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The G spot Café answers their phone with “hello” so the caller has to ask, “Is that the G’spot?” The response is: “Ob, yes, yes, my God, you’ve found it.”

Advertising is an expensive business. That’s why the Crime of Being Earnest is so common. So much is at stake, it’s hard to stay loose.

Yet, spend a few moments before you waste your money and watch people flicking a cross TV channels or flipping through a magazine; you soon realize that unless you first stop people in their tracks, you’ll never get around to delivering your message.

Shock treatment is an answer. But unless your shock is relevant to the product, then it is pointless and dismissed by the audience.

This is where a little irreverence is a good thing. It provides a mild surprise, a spark of life, among all the deathly try-hards, with a pleasing lack of pretension.

Advertising festivals are full of wonderful examples of irreverent success. Award juries are clearly attracted to chutzpah; they reward ads that are cheeky and roguish.
 
It’s the same with real people: they love a bit of knowing naughtiness – otherwise the rock’n’roll industry may never have gotten started.

Yet, wherever you look, mainstream advertising, whether you’re in the US< UK, EEC or Southeast Asia, is numbingly PC.

Major Brands talk about having character and personality, yet they’re more dully politically correct than even the most colorless real person.

This is an opportunity that hasn’t escaped marketers with youth products. A brand is a badge of honour for teenagers even if more sensible and mature folk disapprove of something they buy. Same with its advertising.

Risqué is cool, particularly if only the prime target audience “gets it.” The Cannes award-Winning print ad from a couple of years ago, where the erect nipples of a bratty young couple gawking for the photo were in the exact shape of the playstation’s control teats, is one example.

Years ago, I remember a notorious magazine called OZ sough to do the most irreverent ads they could possibly conceive: One, for the Formal Wear Hire Company showed a news photo of a Buddhist monk in the act of self-immolation, with the headline:
He’s warm, but is he well dressed?

More recently, the Church of England in Birmingham, England, ran a poster campaign showing the crucifixion with the headline: “Body piercing? Jesus had his done 2,000 years ago.”

The Anglican high churchman, defending the campaign, said: “Anything that makes impact on the close up world is of value.” Damn right!

Irreverence works in many categories, not just because it can be provoking, but also because it is real.

Satire works in communication because it taps into (healthy) skepticism among consumers about the sincerity of advertising and brands.

Ads honest enough to admit that most people don’t believe ads – like the old Joe Isuzu Campaign – stand out because of it.

In South American, the rampant Kidnapping industry is a reality, so some irreverent advertisers have even successfully played on that.

One campaign recently showed a businessman being snatched off the street, subdued not by chloroform or guns, rather by the incredibly comfortable and sleep-making mattress the advertiser was promoting.

Too much advertising is too glib, too far removed from the laughable reality that everyday people cope with.

So create advertising around the way real people talk, not the way other advertising people write – greasy, slick and old-fashioned. Irreverence cuts ice because it demonstrates real humanity.

It says: “We are one of you, not one of them.” Monty Python comedian, John Cleese, once noted: “You usually find that it’s the thing that a small number of people object to that makes the large number of people laugh the most.”

While the examples I’ve quoted above may seem shocking and totally inappropriate for mainstream commercialism, don’t forget that, in their day, mainstream phenomena like the Beatles, Madonna and Shakespeare were considered irreverent.

When it comes to success, Forbes magazine’s editor, peter Kafka, talking about the rating in Forbes Top 100 celebrities list in 2003, commented: “Good press, bad press, all press in equal in our eyes.”

Be provocative. Be unafraid. Because, as Bill Bernbach noted, there is practically nothing that is not capable of boring us.

Australian-born advertising author, cutting-edge writer, and former creative director, Jim Aitchison, lives, lectures and broadcasts in Southeast Asia, where advertising is often strait-laced by government decree-yet the wonderful citizens there fairly bubble with untidy humanity. Here, he calculates the commercial virtues of a sense of naughtiness.

The second-greatest television commercial ever made, as voted in viewer polls and based on the collective opinion of the American marketing communications industry, is highly irreverent. When it was first screened in 1969, it certainly raised eyebrows as well as sales.

And even by today’s more liberal standards, it remains fresh and challenges convention.
The commercial is Volkswagen’s Funeral. The brief had been prosaic enough: Communicate the economy of owning a Volkswagen.

The solution: a funeral cortege of expensive limousines tailed by a sobbing young man in a lone VW Beetle.

The voice of the deceased, a rich old miser, intones the provisions of his Will as each beneficiary is seen riding in his or her limo. “To my wife, Rose, who spent money like there was no tomorrow, I leave one hundred dollars … and a calendar.

To my sons, Rodney and Victory, who spent every dime I ever gave them on fancy cars and fast women, I leave fifty dollars … in dimes.

To my business partner, Jules, whose only motto was ‘Spend! Spend! Spend!’ … I leave Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” At last we reach the young man in the VW.

“Finally, to my nephew Harold, who oft-times said, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” and who also oft-time said, ‘Gee, Uncle Max, it sure pays to own a Volkswagen,” I leave my entire fortune of one hundred billion dollars.”

It was the first time an American TV commercial had lampooned death ad funerals. Its creator, the legendary are director, Roy Grace, than at Doyle Dane Bernbach New York, is a staunch believer than any ingredient of irreverence in communications really makes people pay attention, wins their favour and amuses them.

“Everyone likes to see you take a poke at the establishment,” he chuckled when I met him. As Roy recalled ironically, the client’s brother had died just before the “Funeral” storyboard was presented.

Fortunately for Roy Grace, and millions of viewers, the client was not influenced by personal considerations.

Why is irreverence so important? Simply because it’s one thing to be funny, but another matter entirely to create an enduring piece of communication.

Mostly, humour alone is not enough. A bare joke wears thin after repeated viewings. Humour needs and edge.

Irreverence invests a commercial with a very different quality.  Irreverence has the potential to make the as an icon, to enter the public consciousness and remain there long after the commercial has finished playing.

Significantly VW funeral was voted into second place in 2000, 30 years after it had first run.

The commercial voted into first place, Apple’s 1984, arguably also contained a big dose of irreverence, irreverence, certainly towards IBMD Simply put, despite all the “funny” ads made since 1969 nothing better had come along. VW funeral remained a defining moment in television advertising.

Irreverence can be applied in four ways:
• Lampoon the client and product
• Lampoon people that people love to hate (rude hotel employees, for example)
• Lampoon the establishment (lawyers, politicians, the police, officialdom and authority figures)
• Lampoon the human condition, including death.

Lampooning the client and the product calls for a certain bravery, admittedly, but it’s very sound strategically and psychologically.

We all rather like people who can tell a joke against themselves. We’d like to spend time with them, have a drink with them.

Self-depreciating humour signals they don’t take themselves so seriously because they’re confident of themselves, and comfortable with who they are.

They don’t resort to pomposity. In the hands of Bill Bernbach, Helmut Krone and Roy Grace, Volkswagen engaged in many classic executions of the notion that VW is “ugly but it works.”

Another master of this genre was a Sydney used-care dealer Ron Hodgson, a major TV advertiser in the 1970s.

While his competitors desperately tried to communicate sincerity and integrity, Hodgso pioneered politically incorrect humour with himself as the butt of the joke.

One memorable commercial featured British comedian Warren Mitchell in his Alf Garnett character, challenging the honesty of the client. (“You believe that, mate, you’d believe anything … “) Hodgson clearly recognized the fact that he had to work harder to win the trust of cynical viewers, and he won it through irreverence.

Lampooing people we love to hate is very satisfying and disarming. Roy Grace employed this form of irreverence when he made the famous American Tourister commercial where a gorilla hurls a suitcase around in a cage, smashing it against the bars and stomping on it.

The voice-over addressed not the consumer but, rather, those who would handle the consumer’s luggage; “Dear clumsy bellboys, brutal cab drivers, careless doormen, ruthless porters, and all butterfingered luggage handlers all over the world, have we got a suitcase for you … “It was irreverence that truly resented!

If the connection with the brand is appropriate, then lampooning the establishment wins lots of friends.

For example, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington satirized politicians. In their delightful commercial, a politician canvasses for votes door-to door and is offered a piece of Whittaker’s ‘Good Honest” chocolate.

Immediately after he takes a bite, he tells the truth. “As your MP, I’ll be abusing the free airfares, as will my wife and my mistress … I’ll go joyriding in government limos … I’ll spend a lot of time in bars, massage parlors …”

Lowe & partner India went even further in their campaign for The Times of India. Demonstrating how well the newspaper understood the Indian ethos, they satirized money-minded cricketers who endorsed a barrage of products.

Next, they bravely satirized India’s corrupt bureaucracy: an old man, trying to lodge his papers at a government department, is shunted from one shabby desk to another in a sped-up, band parody of a hockey match.

Irreverence directed at the human condition is enormously powerful. Clitt Freeman & Partners New York have titled at windmills for clients such as Little Caesars Pizza. They lampooned babies and hospitals.

Even that sacred cow called death did not escape. To promote the movie The Minus Man, Freeman showed two young adults so engrossed in talking about the movie that the girl ran late for her job.

By the time she had sprinted to where she worked, she discovered two elderly people floating face down in an indoor swimming pool. Only then do we realize that she was supposed to be the lifeguard.

Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney. (Under the creative direction of this project’s originator, Michael Newman) applied gram irreverence for client No Frills Funereal.

The whole sentiment of the campaign was “When you’re gone, you’re gone.” One commercial contained a black screen throughout.

The first caption appeared with the message: “This is what it looks like to be buried in a $25,000 funeral.” Retaining the black screen, the next caption observed: “This is what it looks like to be buried in a $5,000 funeral.”

The golden rule is to make sure your irreverence isn’t irrelevant, The gorilla was relevant to the strength of the suitcase.

The funeral was a parallel world to cars (it would not have worked so well for a product like chewing gum, for instance) and a miser’s funeral was relevant to the economy of owning a Volkswagen. Being “good honest” chocolate was all about the truth. No Frills was all about no frill and being thrifty. And so it goes.

In this age of cynical, disbelieving viewers, irreverence lets a message bond better with the audience. Audiences are all too ready to laugh at advertisers, and mostly with good reason.

If we can accept that reality, smart marketers should factor irreverence into their communications and make the brand-consumer conversation more real and more rewarding.
Keywords: advertising, ads, irreverence,

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Originality is a boon to the advertising industry –I don’t mean intrinsically, in its own right, as some kind of artistic outlet for otherwise unemployable, young creative people.

Fact is, human beings respond faster to something original. Freshness and lightness have immediacy. Immediacy is attractive.

We are hard-wired to look for “the new.” The novelty of new focuses attention and as the first job of an ad is to get noticed (because only then will it be listened to), campaigns with truly original ideas have proved to be the most compelling of selling tools.

Originality is the wow factor. Without a healthy dose of it, the most thoughtful strategy and worthy intentions won’t get your ad up off the page. “Make it new for me,” implored the poet, Ezra pound.

In these days of utter media clutter, originality is the price of entry into people’s attention span; if they’ve seen it before, then they’ll dismiss it immediately.

The ordinary is overlooked, and the extraordinary is given a moment’s glance. “What was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality,” said Bill Bernbach, way back in the 1960s.

Now, some commentators are arguing that modern society is moving from the “information age” into the so-called “creative age.” Brilliant.

Though I can’t say I’ve noticed a surge of originality across too many advertising markets recently. Why?

Perhaps it’s still as another great American, scientist Howard Allen, observed: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

If so, then business leaders must change the way they think about ideas and about how their company cultures reflect that thinking. Business must cultivate a blood lust for ideas.

Easy to say, but we all know in the buttoned-up corridors of the corporate world that originality, by its nature, can be hard to appreciate in the raw.

Yet so many clients demand of their agency, “Please give me something like so and so …
The point is, when the first “so and so” was done, there was nothing like it at all.

That’s likely why it worked in the first place. It was in the first place. A truly original idea has no reference point.

If a thought is original, then there is nothing like it to easily judge it against; research is no help at the concept stage.

It was the philosopher Edmund Buke who put it succinctly: “You can’t plan the future by the past”

Which, in turn, causes another problem for us ad creators, because it means we’re often asking clients to take a step into the unknown. We may have made a creative leap, but the client must also make a leap of faith.

Creativity isn’t a linear process, by definition, so all the logic and cognitive analysis led to the creative brief is often of limited use. This is why, in some ways, it’s even harder to buy a great idea than to have one.

Yet, in my experience, a client who has tasted the blood of a great idea usually becomes a totally different beast.

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions,” wrote author Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Problem is usual with advertising, half pregnancy. Too many advertisers try to get away with only using token originality, say, just in the filmmaking or photography or some other crafted area.

This is not usually enough. To be effective, look for originality in the basic thinking. The core idea.

Is there a pattern behind progress? When Columbus sailed west to get to India, when Gutenberg changed the rules of communication, when Luther challenged the Vatican, when Henry Ford revolutionized production, when Ghandi peacefully toppled the colonial power, when Konrad Zuse built the first computer, they did not take a step.
Whenever great minds change the world, they jump.

The same holds true for experiences. All great experiences are closely related to a jump.
To jumps is the simple and universal principle of moving people.

The Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, coined a term for the very feeling caused by a jump: He called it “flow” It is the state of mind one experiences between being bored and being frightened to death.

Flow is literally the mood humans strive for. One may call it motivation, excitement, thrill – whatever.

Great communication carries people to this special point; it makes them cross a border emotionally, rationally or, at best, both.

People are also brought to this point by admen who have passed this border by themselves in the first place.

All great campaigns in advertising history are based on a jump. When bill Bernabach made Avis say “We try harder”, he broke the unwritten rule that you must never allow yourself to be perceived as second.

When Volkswagen asked the world to “Think small,” they left behind the previously unanimous declaration that bigger is better.

To shift from stepping to jumping is not just a privilege of the titans of (advertising) history. It is not even a privilege of an elite.

It is the behaviour of every baby that discovers the world. All you have to do is to look back at your time as a toddler when you did dramatic things such as learning to walk, to speak, to sing and many other jumps.

Although all my professional life I have benn with the same agency (no jumps there, to be honest) the start, at least, was a jump.

At 6pm on November 9, 1989, E was watching CNN in my dormitory in North Carolina, when , far away, the Berline Wall crumbled.

I called Thomas Heilmann, a friend and a student of law, and we decided to make a jump. We went to East Germany to establish one of the first independent communications companies in the disappearing communist world.

No money, no professional experience, no telephone, no office, no clients – no problem, as long as there is the opportunity to jump.

An outstanding ad always tells a story that involves the jump of an individual or a group. They do something first and surprise their readers and viewers.

Ask yourself: Could your idea be considered as new? If so, you are on the right path to touch people’s hearts and minds.

No news! That was the story for another campaign. No news is a jump for only one industry: the media.

The grassroots paper die tageszeitung was desperately look for subscribers. The paper, acclaimed for its irreverent headlines, was so broke that is could not even afford an ad campaign. However.

The editor, Bascha Mika, liked to jump. It was decided to show consumers what would be missed if the paper folded.

And that became a weekly event. Every week she blackmailed her readers: 300 new subscriptions were demanded by the end of the week, or the weekend edition would be published without something dear to the readers.

In most weeks more than 300 new subscribers were convinced. Occasionally, however, there were only 221 new readers, so the paper was published without any headlines. It turned out to be a collector’s edition that sold particularly well.

During that one summer, more that 5,000 new subscriptions were sold, far above expectation and without one single ad placed.

Successful communication ideas surprise people and make them than, or feel, anew. The more visual, the better.

What comes to your mind thinking about an insect repellent? Wouldn’t it be great if they turned you into a frog? Depicting consumers as a frog?

Pellit Jumped and got an ad that stands out. A friendly, human frog wearing a tie. “Make yourself unattractive,” he suggests.

A naïve look at traditional billboards columns gave birth to a campaign that uses the clichés of beauty to sell designer hats. The faces of beautiful women were placed without any addition on these columns.

The artfully crafted tops of the columns all of a sudden were seen as hats.
Communication scientists have identified a model that explains the law of jump academically.

Volker Trommsdorff, former president of the German Society of Advertising Science (one is not really surprised to find an institution like this in Germany) and noted marketing scholar, defined two contradictory effects in creative communication.

The effect of motivation is juxtaposed by the effect of difficulty. No difficulty means no motivation, just indifference. Too much difficulty, however, causes confusion.

The art of communication is to jump far enough that people get involved and still get the point the optimum.

Can advertisers jump too far? Yes, but it rarely happens. Compared with the bulk of advertising, which is both boring and unforgettable, eases of confusion seem negligible.

Imagine standing on a railway platform in – let’s say Berlin, and a locomotive slowly passes by.

Nothing motivating, yet. Imagine, however, that the train carries an ad saying “Not too bad – But have you ever been to the sate of Baden-Wurttemberg?”

This is how the federal state in southwestern Germany appealed to travelers. The lord mayor of Frankfurt got the message.

She ordered that the Frankfurt buses were not allowed to carry the ad any longer. Thank you for making the Baden-Wurttemberg buses move even more people.

By altering a well-known symbol just a little bit, Mercedes-Benz caught the eye of a very small target group.

The official sign for handicapped puts a wheel under the sitting individual. The ad turns it into a steering wheel and advertises “You are not handicapped,” as long as you drive a specially equipped Mercedes.

Mercedes crossed the border in using a symbol many mainstream brands would not dare to touch.

And they wee applauded by the handicapped for bringing their issue to a broader audience.

Another group that receives anything but public recognition are the drivers of heavy trucks. They slow down traffic and cause jams.

So wouldn’t the best ad space be billboards at traffic hot spots? Almost. The very best pace is the of the truck.

It allows the driver a small conversation about his job and his contribution to society in general and the driver behind in particular.

Mercedes-Benz offered trucker’s giant stickers cover the back of their lorries. The headlines are friendly explanations that every one understands: “As long as sausage cannot be sent by e-mail, we have the share the road,” And, “Of course I am slower than you.

I am carrying your red wine home.” Again, something new was done and received wide attention.

Over 1,000 trucks are continuing their participation two years after the imitative was launched.

For the sister brand of Mercedes, the tiny smart cars, the conventional wisdom of brochures was put aside. Smart cars are so small that two can easily park in the space required by a regular car.

This inspired the unique design for a brochure. The regular format can be separated into two smaller, identical brochures, One to keep, one to give away to a friend.
 
The campaign for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung violated everything one may have learned in art school about celebrity campaigns.

A campaign that jumps right at the optimum spot of perception breaks the rule of testimonial advertising and can involve heads of government, world renowned writer, artists and celebrities.

The celebrities are not see. A small printed headline reads “There is always a clever mind behind it.”

Super model Nadja Auermann, movie director Billy Wilder, statesman Helmut Kohl and the like were asked to pose for a photograph that covers their face with a newspaper!

The viewers of the ad are invited to guess who is hidden. Only a small by-line uncovers the secret.

Among giraffes, the long-legged beauty Nadja is reading, in the middle of the Hollywood sign Billy Wilder reads, Cardinal Karl, Lehmann reads in a flock of sheep, and on a giant ship named Europe the champion of European Union, Helmut KohI, takes a break and reads the paper.

The campaign received more free media than paid-for ad space. It made headline news over and over. Museums are collecting it, and the circulation of the paper has surpassed 400,000 copies for the first time.

One of Germany’s most talked about ads features the CEO of Deutsche Bank, Hilmar Kopper.

In a press conference, he made a remark that has haunted him ever since. In a giant real estate break up, he called the unpaid bills of some handymen “Peanuts.”

An outcry rocked the media. Isn’t this evidence of the cold arrogance of corporate fat cats?

Listening to a speech of his on banking issues, an idea came to my mind. Why not ask him to participate in a campaign.

The picture: He is sitting on a mountain of peanuts. Mr. Kopper showed good humour. When approached he laughed and said: “Why not?”

As soon as his schedule coincided with the peanut harvest, a picture was taken in Georgia (close to plaines, by the way).

A symbol of corporate power pokes fun at himself, bringing his own gaffe into an advertising picture.

Kopper made a giant jump hardly anyone had expected, possible for a top executive from one of the largest banks in the would.

Through this unexpected ad, he turned his image around. Even his hardest critics, the media, heralded his sense of humour and shed a friendly light one the banker.

The law of jump involves everybody: the creatives, strategists, clients, celebrities, the media and, of course, the public. It’s easy to apply.

You’ll know when you’ve crossed the line from stepping to jumping. Your audience will, too.

Jump and enjoy!

Keywords: advertising, ad, ads, campaigns, jump, advertisers,

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If Al Ries’ Positioning was probably the most influential Law of advertising in the 70s, then Jean Marie Dru’s notion of Disruption has been powerfully successful in the noughties.

His philosophy reached back to the great campaigns of VW, Nike, Apple, Heineken, among others, to look what they had in common; he realized there was always, quite literally, a before and an after – a form of change characterized by a sudden transformation in conditions.

A breakthrough, a discontinuity, a creative leap, a revolution, a “disruption.”
From this analysis, Dru distilled not just a credo, but a redo, a new way to nurture great ideas, a way of thinking, a methodology.

How to go about systematically generating big ideas? He called it Destruction and now his TBW network has adopted it worldwide. 

Active, pregnant with opportunity, with a whiff of irreverence and creativity, it carefully harvests ideas from the emotional world of anarchy and mystery.

Conventions train us to do the conventional. Accepted wisdoms, where everyone is thinking the same, usually means no one is really thinking; familiarity breeds inertia.

The word “disruption” is sometimes used in English, and in French, to describe a sudden opening of an electrical circuit.

This image is apt. Inherent to disruption is a surge of energy. It is at once both strategy and action.

The aim of the Law of Disruption is to reframe the brand so that the market sees it differently.

The brand is de-familiarised. Or re-complexified. In other words, consumers are made suddenly to see brand characteristics they had overlooked before. The result is that peoples’ interest in a brand is suddenly renewed.

In this way, as he writes, McDonald’s is know selling fast food to the fussy French, playstation is selling computer games to adults, and the US is buying Vodka that’s not Russian.

The Law of Disruption acknowledges that having achieved a great positioning, the battle is still not over.

Now attacks come all the time from competitors with new angles, and new opportunities open up in newly created spaces.

Apple’s disruption, for example, overturned the conventional notion that, for high technology products, communication must revolve around product features.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s boss, showed that a brand “is not about bytes and boxes, it’s about values.”

Brands should be verbs rather than merely nouns. Brands should stand for something instead of everything.

Too much advertising today is satisfied with maintaining the status quo, staying within common brand imagery and me-too values. This is doomed thinking.

Advertising is at its considerable best when used as a sharp weapon. So advertise to transform the business. Make ads that go for the jugular. “Be a canon at a hare hunt,” as Schopenhauer wrote.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I wouldn’t go as far as claiming that the majority of the advertising industry is crazy, but you have to admit that too many ads out there look the same and say the same, and so just get ignored.

At TBWA, we all agree that if you’re going to go to the trouble to make advertising – and ask your clients to underwrite its considerable expense – then make sure it won’t easily be ignore.

Make sure it rewards your audience with elements of surprise and delight and the shock of recognition.

Respect people’s intelligence, their sense of adventure, and their wit. And while you’re at it, knock them on their collective ear by revealing your clients in a whole new light.

Grab unclaimed territory by showing why what your clients do is singular, extraordinary, even world-changing.

And in the process, make sure your clients enjoy the stature they deserve: prominent in the culture, famous for the particular ideal they embody, and much more prosperous as a result.

We also agree that in order to do this, you can’t simply rely on the creature’s spark of genius.

Creativity has to happen at the strategic level before the creative work begin. And what you need is BIG ideas. But how do you go about systematically generating big ideas?

We looked to the outside world for inspiration, – to history, to science, to business … We realized that the ideas that stood out from the crowd and got noticed had fundamentally changed perception.

There was a before and an after, a form of change characterized by a sudden transformation in conditions: a breakthrough, a discontinuity, a quantum leap, a revolution – a “disruption.”

And what all these ideas had in common was that they had challenged the prevailing ideas of the time.

Before Copernicus, the heavens rotated around the earth. Before Pasteur, there were no germs and so no immunization from them.

Before Ford, automobile transportation was the luxury of a few. Each disruption changed the world, and our perception of it, utterly.

We also noticed that these ideas had all been driven by a vision. Copernicus and Pasteur already had an intuitive feeling about the theories that they went on to prove.

Ford envisioned democratizing automobile transportation. They all had a sense of where they were heading.

And so Disruption, the TBWA philosophy and methodology, came into being. Admittedly, Description sounds difficult, unsettling and fundamentally frightening.

Why would anybody disrupt on purpose? The first thing to understand is that Di8ssrupstion is not about destruction.

It’s about creation – creating something dynamic to replace something that has become static.

Disruption is not just a way to come up with advertising ideas. It’s a way to think. Disruption is about systematically breaking through the barriers that shape and limit standard business approaches.

It’s about challenging conventional wisdom and imagining new possibilities. It’s about overturning the assumptions and biases that get in the way of fresh and visionary ideas.
 
Disruption is the art of asking better questions in order to understand the marketplace at a much deeper level of reality, and then to use this as a strategic tool.
 
The Disruption Methodology – A 3-step Process
We start by identifying the conventions, the unquestioned assumptions, which shape all aspects of a company and help maintain the status quo: corporate, marketing, consumer and communication conventions.

Once we’ve assessed the context, we can look at how the different facets of a brand, company or category’s activity fit together, and understand why things are as they are.

We then move on to the Disruption phase where we challenge the conventions in order to find the flaw in conventional thinking.

Conventional assumptions create giant opportunities if you’re willing to take the time to actually examine and question them.

This is the imaginative stage where we look for inspiring, refreshing and daring ideas to overturn the convention to the benefit of the company, an idea that defies market or category rules – a disruption.

Finally, we identify a Vision is more than an advertising proposition or a brand positioning, it is a total culture.

The vision becomes the destination against which all strategic and marketing decisions are measure. The disruptive ideas we come up with are a way to get to the vision as fast as possible.

What we’re doing is taking something that sometimes happens on its own and turning it into a conscious method of generating ideas.

By thinking in this way, we are able to retire low-yielding ideas and launch new, highly profitable ones.

Disruption helped make playstation the number one game brand worldwide by appealing to a previously untapped adult audience.

It demonstrated that premium vodka doesn’t have to be Russian; witness the success of the iconic brand Absolute, unknown vodka from Sweden prior to its launch in the US.

And it proved that it’s possible to love McDonald’s the company behind the brand, making France one of the fast food chain’s most profitable markets.

Disruption: A system for people Who Hate Systems
The minute you talk about methodologies, creative people get skeptical. I’m the first one to be suspicious of processes because they can be paralyzing.

We are looking for fresh, imaginative thinking, even in the analysis stages. As the owner and CEO of Lego said, “People who are curious, creative and imaginative – who have a childlike urge to learn – are best equipped to thrive in a challenging world and be the builders of our common future.”

Disruption can only be successful as a discipline if it is playful. So we have made play a discipline and our discipline playful.

Childlike thinking and naïveté are encouraged. Einstein said that one of his greatest strengths was the ability to ask childlike questions.

Disruption Workshops
The most valuable disruptions occur when we are able to work hand in hand with the client who knows the ins and outs of the company better than anyone.

This is why we have developed Disruption Workshops and we encourage all our clients to participate in them.

There is nothing more productive than finding a disruptive idea together. The client and the agency are in total agreement, avoiding the sometimes tricky task of selling an idea to a client who has not been involved in idea generation upfront.

It’s fun and rewarding exercise for both the client and the agency. Standard Bank in South Africa overhauled the entire company with a new vision and credo after participating in a Disruption Workshop.

Masterfoods launched a disruptive campaign for the Whiskas brand in the US in which cat are celebrated for being cats, not pets: “Your cat has an inner beast, feed it.”

Disruption and the Need for Constant Reinvention
Apple is a perfect example of a company that knows how to constantly reinvent itself by disrupting the status quo.

Take the introduction of Macintosh. The convention was that people should become “computer literate,” meaning that they should learn to work the way computers do.

Steve Job’s Disruption was: “Computer should be people literate, designed to work the way people do.”

The vision that computers should be at the service of mankind, and not the reverse, was inspirational and generated disruptive advertising.

For 60 seconds during the 1984 super Bowl, the famous spot entitled “1984” promised a brave new world free from the dehumanizing effects of computer technology.

“On January 24, 1984, Apple launches Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won’t be like 1984,”

The next day, 200,000 people showed up to take a look at the Macintosh. Just six hours after the unveiling, sales reached $3.5 million.

The allusion to George Orwell’s novel made this an unforgettable commercial. The advertising approach was as revolutionary as the product itself.

With the Macintosh campaign, Apple added an advertising discontinuity to a business discontinuity.

Of course, disruptions eventually become conventions themselves. Apple’s Macintosh spurred the revolution of the PC over the monolithic mainframe.

By the 1990s, PC manufacturers had caught up by developing machines that were easier to use and cheaper. This made Apple’s user-friendly characteristic less of a discriminating factor.

Nearly 15 years later. Apple needed to disrupt again. The “Think Different” campaign featuring great creators of the 20th century who … are not fond of rules and have no respect for the status quo” launched Apple’s new vision: Apple is a company that makes “tools for creative minds.”

The vision sprang from Steve Job’s Disruptive convention that the brand “is not about bytes and boxes, it’s about values.”

The disruption overturned the convention that for high technology products, communication must revolve around product features.

The “Think Different” campaign not only re-inspired computer users, it galvanized Apple employees and heralded the introduction of he iMac, the best product expression of the newfound vision: a powerful computer with an aesthetical design (and, unlike all other computers, – colorful, not being).

The iMac also declared Apple’s view of the future of computing – the floppy disk is dead.

The launch of the iMac is now considered the most successful computer introduction in Apple’s history, selling two million in one year.

“Think Different” would have been a great motto for the concept of Disruption.
Today, Apple is disrupting yet again with the introduction of iPod and the iTunes Music Store, allowing both Mac and PC users to legally download digital music.

This is one step towards Apple’s newest vision to be at the hub of the digital lifestyle. Apple’s never rests on its laurels, but always seeks to create new market spaces. Apple understands that you have to disrupt or be disrupted.

Great Brands Take stands
The nirvana we’re going for is powerful vision. We work with our clients to find the strategic ideas that change the rules in their favour.

Once you’ve done that, you can find the new path. All highly successful brands embrace a vision. They take a stand for the idea they represent.

When you have a client that represents something that is their own, it’s easy – well, a lot easier, anyway – to come up with intrusive campaigns that help those companies make great leaps.

Our goals is to make our clients famous for the ideas they stand for, fame way beyond just having a good ad campaign. We’re searching for that famous idea that can drive a company forward for many years.

Disruption is not anarchy. It is a strategically directed shake-up. It’s more than a process; it’s a way of thinking.

It’s a way to look at our client’s business and find opportunity. Disruption means viewing the world with a curious, open mind.

It means taking nothing for granted. It means being bold and brave. If you want your business to survive and prevail in a fast-changing world, you have to disrupt the world before the world disrupts you.

The point of Disruption is simple. Invent the future so that you can own the future instead of being evicted by it. Disrupt or be disrupted.

Keywords: brand, ads, advertising, disruption,

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One of America’s most successful exports has been canned laughter. It’s the staple diet of the world’s sitcoms, home video shows, comedies, and is now even used in children’s shows.

I’m amazed it’s not used in TV commercials (other than ironically). After all, telling the audience at home when something is funny would be useful in many TVC scripts, who seem to think they’re being funny when they seriously aren’t.

There’s a thing I cal ad-funny. It’s when something is only funny to the ad people who made it.

It’s not “real funny,” because it’s really not funny. Perhaps real people have a higher funny bone threshold than ad people; how else can so many unfunny scripts be classified as comedy?

Why are there so many clichéd caricatures masquerading as wit? Goofy Voices and stupid expressions aren’t funny: they’re forced and fake.

Most radio commercials fall into this category. And many formula-driven TV spots too. It has given humour a bad name with some advertisers.

A client once accused me of using humour as a first resort. I lamely explained that creative teams don’t always set out to write a humorous idea, but rather, when you’re searching for the shortest, sharpest way to express a thoughts, the answer is often a compression of a couple of different notions. This synthesis is often surprising and elicits the humour of surprise.

Clive James, who once famously described the Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as looking like a bunch of walnuts wrapped in a condom, said he wasn’t trying to be funny at the time.

He was simply trying to “describe properly,” to convey something in the least number of words.

Compression leads naturally to humour. And, happily, humour leads naturally to a smile. An example of how important smiles are comes from a Chinese hospital that recently reported a significant drop in the number of complaints, after ordering staff to how at least eight teeth while smiling at patients.

Humour is so powerful in advertising (when it really is funny) because it’s a bridge that links the brand and the consumer. Laughter, it’s been said, is the shortest distance between two people.

A smile is a meeting of minds. Now, that’s truly interactive advertising. A smile means your audience is literally and physically responding to the message (and by association, the advertiser behind it), and engaging with it in a positive way.

Wit invites participation. Humour makes an ad more likely to be repeated by word of mouth.

Even better, it makes people feel more comfortable talking about and recommending the brand because, in a very real way, they’ve taken part in a little of the brand experience.

Humour also adds fame and topicality to the brand when people say, “Did you see that ad where…”

Humour is the point where your brand’s personality is at it’s most human, touching a facet of your audience’s personality and tickling their fancy as well.

More than any other sales tool, humour invokes a special kind of collective intimacy. In brief, it’s a shortcut to being a likeable brand.

The problem is that advertising is not always very good at it. Many clients would like to produce funny ads, but business today is serious.

Jokes are hard to justify in rationale-driven meetings. If you’re going to go funny with your campaign, you better make sure it’s a real giggle on the cold, pale page, even when the account executive reads it out aloud.

Different countries, like people, find different things funny, which is why national or even parochial campaigns are usually better a humour than global campaigns.

An interesting aside, here, is the example of Australian beer advertising. Australians are widely known to like a laugh and love a beer or two.

Yet, for decades, much Aussie beer advertising was turgid, try-hard, and stubbornly unfunny. It took an Englishman to show the way.

M&C Saatchi founding partner, James Laowther’s UK campaigns for Australian brands like Foster’s and XXXX used the classic drollery of he Aussie personality to hugely successful, and humorous, effect.

Claud Hopkins once said, “People don’t buy from clowns.” At that point the clouds opened, a deep vibrant voice spake “Wrong, claud Love,” and deposited several thousand tons of Volkswagens, crates of John Smiths, Foster’s, Stella Artois, Budweiser, Tango, a BA jumbo jet and a whole lot of drunk patrons of club 18-30 to mention but a few upon his distinguished pate.

If he had survived the incident, Claude would undoubtedly have revised his opinion.
Humour, not only wins most of the awards at most festivals, but also wins more business for clients than any other tool in the advertiser’s armoury.

Why? Because logic can make you think a product is a sensible choice. But only humour can make you like it.

Because only humour requires the actual participation of the viewer, so he/she is more likely to remember it.

And because fish swim, snakes bite, pandas eat bamboo, they all have sex… but only humans laugh.

Laughter is the common currency that humans use to make life seem better. Advertising is trying to persuade people that their products make life better. So the alliance of the two is a match made in heaven.

Speaking of heaven, that same voice spake unto me on the mountaintop – well, Golden Square actually – and did burn a few commandments about humour upon my Quark Express in letters of fire.

Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor – He’s Dead Funny
The best jokes and the bet ads aren’t based on imagination. They’re based on observation, observations of those funny creatures all around us … people.

If we want to get our products into people’s lives, we’d better know about them. So the first thing to do before you pick up a piece of paper is look at the world and the people around you. No, not the Groucho club … real people.

See how they speak, how they gesture, how they tell whoppers, how they kiss and fart and how they never look at each other in a lift.

That’s why they’ve never found Lord Lucan. He’s hiding in a lift. And how they use, talk about or behave with your product. And I’m not talking about research. I’m talking about you, the creative person, observing.

Handy hint: When you see anyone do something strange or funny, write it down. You can nick it and use it later.

Thou Shalt not Kill … but Wounding is Quite a Laugh
Neil Simon once said, “All humour is based on hostility. That’s why World War II is so funny.”

Other than the questionable conclusion, the observation is faultless. If we’re honest, there’s nothing that constitutes a greater source of pleasure than the weaknesses or misfortunes of others.

In advertising, it can be used to great effect to get people to remember your brand name. Who can forget the logo of out post.com after seeing live gerbils being fired through it?
It can be used to dramatise a product benefit.

In a Foster’s tactical ad, we used a crocodile decapitating a bungee jumper to demonstrate how our new hit pump stops the beer losing its head.
 
It can also be used to assail the weaknesses of your real or imagined rivals. Witness the magnificently painful foreign games lampooned by Fox TV.

And some time ago, I used it for Schweppes to parody other people’s advertising, with John Cleese as the assassin.

At the time Calvin Klein was leading a vogue for pretentious black and white ads with equally pretentious and meaningless dialogue.

Schweppes had a culture of dry and ironic ads. But we wanted it to be more modern. What better way to put yourself alongside but, at the same time, above modern icons but unmercifully and woundingly extracting the piss from it.

So we took the slightly meaningless … and turned it into total but very beautifully photographed bollocks.

Handy bit: When doing parody, you have to execute it as well as the original. And do it seriously. Just take it to absurd extremes.

Thou Shalt not Bear False Withness
Did you read right? Is this guy telling you to tell the TRUTH! Yes, you did. And yes I am.

At the beginning of these tablets, the man up there said the reason humour and advertising make such good stalemates is that the best examples of both are based on observation. In other words, they’re based on truth.

Many people outside our business and I suspect some inside, think advertising is about “creative lying.” But the best ads are actually based on truth.

They have to be, otherwise people will not believe them and will not buy the products. And that’s why good humour and good advertising so often go hand in hand. Here I must distinguish between “factual” and “truthful.”

The great America humorist PJ O’Rourke said “Humour is by its nature more truthful than factual.”

Humorous ads may exaggerate the facts, abuse or ignore them to get at the truth, but at the core of the idea is truth to which people can say, “Yes, it is like that.”

And funnily enough, the best example or agency has of this is an ad we did for BA with PJ himself.

Here he paints a picture of Britain as a dog – Obsessed, rain – soaked country, where we eat revolting curry and invent games that on one understands and then get beaten by the rest of the world at them, in other words, the truth … albeit somewhat selective & embellished:

When he sets this against the fact that we also have the world’s favorite airline, you will believe that too.

The only thing I reset is his assertion that we prefer tea to sex. But then, I drink coffee and have four kids.

Handy Hint: After writing your script, ask yourself if it’s funny up front. Then ask yourself if it’s true underneath. Well, a bit true.

Thou Shalt Commit Adulteration
According to the dictionary, adulteration is making something impure by adding foreign or incongruous substances to it. And that is exactly what comedy does.

PG Woodhouse said, “Comedy is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.”
And Max Sennet put it even more revealingly, “humour is when an idea going in one direction meets an idea going in the opposite direction.”

So if you want to do a funny and revealing ad, try putting two wildly different things together. And the key here is what I call the “What if” question. 
 
With our Foster’s campaign, we asked, “what if” people of different nationalities drank Foster’s and started behaving like Australians?

So, we wrote the line: “He who drinks Australian, thinks Australian, and then we had a Frenchman treating a beautiful woman like a baggage handler, a German asking his kidnapped wife where she put the golf clubs and a Japanese robot in a threesome with a can of beer, a vacuum cleaner and a microwave oven.

In Australia, our guys asked “What if” you tried to find another way of saving as much money as you do with ANZ bank? We had a woman; blacking in the hole in her tights with magic marker.

In my late night imaginings, I wonder “what if” Romeo and Juliet were only able to conduct their love affair with text messages?

So I want to do a series of “The classics on text.” (“What if” you tried to nick this idea? I’d sue.)

Handy hint: Take your product and look at it not from the point of view of the client or even the agency.
 
Thou Shalt use Lots of Graven images .. Visual Gags Rule, ok
Back in the caves, before satire, parody, irony and pathos or any other words for that matter, had been invented, nothing would make your average Neanderthal giggle quite as much as a mate’s animal skin falling down while he was chasing a hairy mammoth or the like.

To complete his joy, the mate would then trip over his animal skin (they didn’t have banana skins in those days) and do himself severe damage.

The sight gag or visual humour is born. Thousands of years later, having invented language, philosophy the internal combustion engine, flight, television, quantum physic and those machines that serve tennis balls at you, humans still just adore sight gags.

Here are a couple of stories to illustrate how you can never underestimate the hilarity of a good old-fashioned pratt fall.

I have done a talk called “Laughing All the Way to the Bank: How Humour Sells” in three wildly different places.

California, shanaghai and South Africa. In them I would talk about different styles of humour, showing films that illustrate each style and then measuring the response from the audience with a “laughometer” … actually just a sound meter but hey, we all know how important the brand name is.

In the visual humour section, I would show the famous Hamlet phone booth ad, the Fox Sport “If only Golf was Hockey” ad and a Dutch ad for the football pools, which shows a man pretending to open a glass door for someone and laughing his rocks off when the guy nearly knocks himself out walking into the door. In Monterey, Shanghai and Johannesburg, these got the biggest laugh of the lot.

And here’s an example from my own experience. In our Calvin Klein spoof for Schweppes, much of the humour comes from the deadpan nonsensical dialogue, executed as only John Cleese can.

Cleese: “Why do we walk like one dancer in a dream?”
Woman; “Because, When I step on you shadow, it is I that feels the pain.” And so on ad nauseam.

The script called for the girl to slap John once, a la Calvin Klein. Paul Weiland then asked here to punch him in the solar plexus as an extra visual gag.

When we cut the film together, there was a lot of debate about whether the solar plexus punch was too obvious, oude and generally OTT.

So we tested two versions of the film, one with the punch, one without.
Not only did the “With punch” version win, but the punch was the precise moment in the film when silent amusement exploded into audible laughter.

The ad went on to win the ad of the year at the British Television awards.

Handy bin: Most of the time, aspire to do something witty, challenging and intelligent. But every so often, a crass, primitive punch in the goolies is well in order.

People Coveting Their Neighbor’s Ass Is Always Good For A Giggle
Someone once wrote, “Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.” That may explain my rather feeble grades at university.

But on one would describe sex as a great distraction to selling. As everyone knows, sex is, in an unfortunate expression once used to me, “a powerful tool for the adman.”

But here, I’m not talking about the sex that stirs up the hormones, but sex that tickles that other born – the funny bone, for, the fact is that sex is as likely to raise a snigger as anything else.

In the18th century, Lord Chesterton said of sex; “The pleasure is momentary, the poisons ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

The old dodger had a point, and even today, you can sell people onto something by paling on that shared recognition that sex can not only be magnificent fun, but magnificently funny.

Who can forget, the magnificent Braathens Airline ad advertising their half-price fares for in-laws, where the randy husband kicks off his pants, grips a rose in his teeth and bursts into the room to offer his wife a good seeing to only to confront the father and mother-in law in mid-sip of their earl Grey?

I myself broached the subject of potential homosexual fellatio in my Mafia Foster’s ad, “Kiss.”

And guys laughed. Except the ones with moustaches. Handy hint: Observe the absurdity and humour of sex. But, unless you’re prepared to risk embarrassing physical damage, don’t tell your partner you’re doing it.

Thou Shalt Keep Thy Gag Unto Thyself Until The End
Charlie Chaplin’s definition of the best gag is:

Banana skin on pavement
Man walking towards banana skin
Man about to step on banana skin
Man sees banana skin at last moment
Man steps around the banana skin with a self-satisfied smile
And falls down manhole.

You think it’s over. Kerbang! Something else happens. Surprise. And the same goes for ads. Build up a situation piece by piece towards the anticipated ending.

Then, at the last minute, turn the whole contraption on its head and whip the carpet from under it.

This is particularly useful, when you are trying to dramatise a product benefit by comparing it to something precisely the opposite.

Our Australian agency provided one of the best examples of yanking the Axminster, with their client Berri orange juce, who tells us: “The goodness in the glass.”

In one, lovely granny is trying to tie her shoelaces. Adorable grandson, with an expression to melt the heart of Martin Boorman, kneels down to do it for her.

He gives her a big hug and we close on the face of grandma, touched almost to tears. We pan down to her feet to see the little bastard has tied her shoelaces together.

In another one, a proud dad watches his little angel mowing the lawn. After a suitably vitamin enriching swig of his Berri orange juice, the kid struggles on manfully, until he has completed his task of mowing the word “Shit” into the sward.

The little s**t could have mowed Berri’s sales increase chart into the lawn … but that would have needed a bigger lawn.

Handy hint 1: The best way to conceal your intentions is to make the front very charming or emotional and execute it as seriously as if that were the whole story. The bigger the contrast with the end, the bigger the drop, the funnier the ad.

Handy hint 2: Surprise can hurt. When once talking on humour in Monterey, I decided to give a personal demonstration of the Charlie Chaplin theory.

Before I mounted the stage, I placed a banana skin in plain view by the podium. In the absence of a manhole cover.

I decided that I would fall over my chair to make the point. I dully ascended the stage, walked past the banana skin with a self satisfied smile, fell over the chair and putted three tendons in my knee.

Thou Shalt Honour Thy Product
One of our clients once used to draw himself up to his full height when briefing us, and warn us in apocalyptic tones, that he didn’t want his scripts to be “one of those sponsored jokes.”

At the time, I found this all rather depressing. But now I know precisely what he had meant.

To tell a joke in 30 seconds and then sticky tape a product on the end is a crappy ad.
If it’s a brilliant joke, but it is just and appendage to make the ad more watchable, it’s still a crappy ad.

The best ads and funniest ads happen when the joke comes from the product and actually could not exist without the product.

The XXXX ads would not be funny, unless they were demonstrating our line that “Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else.”

The antics of Danny Kleinman’s great bear-fighting salmon fisherman are made not only relevant but funnier by the fact that they are demonstrating the lengths to which John West would go to get the best salmo.

And of course the most direct product humour can be extracted from the physical product itself.

In our Rentlo ad, an exasperated wife tries to stir her couch potato husband from gawping at the telly by throwing the sets out of the window … only to be frustrated by Rentlo’s wide screen.

Handy hint: Try reading your hysterically funny script, without mentioning the product. If it works, it’s not a good ad.

Execution is God                                                                                     
How many times have you watched the first cut of your comic masterpiece, to be greeted not with a belly laugh but a belly contraction? Oh God, it’s not funny!

Or even worse, it merits that famous top out for all failed comedy: “It’s not so much a belly laugh. It’s more of a wry smile.”

There are only two possible contusions that can be drawn her. Either the script wasn’t as funny as you thought it was or it’s been badly done.

Here are a few tips from he who must be obeyed on how to avoid the latter. The first is get the right director.

It’s so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying … However, it’s amazing just how often people don’t.

And you have to understand one thing. Comedy is a particular talent and very few people have it.

It’s possible that a director, whose beautiful visual eye has accumulated more pencils than Leonardo’s art bag, could be incapable of extracting even a slight titter from a whoopee cushion full of laughing gas.

And the same goes for actors and actresses. If I were asked what is the single most important thing about filming comedy, I would say casting.

The set may be good, the lighting impeccable, and the special effects mind0boggling, but if the acting stinks, so will he commercial.

So don’t worry about how many casting sessions you have, keep going until you ABSOLUTELY KNOW you’ve got the right cast.

And by all means try and find someone who looks the part. But never choose an actor or actress just because they’ve got a good face.

I did that once and “Sir Lawrence Olivier,” as he unfortunate came to be known by the crew, took what we all thought was a funny script and turned it into something about as enjoyable as a fart in a space suit.

Remember, wardrobe and make-up can transform someone’s appearance … but not their talent. And here’s a few other hints.

Most funny lines are delivered straight … because the best jokes are usually in the eye of the beholder, or the protagonist … and there is nothing more annoying than someone who laughs at heir own jokes.

In only one XXX script did we wrongly let the hero smile as he delivered his last line … and it was so unfunny, we didn’t run it.

It’s also why the line that gets the biggest laugh on the set is not necessarily the one that is the funniest when you come to edit it.

Because of this, I also learnt something from one of our current geniuses of comedy directing, Danny Kleinman.

Always do the ending a few different ways. You think you know how it should be done but comedy, as they say, is a funny business and you never know 100%.

Oh, and on a comedy shoot, try not to trip over the cables. You’re meant to write the gags, not perform them.

Handy hint: When you’re handed your baby over to your chosen director, give him the space to do his job. But never forget that, when the shit hints the fan, it still is your baby.

Thou Shalt Keep it Dead Simple
At M&C Saatchi, our main principle is what we call the “Brutal Simplicity of Thought” because, while it’s easier to complicate than to simplify, simple thoughts enter the mind quicker and stay there longer. That’s why the very best and most effective advertising propositions are simple.

The best ads are, at their heart, simple. And so are the best jokes. Here’s an example from earlier in my writing career.

In the “Bridge” ad for XXX, we showed a Ute, driven by two outbackers being driven across a bridge. In the back was the wife and about four tons of XXXX.

The bridge collapsed and the wife and XXXX were left suspended over the dried up riverbed.

In the script, the wife says, “We’ll be all right if we lose some weight off the back” and one of the blokes turns to his mate and says “She’s not just a bloody good wife; she’s a darn good sport.”

As we were shooting the end, the light was disappearing rapidly and the chosen actor just could not deliver the line.

By now the DOP was actually having to stick brutes through the window to light the ongoing disaster, so we had to do something quickly.

In desperation we changed the actors round and I simplified the line to “She’s a good sport, your missus.” One deadpan delivery later and we had a commercial that was simply 100% funnier.

Handy hint: Keep paring the joke down to its simplest expression … to a stage just before it becomes incomprehensible.

Humour depends on people having to do a hit of work. But that work has to be rewarded.
So there we are.

The 10 immutable commandments of humour. But holy smoke! A thunderbolt has struck me in the lumbar regions.

A deep voice has emanated from the fastness of the clouds and spake unto me: “Not so fast, schmuck.

I feel another tablet coming on.” And a finger of fire has burnt the following into the stone at my feet.

Thou Shalt Disobey All The Commandments Above If That Makes It Funnier
“Thou worm” spake the voice. “If thou shalt do an ad that is not simple or surprising or based on truthful observation, sex, incongruity, visual humour or any of the above encomiums and it’s funny and relevant, thou shalt go with it.”

“But Lord,” I replied, “that’s breaking the rules. And anyhow, you can’t have 11 commandments.”

And he spake and said unto me, “I am the God of humour. I can do whatever I bloody well like for a giggle, sunshine.” And he turned me into a planner.
Keywords: humour, advertising, laughter, laugh, jokes, ads,

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I know some clients accuse creativity of occasionally committing the crime of irrelevance.

However, the reality is that your advertising message is competing with, well, reality. Your ad must not only be more interesting than other ads. It must be more immediately compelling than the editorial or programming surrounding it.

Way beyond that, your ad must also be more interesting than the other things in life that demand our attention.

Relevance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Frequently, what advertisers think is as relevant, as compared to what customers think, is as different as chalk and cheese. To a client, his ingredients are important.

The glossy features. The beauty shot. Fact is, everyday humans have a much boarder palette of emotions than advertisers. To a consumer, only the solution to their emotional problem is important.

The Law of Relevance is not about glib product correctness; it doesn’t matter how right, earnest or worthy the advertising is if it’s too dull to be noticed.

Create ads have impact, but they also pay attention to the feelings that are being generated by the idea. Impact is a start – the only possible start, really.

Invisibility is death, but so is a lack of clarity, or creating impact without t creating likeability, or a lack of emotional relevance.

If your ads don’t reach out to people, then people won’t reach for your products.
It’s not enough just to make and sell products anymore.

Nike’s Phil Knight said, “There’s no value in making things anymore. The value is added by innovation and marketing.’

Great ads are difficult to define, but they all probably have an element of novelty (they do the unexpected.), they generate positive feelings (they are likable), and they have meaning (they are relevant).

Remember REG (Respect, Empathy, Genuineness)? If your ad has achieved these three things, then you’re using the force of the Law of Relevance.

Laws like Simplicity, Humor and irreverence, are ways to reveal a truth in your idea: Whereas, Laws like positioning, Respect and Relevance ensure this insight is warmly and enthusiastically received.

Things that are relevant to the product can be irrelevant to the market. People want to know about their beautiful flowers, not about the phosphate levels in your manure. The TV networks knows this.

In late 2003, the US NBC found a new way to get people to stay with the paying commercial in the ad breaks – by interspersing minute-long “movies” among the ads and prime-time shows, supplying the stories, mystery, emotion and all the instinctive nourishment that the ads weren’t.

In what follows, Anne Bologna, Harvard tutor and president of the US Fallon network, cites Citibank’s work as an example of relevance that started out to be “refreshingly unbanklike.” How was this relevant?

Because the campaign focused on what was relevant to people; where other banks show money. Citibank showed real life. Real life, that always passes the relevancy test.

Great advertising happens when creativity and relevance meet. A good ad can be creative but not relevant, or relevant but not creative, but precious few are both. Unfortunately, most are neither.

You know an ad is relevant when it makes someone stop and pay attention to what is, essentially, an uninvited intrusion.

In the past, ads weren’t necessarily uninvited intrusions. In many cases, today, ads are actually welcome diversions, providing educational insights for people who are seeking information about a specific product or service. But how do you make people find relevance in an advertising message?

First, let’s put “advertising” and “relevance” into context. In the 1950s everything was relevant.

In the years after world Ware II, it seemed there was nothing that wasn’t relevant to the lives – and lifestyles – of returning GIS and their new families: toothpaste, cookies, canned foods, automobiles, lawn mowers, washing machines.

Was there anything that wasn’t relevant to these new families and their Baby Boomer children? Everyone not only wanted everything, but they needed it all, and even better was the fact that everything being created was for the most part brand new.

And the new technologies: television, air conditioning, the colgate Gardol shield, provided relevance in every way, shape or form.

Who could deny that when Crest Toothpaste showed a smiling Norman Rockwell-esquire, all-American child, bringing home his dental report card and exclaiming,” Look Mom, no cavities” that this wasn’t the height of relevance?

After all, millions of American parents with millions of Boomer children certainly didn’t wasn’t to spend extra money on dentists.

So when Crest claimed it prevented more cavities than any other brand of toothpaste, Moms took notice.

Everything in the 50s seemed to have a real product difference, and everything was relevant to our lives in those days. Was it creative?

Well, not in the terms of how we see creativity today. But it was quite emotional, hitting on a topic dear to parents’ hearts.

As America began to build a supercharged economy in the 1960s, along came for many people disposable income.

Though poverty was still rampant in the country, the years of war deprivation were soon replaced by a new economy, one where people could purchase new products that did new things, where they had some money left over after each week’s paycheck went for necessities.

But there was more to life in America in the 1960s. Civil rights became a major issue for the nation, and as a war in Southeast Asia escalated, the 1960s and everything in America and the world began to change, including the way we communicated.

As creativity became the buzzword in films, television, music and art (think of the enormous energy and remarkable innovations in 1960s pop and high culture), it was only fitting that advertising would also produce messages that not only sold products and established brand names, but became cultural icons on their own.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” may have been an early example of cultural diversity – or political incorrectness.  Yet it sold lots of bread, and at the same time, established a brand and created a buzz.

Alka Seltzer and Volkswagen consistently pushed the limits of creativity. Offering the public mini “feature films” complete with story lines and denouements, all within a 60-second time frame.

For anyone who had ever suffered heartburn, there was nothing more relevant. “Whatever shape Your Stomach’s in” produced a hit song, “Speecy Spicy Meatball”, made fun of the advertising business, “Marshmallowed Meatballs” parodied the bride who couldn’t cook. Each was entirely relevant.

When Doyle Dane Bernbach created the advertising for Volkswagen, they not only made extraordinary short films, “The Funeral,” they also created a style of print advertising that was clean, simple, elegant, and actually communicated fun via typeface and style.

That format remains the standard. It was not only topical back in the 1960, but it endures today, in a manner that is both timeless and yet remains fresh some 40 years later.

When the new VW Bug was launched just a few years ago, the print ads were done in the original VW print format, slightly updated, but still looking as fresh, and as new as when this campaign was born.

The Early to Mid-60s Brought Us the First Law of Relevance: Creativity
As the Vietnam War rose in our consciousness and arrived in our homes each night via television, the Baby Boomer generation set out to change the world. Demanding peace, social justice, sex, drugs, rock and roll, long hair.

A sense of fun and at the same time, a sense of outrage, the Boomers made for great visuals, lots of ink in the press and even more importantly, a new way of marketing.

While demographics had been a part of the advertising business for years, the generation gap provided new markets, new attitudes and psychographics.

No longer were age and income the prime filters for targeting and reaching a specific audience. Now there were attitudes involved – lifestyles.

Marketing products to people based on heir interests rather than how much money they earned brought marketers into a new age, and opened the door for creating products based on desire, rather than simply need.

In remembering those times, it’s clear that relevance then became a generational issue. For what was relevant to the “youth of America” Wasn’t necessarily relevant to their parents or their government.

But it was relevant to the record companies, apparel makers, cigarette rolling paper companies and so many others who studied the market and learned how best to approach them.

I Know Your Market … Well
By the 1970s relevance was not only generational and political, it was gender-based, sexuality-based, multicultural and personal … very personal.

What was political became personal, and as Boomers decided they couldn’t change the system, they would change themselves instead.

Thus was born the “Me Decade,” so named because out of the chaos of the 1960s was born a period of intense inner and outer scrutiny.

We embraced the causes that had personal meaning to us and then we took very possible workshop, seminar and course to make ourselves “better.”

And it didn’t matter if one was offering education, inspiration, motivation or products and services.

If it wasn’t relevant to the audience in question, it simply wasn’t relevant – unless the media said it was.

And the media told us that fixing our minds and our bodies was the greatest way to ultimately fix society.

Of course, the Boomers still wanted products that reflected their inherent “differences” from their parents.

So smart marketers offered products to the “Me Generation” that were functionally similar but designed to appear different … or designed to reflect the growing concerns over what would soon become known as “political correctness.”

World events, too, began to shape what was truly relevant, portending the 21st century. When the gas crisis hit the US in the late 1970s those most prepared were the car makers who were selling cars that ran 30 – 40 and, yes, even 50 miles per gallon. The US was no longer living in a vacuum as cause and effect caught up with them.

What occurred overseas and in places they didn’t quite understand had a direct effect on their daily lives. And what was really relevant in the world was what was relevant in their product selections.

Understand the World, Understand Trends. They Do Affect the Marketplace
As the “Me Decade” gave way to the 1980s, the Boomers were forced to start growing up the acting their age.

There was already a backlash against the Baby Boomer generation’s lust for staring at their navels, and then complaining to the media about it.

But what the media failed to notice, Rolling Stone, and their ad agency in Minneapolis certainly picked up on.

Perception / reality clearly depicted the media stereotypes of the Rolling stone readership – and then did one better by showing the reality.

It was the most perceptive communication about this audience, and truly helped set the stage for the changes about to come.

And what changes. The Boomers’ contemplation of their own heads beget the “Yuppies” who didn’t seem to care about anything but money, status, money, status and of course, power.

“Greed is good,” proclaimed Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street and everyone it seemed putting aside any sense of discipline when it came to spending money, until of course, October 1987, when the market bottomed out, giving them time to anticipate the next boom.

Who would have dreamed that it would be fuelled by technology and powered by a group of millionaires who rewrote the rules because they were too young to have learned them?
What grew out of the dotcom mania?

We’re still looking for answers. But it’s clear that younger people – the “Generation Ys” – having been so inundated by media and marketing their entire lives, were a bit jaded and cynical about products.

They saw virtually everything become commoditised and so what became more important was the way corporations behaved. “Was this a corporation I could work for? Do they share my values?

Do they have a worldview I admire?” That became the mantra that led to marketers studying emotional branding and how best to make consumers emotional about their brands!

Commodities Can Have a Special Place in Peoples Lives.
With this in mind, corporations need to communicate their corporate values and their place in the world to their audiences.

Emotional connections are important today’s consumer even when the products are commodities.
 
The god news for advertising folks in that, as we’ve seen in this brief and skewed history, human beings are a pretty self – centered lot, so it’s not that difficult to make you make your message relevant.

The truth is people spend most of their daily lives seeking to satisfy a host of personal needs.

Every instance already cited demonstrates this point, even with the filters of various trends and times.

Some needs are relatively trivial, though we think they’re rather important: like the need to get a date, a raise or to be in the know.

On a more fundamental level, people need to be loved, to belong and to feel safe. Once we have an understanding of needs and desire, we can reach out to our audiences with more clarity and more relevance.

As times changed, as we’ve become more sophisticated about how to create and tailor messages to reach our markets, one thing remains the same:

The ability to communicate a product or service message in a way that’s relevant is the essence of advertising. It’s also the essence of all good communication.

And in the case of advertising, it is, of course, good communication and the art of persuasion.

Here is an example of good communication, great persuasion and true relevance: Citibank – “an advocate for a healthy approach to money.” How did Citibank and its agency arrive at this provocative strategy? By using all the laws of relevance cited.

Top Line: Finally, there’s a bank that actually understands there’s more to life than money.

Citibank: A Brand Miles Wide and Inches Deep

A successful business on virtually any measure, Citibank competes in the most undifferentiated categories: credit cards and banking.

Worse yet, consumers typically think of banks like utilities – convenience drives choice. And while consumers love the spending power of credit cards, they hate the motivations of companies behind them.

So there’s little reason to care about “issuing bank” brands. After acceptance, card choice comes down to rates and fees.

A brilliant way to convince people you’re different is to act different. From the outset, the charge has been dauntingly clear: help Citibank stand a part.

Communications must give consumers a reason to care about and prefer a brand that wouldn’t normally get a second thought.

    Objectives:
(1). Distinguish Citibank from card, banking and financial services brands.
(2). Demonstrate relevance to consumer’s lives.
(3). Predispose people to use or acquire Citibank offerings.

But first, they had to find someone who would listen. In a culture that elevates money to godliness, Citibank’s best prospects don’t buy it.

Looking at society, you’d think money drove America. Initial discussions of money led straight to expected places like “freedom” and “control.”

So we asked consumer about life instead: what makes a good life? What’s the secret to every day happiness?

How Much money is enough? Suddenly, a different view of money emerged. We found people with realistic goals, making sacrifices to stay balanced.

For them, personal prosperity didn’t equal money. Money was a means to an end. Financial success was living happily within your means.

We called this group “Balance Seekers.” Best of all, research showed they represent almost half of adults and were great financial prospects.

There’s more to life than money. Unsurprisingly, Balance Seekers were frustrated by the bank’s blatant self – interest. “Are they going ask about my money then I’m not interested.” They were interested in is my money then I’m not interested.”

They were interested in a bank that helps them live rich lives – not get rich. A bank that understood life comes before money.

We described their outlook as a “healthy approach to money.” The tooth fairy? Leprechauns? A credit card that helps you balance your finances?

Credit cards remained challenging. Credit is inherently “unhealthy”; it implies spending beyond your means.

Because companies promote plastic as worry – free money, Balance Seekers felt victimized. “They just want you to spend, spend, spend.

That’s how they make money.” In research, Balance Seekers likened cards to a “genie in a bottle,” powerful but tricky.

They didn’t trust themselves to resist the genie’s temptation to spend. Instead, they just kept the lid on the bottle.

“I only carry one card in my wallet at a time.” The others still exist but rarely see the light of day.

That seemed unhealthy too, not to mention bad for Citibank’s business. We asked if there was to use cards. Balance Seekers told us the key was using cards wisely.

“Being able to earn rewards for using your cars in wise.”
“Using your card to get purchase protection or travel insurance is a good use.”
“I need to be informed about how cards work.”
“If a card could help me keep tabs on my spending, that would be healthy.”

Grounding card communications in these ideas not only connected credit to a “healthy approach,” but also provided a link to tangible features.

A simple Fact: No One has Even Been Bored into Buying Anything. Citibank asked for “refreshingly unbank-like” advertising.

That opened the door to offer a contrast to the credit card category. As a result, where most bank ads were serious, Citibank found humour.

While banks talked about themselves, they focused on people. And when banks showed money, they showed real life.

Being “unbank-like” also means avoiding media that objectify money. In diaries, Balance Seekers described their media habits and passions: home, family, health, community, and personal growth.

Citibank’s message connects perfectly with media that reflect these priorities: lifestyle magazines versus business and finance publications. 

Just When Everything Seems Under Control, Life Happens. And When Life Happens What Have we as Marketers Learned from the Citibank Campaign?
Citibank’s campaign was launched in 2001, the era of irrational exuberance, just as the dotcom bubble was about to burst.

And right before the bubble burst, it seemed that for many people, there hours of sleep a night, but that was because the stress to produce, the pressure from the investors, the almost maniacal hysteria surrounding the bottom line (or lack thereof) demanded release and relief.

Citibank agreed to run a campaign saying there was … there is … more to life than money, a message that seemed counter to the prevailing mood.

But that was 2001. By 2002, we all knew that there was and always will be more to life than money.

And now, two years later, to us, banking consumers and marketers alike. For what is relevance but revealing these human truths in a manner that talks to us, searches us, persuades us and touches us? It’s what good advertising really is all about.

Keywords: advertisers, advertising, ads, ad,

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Most creative people, in agencies throughout the world, have an encyclopedic knowledge of who wrote and art directed great ads of the past, going back almost half a century. Ask about the VW ads from the 1960s, Hamlet ads from the 1970s, Apple ads from the 1980s, Nike ads from the 1990s, etc.

Ask who created the British Airways ‘Face’ or Tango ‘slap’, Levis or Diesel, Perdue or Hathaway work.

Ask them even who directed the ‘1984’ TVC or “Where’s the beef? Creative people pore over award annuals, creative magazines that reproduce ads in loving detail and even, occasionally, advertising books that hero great work.

This is part of the problem. Advertising people live in a circle of mirrors. A great deal can be learned from the greats, no question.

Case histories of all types are telling. And of course you should be a full bottle on your craft. But it’s sometimes hard going forward while you’re staring constantly in the rear view mirror.

It’s hard to be original when you’re steeped in what has been. A walk down a creative corridor anywhere, almost anytime of day, will reveal too many noses stuck in advertising books. Stuck in the past.

Before I start, I’d like to ask a few questions:

Have you been arrested?
Have you exchanged stories with a stranger this week?
Have you been beaten senseless in a street fight?
Have you worked in other industries other than advertising?
Have you been fired from your job?
Have you had a near death experience?
Have you been refused service in a restaurant because of your colour?
Have you fought in a war?
Have you cried so uncontrollably that you had to vomit?
Were you picked on in school?
Did you pick on other people in school?
Have you been in a threesome?
Have you ever been lost without money in a foreign country?
Have you ever drunk a glass of vinegar?

It’s a pool that you can tap into whenever you write. A very important pool. Even for advertising. Especially for advertising.

A person who’s just had their heart broken sees the world differently to someone who never has and will express themselves differently.

Just as a person who’s been addicted to drugs sees the world differently to someone who hasn’t. They just do. They’re changed by their experience.

Everything we experience feeds us. And because our personal experiences are usually truths of some sort. It’s hard to lake that.

One of the best things I’ve ever done is to attend a writer’s workshop with chuck palyhnuck (the author of fight club).

Someone handed in a story of concealing traces of marijuana for an army drug test by drinking vinegar.

“Did you drink vinegar when you wrote this?” Chuck asked “Well, no” was the writer’s reply. “It shows” he said.

“you can feel it when someone has actually experienced it.” I believe the best work always seems to be based on some kind of truth.

That’s the stuff that resonates. That’s the stuff that gets cynical consumers to lower their guards.

When I first joined Wieden & Kennedy I had been an avid student of advertising. I was proud of all the ads and annuals I had memorized.

That was until I was confronted by Jim Riswold, a trained philosopher who had turned his hand to advertising and the writer of some of Nike’s most famous ads (“Spike and Mike”, “Instant Karma,” “Hello World”).

He wasn’t a student of advertising at all. He hated advertising. He told us to throw away our annuals, study culture, then pillage it for ideas.

“You don’t find originality by looking at what’s been done before.” He was looking for unique voices not derivative ones.

Our cultures provide us with experiences which affect our personal ways of seeing things. For example, anyone who has lived in the UK will know that the English and the French aren’t terribly fond of each other.

It’s not something that consumer’s everyday thought but it’s there in the national psyche, just waiting for someone to use it.

And use it Howell Henery did with their ad for Black Currant Tango. It resonated to sell because they had tapped into that cultural truth.

I daresay this way of thinking could work somewhere else. Japan, Korea? Greece, Turkey? North and South India? It’s a pretty human sentiment, after all.

A person who has grown up in Asia is going to see the worlds slightly differently from someone who grew up in America or England.

That doesn’t mean we’re all so different and will never understand one another. I don’t subscribe to the view that only Asians know how to advertise to an Asian market.

It’s as short-sighted as thinking that only Europeans know how to advertise to a European market.

People are more similar than they are different. There’s far more unifying us than separating us.

We all want to love. Be loved. We all eat. We all want security. And we all like to buy stuff. The contexts may change but people generally don’t.

Our cultures help shape our ways of seeing things. And different ways of seeing things are a valuable resource in advertising where we all feel like we’ve seen everything before.

About 10 years ago, Sweden started to appear on the world advertising map. They had a strange way of looking at things, to say the least.

And it showed in their work. The Diesel advertising coming out of Paradiset in Stockholm was hugely successful.

The Swedish agency’s strangely kitsch and ironic point of view turned out to be really appealing to cynical Generation X.

Traktor, a group of Swedish directors responsible for producing much of the Diesel work became the most sought-after directors in the world.

In turn, their work started to influence advertising in the US and the UK. But what happens when you displace some of those Swedes and put them in a new environment?

Would they still be different? Would they be understood? Two of the Diesel creative, Linus and Paul ventured to the US to try their hand at Fallon. Here’s a little of what they did.

It didn’t look like anything else in the US, which meant it stood out like the proverbial dogs’ balls. And, once again, helped change advertising a little more over there.

Other creative and agencies started trying to do more kitsch and ironic work. Remember the C-Net campaign from Leagus in San Francisco and the Discovery.com campaign from Hal Riney?

Both campaigns incidentally, directed by Traktor. They had changed the industry in the US by showing them a new voice.

When Neil French first turned up in Singapore, he brought a unique voice that changed the market there.

When you mixed that up with Australians like jim Aitchison, the style started to evolve further. The next generation helped bring Singapore its own flavour.

People like Calvin sho and Francis Wee took those European and Australian influences and brought their own sensibilities and experiences to them.

Thanks to all that influencing and cross-fertilization, Singapore now has it’s own definitive advertising style.

Advertising is always better when you try to mix things up. Wieden & Kennedy did it in throughout the 90s.

They brought in non-advertising people and made them work with ad people. They brought in designers and architects and architects and mixed them up with philosophers and just plain odd people.

Say what you like about their work then, but you can’t accuse it of being like anyone else’s. It was unique. It was honest. It was thoughtful and funny and ironic and provocative. It wasn’t like advertising.

They also brought athletes to work on the advertising. They realized that sport was a culture with its own truths. And if you weren’t being authentic, then your audience would reject you.

No one wants to hang out with a phoney. Of course, the Swedes weren’t the first group of invading foreigners to help diversify advertising voices.

There were Australians going to the UK and the US a decade or so earlier. Eugene Cheong and Tan shen Guan had ventured over to the UK to try and add their voices to the mix. And we’ve already talked about Neil.

So what happens when you start taking voices out of Asian and get them to apply some of their thoughts and memories in the Western market? Well, a good example is Tarsem’s “Elephant” spot for Coke.

He had seen elephants swimming while growing up in India and it added a fresh image to most of our visual psyches.

Because you don’t see many swimming elephants in Atlanta. I’m going to bastardise a Tarsem quote, but I think it’s an important insight into what we do. “You don’t pay me for the film I shoot or the awards I’ve taken, every movie I’ve seen.”

With changing emigration and more open, diverse, worldly media, more foreign and alien experiences start to overflow and permeate into other cultures.

You start to see some interesting imagery come from unexpected places. The Peugeot Sculptor spot was from an Italian agency, for a French care, with an Indian theme.

I went to Singapore in 1992 because, While at O&M London, I had heard about Eugene Cheong and shen Guan. Well, to be honest I had heard that they said it was really easy to sell work out there.

Of course they were lying. But still it got me to up and leave. That and being fired from my job in London.

So I brought my own set of experiences and ways of seeing to Singapore, and had my ways of seeing changed by the place.

The more places I live in, the more different ways of seeing things I’m exposed to. Even if I misinterpret them, I’m, still changed. And, just perhaps, more unique. And the more unique I become, the more valuable I become.

For instance, in England when the sun comes out, we all rush to try and soak in as many rays as possible. Because we never know when we’re going to see it again.

So imagine my surprise when I go out walking with my wife, who is from India. And she starts taking this really convoluted route to get to places.

The sun’s not such a big treat for her. In fact, she tries to avoid it at all costs. I’d be saying, “Where are you going, the shops are over here?”

Andy, my old partner, experienced the same thing when he moved to Singapore. He was astounded too.

Well, you store that stuff away. Until one day you write a spot about a woman running a convoluted route to stay in the shade.

I doubt whether Andy or I would have known that without having observed things in Asia. Little things.

So what happens when you get an Indian Kid from Singapore, send him over to England at the age of seven months, “bring him up with West Indians, and then get him to live and work in four different continents?

Hopefully you get a different way of seeing things. So what am I getting at? Don’t be closed.

Look for new experiences. Reals ones, preferably. If you can, don’t go straight from school, to college to advertising. Get arrested first. Leave the country. Go out and take you experiences elsewhere.

Then come back changed and apply that new modified voice at home. Or somewhere else again Drunk and bored at a Christmas party once, I decided to piss off my friend’s dog who had been following me around.

I decided to follow it around until it snapped. It took about 45 minutes. And I did get bitten. But 17 years later it became the inspiration for Tailgating.
Keywords: advertising, experience,

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Love conquers all.

Do you remember the love Bug computer virus that swept the world a few years back? It proved that even the most hard-bitten business professionals will instantly open up an e-mail attachment simply because it came with cuts straight through alertness, cognitive processes, training, security protocols and, yep, good old common sense.

“Oob, someone out there loves me! Who, who/” Think about this as a tick: The Love Bug didn’t attack computer systems so much as human emotion, human optimism, human vulnerability, human hope.

“I love you.”
Bang.

It was all over in seconds. Over 80 million computers worldwide melted down from the heart.

In lives increasingly experienced via monitors, there’s a hunger for genuine empathy and direct, personal contact, people live in a cold, scary and often heartless world.

Companies fire them. Spouses divorce them. Institutions stitch them up. Fear stalks the daily news. There’s no one to turn to. So people want to surround themselves with sensuality.
 
This is the real evolution from old to new economy for marketers. Logical is being replaced by likeable.

The notion of buyers and sellers is being replaced by a relationship that is better described as fan and celebrity.

This transformation requires a new set of balances – not only about brand, advertising and marketing, but also about leadership, authenticity and the human spirit. Emotion is no longer a “nice-to-have” for business; rather it is the living, beating heart.

People are eager to bring more emotion, more emotion, more spirit, more inspiration and, yes, more love into the way they do business. But they still find it tough to put Love in action.

That’s where the idea of Love marks comes in – a Saatchi & Saatchi idea that puts Love into business and keeps it bubbling all around it.

I started to talk Love because of one big question that would not go away. What comes after brands? Brands have had a dream run pumping the global economy.

They have defined and grown marketing by boosting its complexity and scale. They have spread out around the globe and come back home again.

The journey from products to trademarks to brands is one of the 20th century. Now this journey is coming to an end and it’s too late for Brand-Aid. Trademarks have long been table-stakes. Now brands too are table-stakes.

Both are useful in the quest for differentiation and are still vital to survival, but they are not winning game – breaker.

It is time to admit it. Brands are dead. They are struggling to deal with the demand for innovation, flexibility and speed, together with the necessity to build close relationships with consumers.

A powerful dynamic has been driving business for decades and brands are trapped in its path. It’s a relentless process, turning what we truly value into the commonplace.

Commodification – the process that erodes distinctions, rapidly cycles through innovations and pushes for higher standards of performance and quality because that is what everybody else is doing.

Everyone in business is wrestling with this problem in one guise or another. The inevitable result?

Pressure on margins and on price at the very time consumers are pushing in the other direction.

They are more demanding, less loyal, profoundly cynical and tough to convince of anything.

Most people nod at the suggestion that traditional transactions need to be transformed into relationships but they don’t know what to do next.

My advice is to get your nose out of reports and statistics and look to emotional connections.

And, of course, look most closely at the strongest emotional connection of all – love. Love is the path way to deep emotional connections within businesses, with consumers, with partners, with allies. Here are eight insights that show the role Love is born to play.

Love Creates Lovemarks
Some brands are so far ahead of the pack that they have become not just “Super Brands” or “Brands plus.” They have escaped the commodity trap and evolved into something different altogether.

Charles Darwin would have got it straight off. Fish to lizard.
Monkey to man. Product to Trademark. Trademark to Brand. Brand to lovemark.

Lovemarks are a game-breaking opportunity to reinvent branding. They place brands where they should be, at the emotional heart. Lovemarks inspire locality beyond reason.

At Saatchi & Saatchi we have been evolving Lovemarks for the past four years. We have focused the entire company on where we want to go with them.

As an Ideas Company, it is simple: “To create and perpetuate Lovemarks through the power of our ideas.” Lovemarks is about attitude, belief and action.

The name itself is provocative, non-negotiable. Saying “love” and believing in love come with the territory. “Enjoymarks” or “Admiration marks” were never going to get the job done.

Lovemarks are personal. They can be local or global or anywhere in between. Whatever the scale, they stand out from the crowd. Lovemarks are the charismatic brands that people love and fiercely protect.

If you made a list of Lovemarks, it would be different from mine because that is the nature of Love.

Love Inspires People
All the stuff we pushed out of business in the last century needs to feel what is important personally, not just analyze it in others. We need to transform management with Inspiration and engage both head and heart.

This is exactly what Love can do. A study of neural activity at Emory University, Atlanta, revealed that the small act of co-operating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

We love to love. The lead author of the study, Dr Gregory S. Berns, admitted that “The results were really surprising to us.” And that is the problem.

We expect the dark and suspicious side of human nature to dominate, and discount the possibility that qualities like Love and Inspiration work best.

Our traditional understanding of management has been very limited. No wonder women have found it so tough to fit in.

Success today has to be about more than management and doing thigs right. And it has to be about more than leadership and doing right things.

What do all leaders need to succeed? Followers. Who wants to admit to having “born to follow” tattooed on their back?

Success in business today depends not on management or on leadership but on inspiration – and at its best, Inspiration is about Love.

Just as they exclude Love, most people push Inspiration out of their lives. What a terrible loss.

Inspiration awakens people to their potential and shows them what they can be and what they can achieve.

Inspiration is contagious and arouses people’s commitment to exceed their personal best – not just to beat their sales targets or the competition.

Love is the pathway to deep emotional connections within businesses, with consumers, with partners and allies.

Great products, great ideas, great anything can only come from Inspired people with passion and emotion. They need to have what I call the “I s” and the “ES.”

• I for Ideas, Imagination, Intuition and Insight.
• E for Enchantment, Emotion, Empathy and Excitement.

Turning up the temperature in your business means more energy and Inspiration, and nothing turns up the temperature like Love.

Love Brings Back Emotion
We can all feel it. Emotion is back in vogue. In the grand old brand days, emotion was a clip-on. Brands flourished in the rational world of benefits.

The advertising team was there to pipe on some emotional icing – and that was that. But over the past two decades, science moved deeper in the human mind.

It turned out that the human brain is more complex, more densely connected and more mysterious than any of us dreamt.

Study after study has proved that if the emotion centers of our brain are damaged in some way, we don’t just lose the ability to laugh or cry.

We lose the ability to make decisions. The neurologist Donald Calne puts it brilliantly: “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.” More emotion equals more action. That’s what the “motion” part of emotion is all about.

Now there is a big loud alarm bell for every business right there. Emotion and reason are intertwined, but when they conflict – emotion wins every time.

Without the fleeting and intense stimulus of emotion, rational thought winds down and disintegrates.

Emotion is an unlimited resource. It controls our rationality and guides our decision-making.

There are no limits to its power. It’s always there, waiting to be plugged into. And you certainly can’t ignore it by declaring that your products are in a “low-involvement category.” What a cop-out!

We need to stop talking about emotion and set it to work. We need to jump into the emotion economy.

There are many openings into this economy but it is now obvious that entertainment is gaining ground fast.

According to the US Consumer Expenditure survey, the total spend for entertainment per household increased 20.8% over the last decade.

Entertainment appeals to our unconscious, intuitive and creative mind that operates beyond rationality and rules. Emotion and story-telling, mystery and metaphor are all central players in Lovemarks.

Love Gives Respect New Meaning
I talk more about Love than Respect because we all do Respect so much better. We have made huge investments in performance, innovation, quality, trust and all the rest for decades.

And we would all agree that we made fantastic progress. The problem is that it was all in one direction towards what I call the “er” words – newer, brighter, stronger, faster.

And the really big problem is that they take us head on against the most frightening “er” world of all: Cheaper.

This is what happens to you when you slip down the value chain. You become eager to give away more for less just to stay in the game even worse you put all your effort into what has just become table-stakes. Lots of puff for not much stuff.

In the 21st century, great performance is no more than what consumers expect and demand.

Cars start first time, the fries are always crisp and the dishes shine. Today every one has to earn Respect just to stay in the game.

Now the new challenge is Love, and Love demands the same investment and the same rigor we brought to the capture of Respect.
 
Our client Toyota gets it. Don Esmond at Toyota USA crystallised the new Toyota challenge: “It’s time to move from the most respected car company in America to the most loved.”

Love needs Respect right from the start. Without it, we’re not talking about Love; we’re talking about a fad or infatuation – compelling and fun but certainly not capable of inspiring loyalty of any kind.

Love Draws on Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy
We all know the power of mystery, sensuality and intimacy from our own lives. The obvious next question, then, is “Why should relationships in business be any different? My answer is simple. They are not.

Business too needs mystery, sensuality and intimacy. Mystery draws together the stories, metaphors and dreams that give a relationship texture.

Not surprisingly, after the metric mania of the 20th century, mystery is again taking centre-stage.

What we don’t know starts to be as important as what we do know. The five senses pull us towards sensuality – vision, sound, smell, touch, taste. This is how human beings experience the world.

Sensuality is a portal to the emotions and intimacy, where thinking and feeling come together most closely; the art of knowing the right thing to do is called empathy.

Some companies have created experiences that have used mystery, sensuality and intimacy brilliantly.

Think of the expertly integrated experience Starbucks has sent out around world. Other companies have created experiences that are horribly wrong for human beings.

Let’s take a simple example. Who wants to be squired with perfume as they walk into a store? Name me and not my wife.

This formulaic spray-and-bray is just a symptom of a much bigger problem – passion trimmed into efficiency.

Inspiration pulled back to a positive attitude and Love diluted to “like”. By focusing on mystery, sensuality and intimacy, business-as-usual can be transformed with new emotions and new ideas.

The Stanford economist Paul Romer likes to say that big competitive advantages in the marketplace always come from “better recipes, not just more cooking.” Love has got to be the most well-tested recipe of all.

Love connects with Consumers
Consumers are the heart of any enterprise, and at last, businesses are starting to realize it. People want control over their lives.

They are more sophisticated and, best of all, they keep changing. This is the new consumer.

To respond to this new reality requires a profound shift in how to develop ideas and insights that can truly touch consumers. What has the power to get us there? The emotional commotions created by love.

Our new evolved consumers want to connect in more ways with brands. They are looking for new emotional connections.

More people are living alone and it is projected that far more will be alone over the coming decade.

In the UK today, seven million adults live alone – three times as many as 40 years ago – and it is projected that, by 2020, one-person households will make up 40% of total households.

Forget Rober D. putnam’s famous ‘”bowling alone”. People are eating alone, exercising alone and waking alone.

To touch these customers directly you need to listen to them. That’s how you can feel the shifts in temperature, not just read about them in market research reports.

Most businesses never get that close. They set up a program of consumer contact, rather than taking the pulse.
 
Invest in Love and you can connect with people and you can cultivate enduring relationships.

In their most evolved from, these relationships give consumers a direct impact on design, production, distribution and marketing, and give you an extraordinary new opportunity to create long-time value.

Love Revivers Market Research
Researchers turned down a dead end a decade or so ago and they have been struggling to read the sings ever since, once they had corralled what could be measured, everything that couldn’t was simply ignore.

The problem was, of course, that everything of value cannot be measured. In fact, not much of value can be.

As the British industrialist John Banham once said; “we are in danger of valuing most highly those things that we can measure most accurately. As a result we are in danger of being exactly wrong rather than approximately right.”

A further problem is that the information gathered by most conventional research methods has become a commodity.

All the big players have access to pretty much the same information. All the big players have access to pretty much the same information.

And not only do they have the same data, they have the same processes for dealing, with it. That’s not where the game is going to be won and it is certainly no help in creating emotional connections with consumers.

We need research to help us discover what we don’t know. And then we need research to inspire us to go further and deeper.

We need research to absorb many perspectives – and make sense of them. And, most of all, we need research that puts consumers at the centre rather than at the base of a very large pyramid.

This is the only kind of research that will come close enough to Love and to emotional connections to make a difference.

To have a meaningful understanding of consumers demands creativity and insights as well as accuracy and depth.

Always remember that Love is one way. You can’t analyse their love without committing your own.

If you stand to one side as an objective observer you will get the results you deserve. I’m looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand.

Love Loves the Local
People live in the local. They live in real, distinctive places and they love it there. I have never met a global consumer and I never expect to.

We define ourselves by our differences. Differences have huge value because they are the energy of powerful emotional connections.

This is the game local brands can play so brilliantly. This is also the challenge for brands with international markets.

AG. Lafley, CEO of procter & Gamble, believes that in 10 years, P&G’S toughest competitors will be focused local companies.

Tell that to the global Godzillas. Mounting evidence is on their side. Take the assault on China.

Emerging markets remain critical to growth. There are millions and millions of people wanting to take part in the ease, opportunity and spirit of the modern. But they want it their way.

International corporations do not have to retreat. Billion-dollar brands remain an inspiring goal. We certainly want more of them for our clients! We just have to get smarter.

“Think global, act local” is back-to-front. And “Act global, think local” is not much better Starting with the local is absolutely right, but “think” is all wrong.

”Think” is not action, “Think” is not fast or transforming, emotional or inspiring. What works better? “Act local, go global” – action at both levels.

Only Love inspires loyalty beyond reason. Lovemarks are a very simple idea. They come from deep inside what every human being wants and needs most – Love.

How paradoxical that the loyalty beyond reason we are searching for should be only a heartbeat away from each of us.

Keywords: brand, advertising, marketing, Commodification, love, lovemarks, branding, brand, emotion, reason, sensuality,

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