Advertising - the superpower, not the business

I’ll probably get a lot of raised eyebrows for this, but to me, good advertising is like having a superpower. It’s just that instead of making me invisible or able to toast bread with a glance or [insert ridiculous superpower here], it allows me to create brands and manufacture feelings through a wide range of key ideas.

What interests me most about advertising, then, is the way in which certain ideas and strategies can be used not only to sell merchandise – which I believe should be the main purpose of all good advertising – but also to give life to and create an attitude towards a much too tangible carton of milk or a plastic case with an apple embossed on it. I mean, what would your iPhone be without a soul?

In this sense, good ideas in advertising (those big small ideas I talked about a few centuries ago) can make food taste better, soap wash cleaner and certain political figures seem smarter. The entire advertising strategy, from the awareness stage to the action stage, is, I believe, a fascinating process based on a simple yet powerful idea – the superpower which makes you the hero or the villain. Or both.

Thoughts from Mr No One Yet

People in advertising say different things regarding the purpose of advertising and I guess that what they say is not even that important as long as what they do makes their clients happy.

Still, I recently heard an idea coming from an advertising executive of a global communications agency according to which advertising is persuasion and not selling. For those of you who didn't really catch the last few words, the guy said that advertising is not selling.

Of course, I am no one yet in the world of advertising, but that doesn't mean I cannot question such a fundamental concept. Surely, advertising is persuasion. But what do you persuade people to do through advertising? You persuade them to like and eventually buy your product. I personally believe that persuasion, along with the informative aspect of advertising, is just a part of the main and utmost important purpose of advertising: to sell products, services, ideas and so on.

However, the ad exec argues that persuasion is the ultimate purpose of advertising and that advertising is not about selling. I would like to highlight the fact that I do not reject the idea that advertising is persuasion. I do, nonetheless, reject the idea that advertising is not selling. Picture this: you see a TV commercial for product Whatever. The ad tells you how great product Whatever is for you and you believe it. The ad therefore persuades you to believe that the product is great. This means that the purpose of advertising has already been achieved. But you're still sitting on that sofa and Whatever's sales don't grow just because you liked the ad or because it persuaded you to have a positive attitude towards the product. In fact, the ad you just watched is probably part of a several million-pound campaign - paid for, of course, by the advertiser. Paying millions of pounds for someone sitting on a sofa to like the product is no good unless people stand up and go and buy that product.

Therefore, I believe that while persuasion should be acknowledged as a major purpose of advertising, dismissing the fact that advertising is about selling may be a brutal understatement. Not to mention a much too romantic approach to advertising. Alastair Crompton put it better: 'Realize that your function [as an agency] is to get people to spend, and help your client to earn his living and keep his factories busy and his employees rich.'

Who do you agree with - Mr No One Yet or Mr Advertising Executive?

I will invent a better wheel

Mediocrity is tempting. It is effortless and widely appreciated. It is actually easier to achieve than the state of being absolutely crap at something. So why not embrace it?

I recently had a pleasant conversation with a great ad man about the importance of being different in advertising. Of course, being the Lady Gaga of advertising is probably not the way to go (sounded much better in my head), but having a point of difference is paramount. And not just in advertising.

At the moment, it seems to me that most people in advertising are trying too hard to be different or creative, hence some ad campaigns that overlook the main purpose of advertising - that of selling happiness - and whose main aim is to be awarded some Lions in lovely France. If perfection weren't so boring, I'd say I'd want Leo Burnett's creativity and David Ogilvy's salesmanship. In lovely France.

Great advertising requires good people - I retract that. Great advertising requires great people, people who see things differently without having to wear some magic glasses. Advertising is changing rapidly, and what might have worked five years ago might be inefficient today. I'm no retired ad man, but I'm going to say this to myself: Take roads that haven't been travelled before. Invent a better wheel. Fail like hell. Then get it right. Be amazing.

One Crappuccino, McPlease

Ordering coffee these days feels like a personality test and takes almost as long as walking your dog. You cannot go to McDonald's and order a cheeseburger, but asking for a McCheeseburger might get you out of trouble. So just how happy is humanity about having so many products to choose from?

First of all, I don't think the problem here is the great number of options available to consumers. Within the basic context of democracy and that of a free market, having choices is good. Having more choices is even better. The problem, then, is that advertising creates what seems to be new products. That's why you need an Italian dictionary to order a coffee in England.

However, this situation is more than the result of advertising creating products that only seem new. Brands such as Starbucks use Italian names for their coffee for the simple reason that Italian coffee is widely appreciated as high quality coffee. Therefore, Starbucks plus Italian quality equals brand quality. Surely, there are more reasons as to why products today seem so complicated, but the bottom line is that behind any frappuccino there is the old-fashioned coffee.

What Next?

Success. To a certain extent, we all know what success is. It could be working in an office that has walls and more than one window, or being recognised on the street, or being more annoying than Simon Cowell, or not having a clue as to what treasure lies behind the digits of your account number(s). But what happens once you've reached that ridiculously perfect social and professional status?

I have no idea. I am but a 21-year old middle-class dreamer whose greatest success was not even paid in real money - even though, come to think of it, I did get paid in gold (sort of). Anyway, I guess there is always something greater than what you are and what you do. So if you are successful and need ten accountants to sort out your fortune, that doesn't mean you cannot have twenty accountants for the same purpose if you suddenly find yourself overwhelmingly and dangerously successful. In other words, having everything is technically speaking impossible. 

However - and I'm saying this without owning an island - I don't believe success necessarily involves having a lot of money. Maybe success is not even a corner office. Maybe success is having a job that you love, true friends, one wife, some kids and a dog. So what if this is a cliché? Societies are based on clichés by definition. That said, success is certainly perceived in different ways by different people, and no definition in this polluted world will be able to objectively portray such a subjective concept. Better yet, no post on this blog will risk boring readers to death by technically analysing the notion of success. Be successful.

And Then the Robot Starts Dancing

I recently had a "Hey, do you know that TV ad?" conversation with a friend who has no particular interest in advertising and I noticed something, well, normal. He kept telling me about several commercials he had seen and liked - most of them for cars - but he got wrong almost all the brands those commercials were for. As far as he could recall, "the one with the dancing robot" was for Volkswagen and not for Citroen.

This means then that he remembered the creative ideas in those adverts rather than the actual brands they were advertising. Does any brand want that? Exactly. So could this mean that consumers don't pay much attention during commercial breaks? Or could this be the advertising agencies' fault?

There is a positive answer to the first question. Yes, it is a fact that only a small number of TV viewers actually pay attention during commercial breaks, which means that the majority of them ignore TV advertising (and engage in other activities) or are only affected by it on a subconscious level, as in the case of my friend.

As regards the answer to the second question, the situation is certainly more complicated than it may seem. Advertising agencies build brands by creating brand image and brand personality and all that, right? In order for them to grab the attention of the consumers, they must come up with memorable adverts that say "Hey, you, don't go pee, you want to see this!", hence the dancing robot. Still, TV advertising today seems to be more like a competition of creative ideas rather than good selling techniques, so the risk of people having no idea what "that cool ad" is for seems only natural. Having said that, the lack of attention on behalf of the audience might be a matter of association - as a component within the facets model of advertising effects - between advertising and the product being advertised. But that's a different story. Actually, it is not, only I will expand on it in a future post.

Relevant Thoughts

Well, I've been thinking and I don't believe that the big idea has even been invented yet. The wheel? Seriously? That's the smallest idea that the homo sapiens' brain has ever come up with. Which is why it is probably the greatest idea, since it brought about progress. Put simply, I think that if an idea is able to make a tree grow twice as fast as it normally does, that idea is a great idea because it leads to something great: a faster regeneration of the Earth.

Trevor Beattie was right, I guess: There are no real big ideas. I mean, have you seen the universe? I think that any idea is limited to this almost round planet's troposphere and, every now and then, its exosphere.

 

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Still, I do believe that an idea can change the world. Jupiter might not give a damn, but I do believe that good ideas are worth fighting for. Perhaps it all boils down to belief, to how sure one is that their idea is able to change things. Perhaps it is the usefulness of an idea that establishes the latter's dimensions, or maybe it's its crazyness. Perhaps there are no big ideas, but there are big small ideas.

It's the big small ideas that matter.