And I’m hard-pressed to imagine the CEO who would conclude that conversation with: “Right, well, keep up the good work.”