Creativity vs. Profitable Creativity or how to make advertising make money
There is a significant difference between creativity (the kind where you are funny) and profitable creativity, the kind where you systematically make money from your advertising. I was speaking with my good friend and award winning creative director Blaine Parker of www.shortfatadvertising.com and he shared this very powerful example of that very thing for me. This article is reprinted with permisison of Blain Parker.
HOW’S YOUR SNORING?
There’s an advertiser with a medical practice that addresses sleep disorders.
He’s my new favorite client, a) for being an aggressive niche marketer, and b) for a willingness to listen.
Working in a small California
What is a CPAP, you ask?
(I know: look too quickly, and it reads like a different word which randomly comprises the contents of a mysterious bag occasionally sold on woot.com.)
CPAP stands for “Continuous Positive Airway Pressure.”
In this context, a CPAP is a respirator (read: noisy machine) which people with sleep apnea are supposed to wear when they sleep.
Bottom line: it keeps them alive. Maybe.
Yes, we’re talking about addressing the off chance you might suffocate during the night by making you sleep with a hose attached to your face and a machine running in the background.
How romantic.
WHAT THE CLIENT WANTED TO RUN
Roughly the first half of their 60-second commercial included the sounds of snoring, dark music, a jab about sleeping with “a leaf blower attached to your face” (including a leaf blower sound effect) before segueing into the solution and offer with a lullaby music bed.
I was called in to read this, along with a 30-second version.
When I groaned in dismay, I was also told the client was adamant. This was the copy. (Bear in mind, I’ve had no involvement up to this point. I have no idea what transpired between the account rep, the client and the original copywriter.)
So, I take off the writer’s hat. Just be a professional voice talent and do the job.
Which might be my first mistake. Being a professional actually should mean advising somebody under one’s care that they’re making a mistake.
But I wasn’t being that kind of professional. I was being the kind of pro whose excuse is, “I was only following orders.”
I was being a soldier.
I recorded the commercial, making a few tweaks on the fly because the call to action was constructed improperly. I revised that for optimum effectiveness. (We’re talking things like giving the offer BEFORE giving the phone number, and saying phone number twice in a row.)
Apparently, that small tweak was not taken well. I was ordered to re-cut it EXACTLY as they’d written it.
So I did.
I was being the kind of professional who obliges by paying out enough rope for the client to hang himself. (That never feels good.)
HOW’S THAT COMMERCIAL WORKIN’ (SNORE)?
Two calls in four weeks.
They also claimed that the only two calls came immediately after the 30-second spot ran.
Thus, two things were decided.
One, they decided to switch to 30s exclusively.
And two, they decided to tell us, “Do it your way.”
Normally, it makes no sense to let a client think that this is the right way to determine that his 60s are ineffective. A listener can hear the 60 five times, then finally call when he hears the 30.
But in this case, the 60 was a millstone around their neck.
Forget that it took almost half a minute of selling time to state all the obvious problems associated with this device the user already hates.
It opened with a big, fat SNORE! For many people, that’s a button pusher.
It called this awful device “a leaf blower attached to your face.”
It said all kinds of unattractive things the user DOESN’T WANT TO BE REMINDED OF!
In a nutshell: we aided and abetted in producing something clumsy and repllent.
My theory on why the 30 worked?
It didn’t have nearly as much time to insult, offend or annoy the prospect.
SOMETIMES, BEING CREATIVE MEANS GETTING OUT OF THE WAY.
With no sound effects and a simple, appropriate music bed, here’s the client’s new 30-second commercial.
You have a CPAP, and you hate it.
Want to get rid of it—safely?
The Sleep Center
Are you a candidate for this liberating, CPAP alternative?
A simple, 30-minute screening will tell.
Normally $300, the Sleep Center
THIS COMMERCIAL IS BORING!!!
Except to the person who has a CPAP
And last week, TEN of those people called the Sleep Center
That’s 20 times more callers than they had with their clever, creative commercial
Why?
Because it’s not too clever for its own good.
If you’re sleeping with a hose attached to your face, do you really need bad jokes about leaf blowers?
No.
You need sympathy! You need relief! You need an alternative!
Hitting emotional buttons doesn’t mean rolling around in the trough with the prospect’s pain.
It means hitting the triggers required to make him respond to the better alternative.
This isn’t rocket science.
This isn’t brain surgery.
Nor is it entertainment.
It’s human psychology.
And if a client isn’t willing to understand that (as this one is), then radio might not be for him.
And one reason this client is my new favorite?
They said, “Do it your way,” and they actually meant it.
That’s a smart advertiser.
Excuse me now while I nap.
As Always,
Blaine
Your Short, Fat Creative Director in Los Angeles
This is an excellent story of an adventure in marketing. And it's not unusual. That's the horror of it.
I've been in the advertising agency business for thirty years. This and hundreds of experiences just like it are why I'm flagging in my enthusiasm lately.
And it's not stupid clients that make me as tired as do the idiots who create, produce and distribute the bad advertising, all the while thinking how clever they are to have come up with the outstanding idea of two frogs selling beer, for instance.
Now that's pure genius. Right? It's funny and it's cute. What else is there? Oh yeah. There's the incredible technical skill that makes us see two frogs talking and croaking on cue. People will be talking about that for a long time.
Maybe. But will they talk about the product that was supposedly being sold by this genius?
No.
People who buy the things we sell are far more intelligent than many of our ilk like to think. In fact, they are never wrong. They are never wrong because they make the buying decision. Their response to our work measures our skills and effectiveness. Nothing else does that. And so nothing else matters. Like I said, they're never wrong.
Yes, Mr. Parker says, the CPAP commercial was boring. Except to everyone who must use a CPAP. This is the key truth to what his story teaches us. And it's what any really good advertising person already knows.
Advertising isn't supposed to appeal to everyone. It is only supposed to appeal to those who are in the market for the product it's selling. Admittedly, some do not know they are in the market for a product until they are shown their need. Aha! Another key.
As a wise one once said, I've never bought anything from a frog. Neither have I. Nor, I suspect, have many people. Yet, we hear about the Budweiser frogs every year after the SuperBowl.
Why? It's entertaining, isn't it? The frogs are funny. And they're cute -- if a frog can be cute. But, if you're honest, you have to ask yourself: Do I want to buy a beer because of that advertisement? More to the point: Do I want to buy a specific brand of beer because of some funny frogs?
If you said yes, you probably have a bit of a problem with other things, too.
So, you say, well, you remembered it didn't you? That's the purpose of advertising, isn't it? No. That's not the purpose. Recall helps immensely, but it's only a tactical aspect of good advertising.
Good advertising sells things. And it sells things to the extent it is quantifiable and measurable. If it doesn't sell things, then it's not good. It's really that simple. No matter how clever or funny or creative or ingenious the concept. If it doesn't sell, it isn't worth the paper it was written on.
People who say they don't believe advertising works are not very insightful or introspective. And they have little if any understanding of the world around them. They can be educated. If they refuse that, then they are to be pitied. Because they will be preyed upon by every sales scheme and gimmick that comes at them. Because, by not believing it works, they have no defense.
Yes, good advertising is that strong.
I could go on with other thoughts and ideas, but I'm tired.
Posted by:Douglas Kelly | August 06, 2007 at 10:47 PM
Right On! The sad truth about advertising that's cute versus advertising that works is that the ad industry rewards the cute and doesn't acknowledge the ads that worked to bring the client what he/she really needed.
I have a theory over 35 years in the ad and production biz: Each new generation of 'creative' people reinvents what those of us with worn tread on our tires already learned when we first started. What 22 year old copywriter hasn't come up with gimmicks, thinking that's what makes an effective ad? Youth is wasted on the young who reinvent the same things their predecessors already discarded.
At some point, someone in the ad game who is successful realizes that their job security comes from creating results-driven work, which many times seems "boring" to the newbie. What the newbie doesn't realize is how shallow their well of creativity will be when the life gets sucked out of them. The path of least resistance is the path to the greatest profit. Those of us who learned over years of experience that the path of least resistance is creating ads that work to bring in business for the client. More stuff, less fluff.
Mike Weiner
President/CEO
The Image Generators, Inc.
Posted by:Mike Weiner, The Image Generators | August 14, 2007 at 06:09 AM