For all of you making your brain ache and your stomach knot searching for that perfect headline, tagline, edit, cast…for your nearly perfect ad, here’s some welcome relief. It’s also a really great story from a really experienced creative about making ads that stand out – and work.
It’s a theory that’s been kicked around almost every creative department I’ve been lucky enough to sit in over the years. If you’ve been in the business a while, no doubt you’ve heard it.
“If you can’t write a good ad, write a really, really bad one.”
The justification seems to be, at least a bad ad will be remembered. It won’t be wallpaper. I call it the “stone in the shoe” school of advertising.
Instead of seducing or romancing or entertaining our target audience, we annoy them. “Shouty” ads have had success doing this for years. The voice-over screams into the studio microphone. The sound engineer uses audio compressors so the ad blasts out of every speaker. The art director and designer conspire to choose colours that clash. The writer then peppers everything with exclamation marks.
Truth is, there’s a lot of money to be made in annoying people.
In the early days of his agency, John Singleton made good profits from bad ads. Hudson building supply company was labelled Udson wiv an haitch. Where do ya get it? was screamed for David’s Holdings. Bad jingles. Bad typefaces. Cheap sets. Ordinary talent.
But it worked.
And you still see it today. Ever seen an upside-down ad? It’s a cheap attention grabber. Ever seen a headline with a deliberate typo? I’ve used that in one of my first columns for The Stable.
But what if there was a way to use the ‘stone in the shoe’ without being annoying?
There is. It’s been staring us in the face for decades. Why did David Ogilvy’s Man in the Hathaway shirt work so well? It’s the eye-patch. There’s a story behind the talent. He’s not perfect. He’s flawed, just like the rest of us. Imagine that ad featuring talent with two good eyes. Wallpaper, right?
Some of most iconic TV ads stick solid to this theory.
When the creative team on Compare the Market wrote Simples, they knew it was grammatically incorrect. Why plural? Because it made the meerkats memorable. It was their stone.
Same, same but different with Bigpond’s It was to keep the rabbits out. TVC. The talent was street cast. No-one was ever quite sure of the relationship between the two characters. Father and son? Grandfather and grandson? The ambiguity helped. It was a stone.
So, next time you’re looking for the perfect word for the perfect line in the perfect script, take a breath. Or you’re trying to frame the right shot, leave something wrong. Or if you’re casting beautiful flawless talent, find a flaw.
Because, if you end up with perfect, you might also end up with wallpaper.
Rob Morrison is a rarity in advertising – a grey-haired creative. Rob’s experience includes time as a Creative Director at Ogilvy, BWM (now Dentsu Creative), George Patts (now VMLY&R), Campaign Palace and Wunderman. He now runs his own consultancy – morrison.collective.
Here are two more opinion pieces from Rob Morrison:
