3. Using Creativity To Sell

In recent years advertising has grown to fill almost every part of our environment. It pervades our screens, our landscape, our music, our clothing and much else besides. The arrival of so-called ambient media around two decades or so ago has enabled advertising to leap from its traditional haunts, such as television or billboards, to places as diverse as bus tickets, car park barriers and even dairy cows. It goes without saying that the profusion of commercial messages around us is such that an average person can expect to be bombarded by hundreds, if not thousands, of ads a day.

The net effect on us as consumers is that we tend to filter out advertising. Not entirely, though. Studies show people pick up a lot of their product information from advertising and will even make purchasing decisions based on how a brand markets itself through the media, despite the fact that they generally do not believe the claims of advertisers. The marketing researchers John E. Calfee and Debra Jones Ringold found that a constant 70 per cent or so of the population around the world believes that advertising is a useful source of information; the same as the proportion of people who say advertising claims cannot be believed (for more, see Calfee’s excellent book Fear of Persuasion, published by Agora). Sadly for advertisers, the exact triggers that lead people to pick up on commercials are less clear. Hence the famous quote variously attributed to Lord Leverhulme, Frank W. Woolworth, John Wanamaker and others: ‘I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.’

Nevertheless, the sheer amount of advertising that now bombards us means that it can be very difficult for a particular message to stand out.

This has led advertisers (and their agencies) to wage a war of one-upmanship with each other, boosting the cost and sophistication of commercials almost every year. While creativity is often seen as the key to success in this struggle, in reality what counts is an ability to understand the target market and work out what makes it tick.

The first thing the copywriter needs to do in devising a campaign is to work out what the client’s product, service or brand means to real people. Then the creative process begins. Perhaps more than any other copywriting discipline, advertising relies on creative talents to get its message across. The reason is simple. Ads are ten a penny and people do not go looking for them. Most advertising is ignored. So to have any impact at all, an ad needs to get noticed then create an emotional response in its target audience.

Bear in mind that what works for one audience may not (or probably won’t) be appropriate to another. One of my favourite poster ads from the 1990s, for a Japanese brand of beer, got slated in the press by a marketing head who could not understand the point of the creative. He was evidently not part of the target market. I evidently was, since I saw the ad, I liked it, and I bought the product.

Get to the point

Once you have worked out what will appeal to the target audience, get it across in as few words as possible. Ads cannot afford to be long-winded, because the space they occupy costs money and the audiences they are trying to reach are unlikely to care much about trying hard to get the point.

Working with clients

It is a sad fact that some of the best marketing ideas end up on the advertising equivalent of the cutting room floor. Most businesses (including very successful ones) tend to be highly conservative. Afraid of the consequences of getting it wrong, they tend to be reluctant to do anything that might rock the boat; and that usually includes embarking on outrageous advertising campaigns. As a result, most advertising tends to be a compromise between the initial creative idea and the rather more cautious views of the marketing bosses who foot the bill. This means two things for copywriters:

• first, you need to provide a strongly thought out rationale for why your ad campaign will work
• second, you need to be prepared to ditch, revise and re-work your ideas.

This process of testing and re-working ideas can, however, work to the benefit of the campaign. As mentioned above, pure creativity is not the only ingredient in successful advertising. Ads also need to bring out the right emotional response in their audiences or else they will simply be annoying. (And who has not been turned off a brand because of its ‘stupid ads’?) They also (as described in Chapter 8) need to employ the right tone for both the audience and the advertiser. The compromises arrived at in the development of an ad often involve the testing of dozens of different ideas. Some of these will be weeded out by the creative team, some by the client and others by research panels.