Tuesday 11 March 2014

If you think this ad is good, you don't understand how advertising works


The Bell's scotch spot from South Africa. It's a highly arousing, well written, well crafted advert that has the capacity to inspire real social change with adult illiteracy. But what's the scotch doing at the end? 

For advertising to work it has to be remembered. This ad doesn't work because although the content will be, the brand, Bell's Scotch, certainly will not. 

Why? Because Bell's is irrelevant to the story. It is simply bolted on at the end. Celebrating a personal triumph by cheers-ing with a scotch is flippant and forgettable. The advert will be remembered for its story, which is adult literacy, not about the scotch. 

The advert also fails to execute the story within the closed world of the brand. You do this to develop associations which help create and refresh memory cues so the brand is easily remembered in a buying situation. (E.g. Carlton Draught Beer Chase)

How simple would it have been for the guys to play scrabble in a pub rather than a cafe! 

And finally, it's simply not branded. Similar to Eaon Pritchard's what-should-have-been uncontroversial comments about the John Lewis Christmas ad, it would have been easy to insert distinctive branding throughout this spot. Again, helping build memory structures and make the brand come to mind easier. (E.g. Nike Possibilities) 

A brand that is not remembered is not bought.  

This may be an exceptional film but it is not a good Bell's Scotch ad. It is our job to use creativity to get brands both noticed and remembered which ultimately leads to them getting purchased. Failing this, like this Bell's spot, what value are we actually adding to our client's business? 

By Christopher Ott

Pritchard, E. (2013). How John Lewis get away with something 99.9% of brands should be wary of attempting. Mumbrella

27 comments:

  1. Great blog post.

    The idea I suspect comes from the brand story telling camp. Their theory is that brands need to own an emotion and tell a story around that emotion.

    The problem is they forget as you rightly state that the purpose of advertising is to get people to remember your brand and then hopefully buy it. Advertising is a solution to a business problem, lest we forget.

    The problem with such ads I think is they start form the wrong place. They start from deciding which emotion to own. Rather than what can we say about our product and then start to layer on the craft of being emotionally engaging or having impact.

    Am I am the wiser about Bell's whisky? Nope. Am I inspired by the man who who learns to read so he can read his son's book. Yes

    So great post Christopher, there clearly aren't enough post of this kind around today.





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  2. Thank you. Totally agree. The only thing I'd add is there's nothing inherently wrong with the story telling execution (In fact it's a great one to get your messages to stick), but when you use it, you have to make the brand or product the hero of the story. Something Bell's simply doesn't do. Cheers.

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  3. Hallelujah! I love both this article and the comments. Christopher, as a copy writer, what would you suggest we (as brand client) include in our briefs to encourage creatives to move beyond the brand story telling camp? As is the case with our agency. I do wonder if we really need to get a richer awareness of the cues for the brand, to help the creative team. ie. What triggers brand and category choice? Both consciously and unconsciously.
    Thanks again for a great post Christopher.

    alana

    alananews.tumblr.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Alana. I'd think if you're briefing your creatives and they're only coming back with 'storytelling' concepts then they need to add a little variety to their thinking - 'storytelling' should be just one of many techniques in a creatives' toolkit.

    But, like I said above, there's nothing inherently wrong with the storytelling technique. The Carlton Draught example from the 'What wires' post used storytelling while also bursting with memory-building brand cues.

    While it would be great if a brief contained all the relevant cues, I wouldn't think something like a deep dive research was necessary. The cues should be readily available to any consumer - which we all are.

    Cheers,
    Chris.

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