One year after Chiat/Day made advertising history with its famous “1984” commercial for Apple, they returned to the Super Bowl with a spot called “Lemmings”. Unfortunately, a more accurate title for this commercial might have been “Lox” because it basically lay there like a piece of dead salmon. Was this a rare and unusual incident? Not really, more like a very widely seen and particularly expensive example of something that happens all the time. Every day well-meaning advertising agencies offer up and well-intentioned clients agree to produce advertising— thoroughly researched advertising I might add—that is nothing more than ordinary.
But, if a client as good as Apple and an agency as good as Chiat/Day once was can’t always tell the difference between an ordinary ad and an extraordinary one, how in the Dickens is some marketing MBA supposed to? Not to mention, his or her VP of Marketing? Or their CEO for that matter? Obviously, just trusting the agency isn’t the answer. And testing doesn’t seem to do the trick. So is it just a matter of “you pays your money and you takes your chances”?
I don’t think so. What’s needed here is some thoughtful analysis and a bit of education. Advertising, and particularly the development of extraordinary advertising, has been shrouded in mystery for far too long. It’s not some arcane art; it’s a series of logical steps. Logical steps that adhere to a set of guiding principles and are firmly rooted in a clear standard of what constitutes extraordinary advertising and what doesn’t.
The fact is, there are best practices when it comes to arriving at extraordinary advertising. Things to avoid. Things to pursue. Things that if executed flawlessly (which is no mean feat as the recent bestseller Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan points out) will, to quote that book’s subtitle: “get things done”. In this case, extraordinary advertising.
And yes, I know the success of a company’s marketing program is the result of a complex mixture of factors—product, channel, pricing, internal organizational design, feedback systems, adaptability and so forth—that doesn’t alter the fact that advertising remains one of the most easily altered and under- optimized of them all. There is a line between ordinary and extraordinary advertising, and it is my hope that this book will help you both see it and make sure your advertising ends up on the right side of it.
But first, a few words about where I got the idea that I might be able to shed some light on this topic. My academic credentials are nil and my star power slight. Oh sure, there are a few One Show gold and silver pencils rattling around in my closet somewhere, which probably puts me in the top 2% of the game since most copywriters never win any. But I don’t think that’s my primary qualification for this task. I’m more like one of those good-but-not-great ballplayers, who became a great manager through sheer study of the game. And I had the good fortune to have some amazing teachers. (Most of whom were under the mistaken impression that they were my employers.) Whether they wanted to be or not, Dan Wieden, Dave Kennedy, Martin Puris, Ralph Ammirati, Amil Gargano, Ed McCabe, Phil Dusenberry and Hal Riney were all my teachers. Along with Lee Clow, Cliff Freeman and Jay Chiat on sort of a correspondence-course basis. Admittedly, it’s not the faculty of the Harvard Business School, but in advertising you could do worse since between these guys about $50 billion in brand and business value was created over the last 30 years.
And while I’m on the subject of value, that’s another area where I differ from the average creative person. Most writers and art directors are, to one degree or another, frustrated artists. Given half a chance, they’d all be producing screenplays, painting or writing a novel. But what I discovered over the course of working in this business was that I wasn’t a frustrated artist at all; I was a frustrated MBA candidate. What really intrigued me about advertising wasn’t simply the act of creating something out of nothing or the resulting cool production trips to LA or London. What really excited me was what a phenomenal return- on-investment extraordinary advertising could produce. What an amazing competitive tool it could be. And frankly, how the right advertising could propel a brand from obscurity to dominance in a remarkably short period of time while making everyone, including shareholders, a boatload of money in the process.
But what always mystified me was how rarely these goals are met. Because to be blunt, while the guys I mentioned earlier may have helped create $50 billion in value over a 30-year period, the advertising industry overall probably vaporized a hundred times as much while performing the same act: making advertising. But it was ordinary advertising like the “Lemmings” spot. Advertising they thought would be good, and convinced their clients would be good, but in the end proved to be not so hot. And unfortunately, it’s the clients who pay (literally and figuratively) because much like surgeons are said to bury their mistakes advertising people get to new-business-pitch their way out of theirs. There’s always some client interested in an agency’s experience in their category—even if that experience was, in truth, pretty awful.
This book is my payback to all those very well intentioned clients, clients-to-be, agency people and businesspeople in general who’d really like their advertising to be extraordinary. Who recognize that the only way to do that is to 1) better understand why so little advertising ends up extraordinary in the first place and 2) discover what it takes to develop advertising that is truly extraordinary. Because only then will you be able to identify and champion the “Lemons” (like the famous VW bug ad) and steer clear of the “Lemmings”.