Welcome to Pondering Creative

I’ve done a ton of technical advertising over the years, industrial, aircraft, software, you name it. I enjoy engineering-based products because nowhere does the art of creative persuasion call for greater talent than in the task of translating a technical feature into an attention-getting concept.

But nowhere is the value of high-concept advertising more difficult to convey than to an engineering-based client. Engineers, technicians and other data-driven people are usually so enamored of the technical facts surrounding their products that it’s difficult for them to step outside their own knowledge-sets and imagine what it’s like not to know what they know. Their intimate knowledge of the product is often their worst enemy from a marketing standpoint because they can’t imagine a target audience not being instantly fascinated by its technical elegance.

The truth is that, no matter how perfect a product or service is for a given target audience, you still have to pull them out of the hypnotic reverie called “real life,” in order to tell your story.

The formula is the same every time: 1) get attention, 2) identify a need, 3) fill the need and 4) ask for the order. The natural tendency of technical-minded people is to jump to step 3 because the manner in which their product can fill the need is where their brains live, day-in and day-out.

It’s our job as marketing professionals to help them understand the technical process of advertising. Just as a computer motherboard can’t be overhauled until you’ve disconnected the power and removed the access panel, so the human mind can’t be influenced until you’ve opened it with a provocative thought (the headline and visual) that demands further exploration (reading the copy). Only then can you “fill the need” in a way that will be mentally allowed by the target.

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When I was an agency dweller, I hid behind my cubicle wall, acting pretty much any way I wanted to, wearing clothes that made anti-fashion statements, flinging rude comments and spending inordinate amounts of time playing with toys. As long as my creative work was stellar—and on-time—this was allowed.

My situation wasn’t unique among designers and copywriters. Walk around the creative department of any agency worth its salt, and what do you see? Yo-yos, skateboards, wind-up toys, antique toys … morbid toys. One of my favorite places to visit is the cubicle of Steve Hobson, staff genius at Sullivan, Higdon and Sink, whose cubicular domain is guarded by a perimeter of disembodied doll heads. Go, Steve.

Why do we act like bad children? What’s wrong with us?

Nothing. We’re paid to be different rather than homogeneous, striking rather than plain. We’re valuable to clients because our personalities scream and our egos demand attention. Who else could invent concepts that stop target audiences in their tracks?

Now that I run my own business, I’m in the client spotlight more than I used to be, so there’s a real temptation to act “normal.” But even as I play grown-up, I try to preserve my panache, engaging in small rebellions:

I wear jeans to meetings where no one else is wearing jeans.

I let my cynical humor out of its cage and allow it to prowl ruthlessly through innocent conversations.

I verbalize thoughts that are off-topic, off-color and frequently wrong.

I refuse to wear a necktie outside my own funeral.

I continue to live by the code of the creative: “I will be bold. I will be controversial. I will even be unpopular, but I will never be plain.”

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Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
–Albert Einstein

Slogan, tagline, positioning statement … whatever name you use, it’s an important part of a brand. Some experts define a tagline as a statement that condenses the essence of a company’s marketing message in a meaningful way. I think we can add a few thoughts to that.

A tagline should …

… serve as a rallying point that tells everyone, inside and outside the company, how to feel about the brand.

The keyword here is “feel,” meaning the tagline should evoke an emotional response. Logic alone generally doesn’t create the mnemonic “peg” inherent to great taglines.

… be short. Really short.

There are exceptions to this, but not many.

… clearly define a market position that no other company can claim.

In the words of Jack Trout, “differentiate or die.” If your tagline makes a claim that other companies like yours can make equally well, it will promote your industry rather than your company. Figure out what no one else can say, and say it.

… be comprehensible and relevant to all potential target audiences, regardless of age, nationality, etc.

Yeah, the previous rule said to be specific, but your tagline also has to stay general enough in tone and cultural context that all your demographic groups can relate to it.

… mesh with the look and feel of the logo.

These two brand components will usually live side-by-side, so they should work together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

… be self contained, when seen in context with the company name.

This can work in different ways for different companies. If the company’s name is GPX, Inc., the tagline has a lot of ground to make up because, in addition to defining a market position, it has to describe what the company does. If the company’s name is descriptive, like Neighborhood Medical Clinics, the tagline can pick up the message at that point and move the brand to a whole new level of emotional definition. Either way, the name/tagline combination should have a sense of inherent meaning that defines the brand without the need for further explanation.

… not contain the words “quality,” “commitment,” “unique,” “innovation,” “great service,” or any other overused terms that have long since had the life beaten out of them.

Every company principal feels “deeply dedicated” and “profoundly committed;” that’s a given—or should be—and to come out and say it makes a company look small, unimaginative and utterly indistinguishable from about a million other companies.

A tagline may also …

… sound familiar, even if you’ve never exactly heard it before.

If a tagline sounds like a phrase people are already familiar with, it opens a gateway into the audience’s mind. Here’s a good system for tackling this approach:

1. Paraphrase the core message your tagline has to convey. Doesn’t have to be short or pretty; just accurate.

2. Write out an expanded list of words and phrases that hover around this paraphrase.

3. Buy a Flip Dictionary and look up all the words on your list. Create an expanded list from these entries.

4. Buy an encyclopedic book of idioms—common sayings—and look up the words on your expanded list. Cross reference the idioms you find with ideas that are metaphorical to the brand paraphrase you’re working with. Brainstorm. Play with variations of these idioms, or if you find one that really fits, consider using it as-is. Examples: “When you got it, flaunt it.” “Have it your way.”

… sound like a statement of empirical or philosophical truth.

This approach can slip nicely under the radar. If a tagline contains an inherently inarguable statement, people are less inclined to distance themselves from it. Examples: “There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s MasterCard.” “When it rains it pours.”

… compliment and empower the target audience.

When a tagline taps into the cultural consciousness of its audience, it becomes a way of being rather than just a way of buying. Examples: “Because I’m worth it.” “Think different.” “Just do it.” “Miles away from ordinary.”

There, I’ve spilled most of my secrets. Anyone else care to give up your tricks for tagline creation?

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Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite—getting something down.
–Julia Cameron

In a previous article, we discussed the structure of kick-ass creative meetings. Here’s the nickel tour:

1. Invite both copywriters and designers.

2. Summarize the creative assignment, including the message delivery medium; the target audience; and the single, main product benefit.

3. Identify the basic statement your concept needs to make.

4. Encourage the verbalization of all ideas, no matter how silly.

In this article, we’ll explore some specific tips for crossing the finish line with a great concept. Not all of these will work for everyone, but whatever your style, there should be a few jewels you can use …

-       Have the meeting in the biggest room you can find.

-       Bring some great ads to the meeting to set your sights high. (The Graphis Advertising Annual is a good start.)

-       Fill a candy bowl and set it out. Sugar is good. Caffeine is good.

-       Budgetary restraints: forget them. First figure out what you would do if money were no object. Then back up from that point, if necessary. This is a creative brainstorming session, not an accountants’ convention.

-       Put a dry erase board or a big pad of paper in the room. Every participant should also have a pencil and a note pad—better yet, tape butcher paper to the table and set out a bucket of crayons. (Concepts expressed via pictures, written language and spoken language move through three different parts of the brain, so this will trigger new combinations of ideas.)

-       The most important ingredient in a kick-ass creative meeting is fun. Don’t underestimate its influence. Here are some meeting “props” that will improve the fun-quotient while firing up the right side of every brain in the room. These props also provide momentary diversions that help people “look away” from the assignment for a few seconds at a time, so they can circle back with a fresh perspective. As long as you always come back to the assignment, these are pure gold:

o Make a few paper footballs and start up a game.

o Play with yoyos.

o Play with Legos.

o Play with Superballs.

o Play with dart guns. (Don’t shoot your eye out.)

o Take turns bragging about your scars.

o Require everyone to show up naked. Just kidding.

One of the realities of a KACM is that a lot of ideas will sound brilliant—will, in fact, be brilliant—but won’t fulfill the assignment. The trick is to test each new concept against the assignment basics: message delivery medium; target audience; and single, main product benefit. This is the container your concept has to fit into to make the cash register ring. But don’t jump straight to this step with every new idea, or your meeting will turn into a poo-poo session. Let the ideas ripen and take on some shape before testing them against this.

How can you tell when you’re on the right track? Just keep going until the concept feels right. When you’re onto something good, it’s like digging a Q-Tip into the waxy part of your ear, trying to find that spot you hadn’t even noticed was itching, but now it’s driving you crazy, and you’re probing, getting closer … closer, and the Q-tip is abrasive, yet nicely fluffy, and you feel a tingle rising and then—BOOM—there it is! Yeah, baby.

How do you know when it’s time to end a creative meeting before you’ve hit a home run? The buzz peters out. Your brainwaves lose their luster and start to feel normal again. Caution: it’s okay for this to happen several times during the meeting, but when it’s accompanied by a sense of creative exhaustion, let it go. End the meeting, set a time to pick it up on the following day and forget about it. Come back refreshed, having let the subconscious mind do it’s work overnight. As often as not, somebody will show up the next day with a killer concept on the tip of their tongue.

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The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
–Bruce Feirstein

Say “Bangladesh” aloud to yourself. Go ahead; do it now. Bangladesh. You like that, right? Now say “mukluk” and “albumen.” Feels good, right?

Bulbous bouffant. Gotta love that one.

Assiniboine. Oh, yeah.

Words like these elicit instant emotional responses—quick blasts of euphoria—because they feel familiar to the tongue. They have a sort of self-contained momentum that tastes right.

Well-chosen phrases have the same power; they carry poetic inertia that anticipates patterns of receptiveness in the human mind. If you don’t believe this, I respectfully refer you to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a linguistically splintered tale that nonetheless fits cozily against our language receptors.

Because people are receptive to familiar words and phrasings, great advertising copy is built on language patterns that feel familiar to specific target groups. A good copywriter analyzes the audience’s buzz words, catch phrases and speech patterns, then feeds their own language back to them—but better than they could have said it themselves.

When you encounter great ad copy, it’s like an unexpected meeting with a stranger who shares your line of work; first comes a rush of familiarity, then mental focus occurs, then barriers fall away and communication flows easily. If you’re an oil field chemist and I walk up to you out of the blue and start talking about a program to reduce oil entrapment in brine water, I’ll probably get your attention. If I employ meticulous language and compelling sentence structures to give you new information on the subject, you’ll probably stay engaged in our conversation.

If I do that in writing, it’s called advertising.

Granted, all target audiences do their best to avoid reading ad copy, but the right words and phrases can overcome this tendency. When words taste right, sound familiar and talk about something we’re interested in, they engage us, almost against our will. They lead us down paths we might not normally follow … and that’s called selling.

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There is a universal belief in lay circles that people won’t read long copy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
–David Ogilvy

Our words must seem to be inevitable.
–William Butler Yeats

I’m not ordinarily one to quote other people’s work on my blog, but some of the ideas in this book are blowing my mind. These principles apply to everything we do in marketing. The book is also very well written, which is a compliment I don’t pay lightly.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
(Excerpted with the authors’ permission from “Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” copyright 2007 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs. This is sheer coincidence, of course. (Okay, we admit, SUCCESs is a little corny. We could have changed “Simple” to “Core” and reordered a few letters. But, you have to admit, CCUCES is less memorable.)

Thanks, Chip and Dan.
–W

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Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
–Rudyard Kipling

A few of us who were around when designers used pencils and writers flipped through index cards at the public library are still fond of bemoaning the advent of the digital age. But there seems to be less and less whining about it, as time goes by. Once you get used to having the information world–and a godly amount of computing power–at your fingertips, it doesn’t matter what kind of good ol’ days you remember.

You take pride in performing fast Google searches–come on, you know you do–you’re the Google master. The Google-o-sapiens of a brave new world. If there was a Google-en-heim Fellowship, you would win it. And if you’re really good, you’re using Boolean search terms. Say it aloud: Boolean.

It’s all about getting information and resources fast, and when you make your living in the feverish world of marketing, there’s no arguing with speed. It’s a drug. It’s a necessity. It’s a new organ in your body.

As I write this article, the cable guy is drilling a hole in the wall of my home office to allow faster Internet access because my DSL just doesn’t cut it when clients want to videoconference.

It’s about memory and storage size, too. You got your megas and your gigas. My first computer had a four megabyte hard drive, and that was enough. But now everything’s giga, and in my most secret dreams, I use the word tera. TERA! Terabyte, terahertz, and if I could have a really big laser cannon–big enough to blow up the moon–it would probably use a terawatt of energy.

I confess that my computing power isn’t as big and fast as it should be. I’m still struggling with a fossil of a desktop computer–yeah, it’s like two weeks old. But part of me doesn’t mind that’s it’s slow compared to the state-of-the-art computers that were invented yesterday afternoon. Sometimes I kind of enjoy watching the bars go across. It’s like mowing the lawn … you wish it would go faster, sure, but it’s also kind of cool seeing it get done in sections.

And maybe we don’t always need maximum speed. Seems like, without noticing how it happened, we’ve come to expect everything around us to operate at high velocity. We drive fast, think fast, walk fast, eat fast. Speed is not just a convenience; it’s who we are.

Can that be healthy?

Each day, I take a few minutes to slow down to the gentler pace of yesteryear. Remember walks in the park? Sunsets? Yes, yes, back when you were describing yourself to that dating service! You put all the slow and wonderful things about yourself in the description, some of which you had never done in your life, but you wanted to do them. You had a clear image of the special moments you would spend, given the opportunity.

I think it’s important to create that opportunity. Surely that’s part of what life is about, the simple … the sublime. The unhurried.

Here’s my suggestion to you, my brothers and sisters of the giga-tera marketing generation: slow down once a day. Get up from the computer and walk, just walk away. Stick your nose out the door and see what the sky looks like. Stroll down the street. Wave at somebody. Say hello.

And if you see a rose, smell it. That part’s sort of required.

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The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
–Joseph Priestley

Today’s subliminal thought is …

My favorite authors are Ann Tyler, Don DeLillo and Chuck Palahniuk because their prose hits me at many layers with few words. Advertising has made me an impatient reader, so now, even fiction has to capture my attention quickly and hold onto it like never before.

And if that’s true of fiction–which we read on purpose–then our attention is even harder to capture when it comes to advertising, which most people never read on purpose. If a piece of ad copy presumes to interrupt my schedule, it had better hit me at many layers with few words.

To pull this off, the copywriter has to have a deep understanding of who I am, what I care about and what kinds of words are native to my subconscious.

Done well, great copy has same effect as great poetry, which conveys a layer of language, a layer of imagery and a layer of archetype–all interwoven to deliver a calculated message.

Few words equal massive impact … when they’re right words.

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The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
–Mark Twain

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
–Woodrow Wilson 

One of the recurring nightmares suffered by all advertising creatives is that of the tell-all client. Sounds like this: “Our ad needs to talk about the high interest rate on our CD, but we also have to tell them about the new location, our Saturday hours, the fact that we received accreditation from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council–oh, and get our mission statement in there somewhere.”

Don’t even get me started on mission statements. Rather than putting the client’s mission statement into a piece of advertising, I recommend slipping a tranquilizer into the target audience’s drink. It’s more effective, though not as fast-acting.

When clients come to you with this tell-all strategy, it’s your job to break the news to them: “Nobody has time to think hard about your company. The only reason anyone’s going to read any of your advertising is because there’s something in it for them. So let’s find one benefit that will look attractive to the target audience and demonstrate it really well.”

One benefit. Not two. Why? Because well-executed advertising is like feeding a wild squirrel out of your hand. The squirrel just wants the food. It will run away if you make any sudden movements or loud sounds or if you try to show it something else in your other hand. Furthermore, the squirrel doesn’t want to know you love it or that you belong to a squirrel rights advocacy group or that your family has fed squirrels for generations. If you want the squirrel to bite, keep it focused on what it wants.

Same with advertising. Get the audience’s attention by speaking to their need. Keep them on that precise train of thought as you clarify the need, then as quickly as possible, show them how your product fills the need and ask them to take action. Extraneous information only gives them an excuse to focus on something else, and people would rather focus on almost anything than advertising. Make it easy for them, and they’ll stay with you until you’ve made the sale.

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There on my computer are the two buttons representing things I can never have: Control and Escape.

The most certain path to a “Big Idea” is by way of the creative meeting–that conference-room campout where so many great advertising concepts are born. Yes, you can achieve greatness alone, but who’d want to? A kick-ass creative meeting (KACM) is more fun than a flyswatter on a cattle ranch.

It recently came to my attention that not everyone in the business has attended a truly “KA” example of a “CM,” so in this first article, we’ll look at basic meeting structure. Part 2 will cover the fun stuff at a later date.

First, in order to be KA, a CM has to meet two conditions:

1. Attendees should come from both the copywriting and graphic design arenas. Ordinary mortals are also allowed to attend, as long as they’re fluent with the basic formula of advertising.

2. All ideas are fair game, no matter how weird, off-beat or, yes, stupid, at first glance.

Start the KACM with a creative briefing. Summarize the assignment, the message delivery medium, the characteristics of the target audience and the single, main product benefit. If any of these components is imprecise, clarify it before wasting everyone’s time on a meeting you’re not ready for.

Talk through the message delivery medium and the manner in which it will engage the target audience. Will they be clicking through random e-mails or surfing a website that’s strongly related to your product? Escaping to the kitchen during a television station break or stepping out of an elevator in a crowded airport? Discuss the specifics of the engagement and clearly visualize what you’re trying to distract them from. Nobody reads advertising on purpose, so you’ll have to anticipate their situation and state of mind with diabolical finesse.

Hash out the basic statement your concept needs to make. In other words, what would it say if it didn’t have to be pretty, poetic, emotionally appealing and brief? (Which it does.) Here are some examples:

“If you’re a serious hiker, you wouldn’t wear any other brand of shoes.”

“Your auto parts counter will make more money if you buy this DVD and show it to your employees.”

“Our banking services do a better job of meshing with farmers’ financial cycles because our policymakers come from farming families.”

And don’t limit your ideas to words; think in images. What visual metaphors will stop the audience and cause them to read the words? –not only stop them, but move them down a mental path that softens their resistance to the message?

Now you’re ready to creatively condense the message. Let the ideas fly, and have fun–lots of fun. Be silly. Be obtuse. Be wrong. Any idea is fair game, as long as it doesn’t move the group too far off-concept. The meeting should start to feel like a psychotherapist’s free-association session, but with more than one crazy person.

Use a dry-erase board or a big paper pad on an easel, and put an experienced person in charge of writing down ideas as the group calls them out. If anyone is shy, coerce them into participating. If anyone is not fully fluent with the basic formula of advertising or repeatedly pulls the group off task (this isn’t the time to discuss media placement, client headaches, reasons this is a difficult assignment or basketball scores), politely end the meeting and reconvene later without that person. Overanalyzing, sniping of other people’s ideas and basically not “getting it” will also poison the process.

Frightened yet? You should be. It’s not easy to speak up among a group of really smart people, knowing that most of what you say will be stupid and wrong. But that’s what everyone at the meeting has to do–open the flood gates and let the subconsciousness flow until the right idea takes shape. Right brainers welcome. Long live the right side of the brain.

Stay tuned: in Part 2, we’ll map the controlled insanity of the KACM in greater detail.

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Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.

This formula is far from new, and for those of you who already have it hard-wired into your brains, good; feel free to skip this article. But upcoming discussions on the blog will refer back to it, so I feel obligated to give it some screen space before we discuss more advanced topics. Here’s the nickel tour:

The not-so-mystical formula for creating advertising …

1. Get attention.
2. Identify a need.
3. Fill the need.
4. Ask for the order.

The lines between these steps are often blurred–and sometimes nonexistent–but every successful piece of advertising in every medium follows the formula.

Let’s go a little deeper:

1. Get attention. You have to stop them from turning the page, changing the station, clicking to another website–whatever the specifics of the message delivery medium dictate. Getting attention is an emotional process; you must strike a chord in the target audience that runs deeper than logic.

2. Identify a need. This is frequently (but not always) done as part of step 1. If it’s done separately from step 1, then step 1 has to be closely enough related to the need/product benefit to transition seamlessly into this step.

3. Fill the need. After pointing at a need or interest the target audience already holds dear, you are a translator, discussing the product’s main benefit in terms of what the target audience wants.

4. Ask for the order. Provide instructions on how the target audience can respond to the information you’ve just given them.

To go deeper yet, read Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples and The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert W. Bly.

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When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem.
–Buckminster Fuller