Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Revisiting Forgotten Ground Rules in Advertising

We are in the business to communicate effectively with our customers. Our all-important function is to understand our customer, to get to know her well, to like her and be his friend. Our business is to help her, inform her, and challenge her. Our mission is to make her feel good about us and our product and convince her with all enthusiasm and absolute honesty that we have something for her that she needs and wants. Something ( whether a product or a service ) that we believe in and are enthusiastic about, and want her to be enthusiastic about. So our as advertising people is to get results ; to sell a good product/ service to a good customer.

@ Step on the FIRST step
The most important and perhaps the most difficult part of evolving good advertising is finding out the Marketing Problem and then coming up with a brilliant creative way of solving it. What most fail to understand is that there is a difference between brilliant advertising that solves a problem and advertising that is just brilliant and does nothing to solve the marketing problem. These days a lot of foolish advertising is being done in the name of creativity, by a lot of foolish, indisciplined people.
What's worse, the once discerning band of brand managers and marketing managers have given way to irresponsible heads who allow these ads to be run with merely sappy, smart-aleck headlines and far-fetched ideas that have nothing to do with the product. Most of such ads can be recognised by the fact that your best friend or husband or wife thinks they saw a brilliant ad this so and so who...But if you ask them if they would buy they product, they look a little confused. These are the ads that make the person who did them look like a genius, but in market place, they make the advertiser who is paying big money to run them look like a fool.

@ Step Two: Step on the gas for strategic creativity
We are 100% for creativity in advertising, but but not total creativity. Lack of direction, strategy, thinking the problem through first, is like creating an ad in limbo rather than as a specific answer to a specific marketing problem.
The kind of creativity that works best is the one that begins with creating a creative selling strategy that has come out of marketing data and research data and has been agreed upon by the client. It is the one that is focussed, that covers ground with advertising ideas that aim at hitting the target aimed at.

@ Step Three: Define the problem
Having defined the problem and putting all wild creative thoughts on leash with focussed data before you, it's time to determine the creative selling strategy that can solve the marketing problem. To do this, just let go of all holds and allow your mind to flow free. With complete freedom, no restrictions, with all facts at hand, with all time you need backed with all encouragement that can help.

@Step Four: The Big job translating strategy into advertising
Now is the time to take a specific problem of translating a specific strategy into dynamic advertising. It's time to get people who think X to move to Y, to get that Y into the head of a lady whose brain is already clogged with a million messages. This is best done in the simplest, boldest, farthest, most original, most compelling,most memorable way possible. This is what gives away into brilliant advertising that is creative and yet sells the product. The directed kind of creativity that is brand of genius that some creative people have. They are the ones who keep coming up with wonderfully ingenious ways of getting there, again and again and again.