John Hegarty on advertising (and what Nelson Mandela might say)

John Hegarty has been behind some of the most memorable adverts of the past 20 years. Such as this. He’s the author of the memoir “Hegarty on Advertising”, widely regarded as one of the finest books on the subject. In a series of posts, I will reflect on some of his ideas and use them as a backbone for some personal thoughts on advertising.

The first quote that sticks out from the book is this:

“Creativity in advertising is all about the power of reduction. Write less, say more.”

Most people would agree that this seems a core principle of the craft. Brevity is not just the soul of wit, but also of good copy. Consoling poetry, stirring song lyrics, funny jokes, and great copy are similar in one key respect: the biggest amount of impact is crammed into the smallest number of words. Examples of this abound in culture, for example:

In the sentence “1984 is not going to be like 1984”, from their 1984 Superbowl advert, Apple said everything they needed to say about why Macintosh computers were better than IBM (their main rival at the time). These were computers for the people, the future is in our hands. Individual expression will be victorious over autocratic uniformity.

When, in Kerouac’s classic novel “On The Road”, the narrator, Sal, remarks: “The road is life”, in four short words he offers an answer to universal existential angst. Meaning is found in the journey, not at some destination at the end of the road. The journey is the destination. Life is the little moments that we thrive or despair in, amidst a sea of nothingness and contingency. Life is a frothing, violent sea that you must dive into: we should leap naively into the moment for that is all there is, but that is enough. This was a rebellion against the creeping conformity of 1950s America: where happiness or meaning was to be up found at the top of a hill somewhere, whether that hill be made of money or God. “The road is life”: a world of subtext lives in those 4 words.

We all have our favourite song lyrics, lyrics that sum up a kaleidoscope of emotion in an abrupt flourish. “Slow Show” by The National for me sums up what it is like to be in love “You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw, I missed you for 29 years”. And “Sorrow” sums up what it’s like to be dumped: “Sorrows my body on the waves, sorrows a girl inside my cage, I live in a city sorrow built, it’s in my honey it’s in my milk”.

But back to Hegarty. He writes: “The function of an object is now taken for granted, so our concern shifts from function to form”. Here he is referring to design and usability. As consumers we want something that looks fantastic and something that is easy to use. These are the extra gifts in the box that make Apple products, for example, stand-out above all their rivals. What does “the extra gifts in the box” mean? Well, it’s a phrase coined by marketer Seth Godin and is best illustrated with an example: the iPhone isn’t just a good phone (there are lots of good phones around), but it also looks great, is very light, is intuitively simple to use, and is packed full of great apps. It is full of little gifts to the consumer beyond being a phone, and those extras are what make it stand-out. The phone bit is almost irrelevant. Apple obsesses over usability and design, and their advertising demonstrates and celebrates their comparative advantage brilliantly. Here's an example. 

Apple’s products are so exceptional, so innovative, so stand-out, that the marketing is built in. Hence the simplicity of their advertising: make the product the star, and just demonstrate how easy it is to use, and how the technology is relevant to people’s lives. Like this advert for the iPad: essentially just a series of simple vignettes about how it helps someone live a full, and exciting life.

One of the biggest themes of Hegarty’s book is the importance of RELEVANCE. Advertising should reflect how people actually think, talk and live. Intrinsic to an advert must be a sense of humanity: it must be personal, it must reflect human values, worries, fears, needs, aspirations.

As advertisers we seek to tell stories as efficiently and compellingly as possible as to how the product is relevant to the consumer. Here is a wonderfully simply advert for the iPhone 5.  The take-out: there is a brilliant camera on the iPhone, and it has a great feature that helps you with your family life. The technology is not redundant, it is essential and useful.

This focus on relevance reminds me of a quote from Bill Bernbach in “Ogilvy On Advertising”:

“Shortly before he died, Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the 80s. He replied, “Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man-what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know all these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with an artistry to touch and move people will succeed. Without them he will fail.”

While I’m throwing quotes around like an inebriated Stephen Fry, here’s another corker from everyone’s go to good egg Nelson Mandella: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” The take-away: make sure your advertising sings the same tune the consumer is singing in their head. 

Great advertisers have an inspiring vision for the brand, and for the future in general, they have a point of view, something to say, an angle on what’s important in life. They want to create a zeitgeist, a movement, they want to change something. But part of being a visionary is being an expert in reality. All comedy, all art, all good advertising, is essentially observational. Communicating some human truth that we have noticed through observation or personal experience. If you abstract what we do enough it comes down to making a human truth tangible.

It seems to me that a good question to ask yourself when trying to promote a brand is to ask “What human good does the product help the customer achieve?” When you have identified this universal human good, find a way of personifying and exaggerating that in a campaign.

Here’s a brilliant example of this from Wieden and Kennedy, specifically their Nike account: the “Find your Greatness” campaign. It reflects the deep longing we all have to be great. Most of us will never be heroes or legends. But greatness is democratic and relative, we can all get glimpses at the exceptional in our everyday lives and that is an inspiring idea. W&K capture this wonderfully here and here.

People are always thinking about themselves. They are asking one question: what’s in it for me? You better have a good answer otherwise no one is going to listen, they are just going to say: “SO WHAT?”

As Hegarty says with characteristic clarity “The key to great marketing is never to forget about your audience”, he continues “What makes someone who markets a brand so effective is their bringing the outside world in”. Let life shine through your copy.

Why you should be more like a goth (and Stuart Baggs from The Apprentice)

A friend who works in marketing tipped me off about this guy called Rory Sutherland who is an advertising expert, and a phenomenal speaker. He has done three TED talks, they are available here.

There are lots of lessons we can draw from what he has to say:

1.       Two types of value

There are two types of value: so called “real” value (the objective quality of something), and intangible/tangential value (the value we get from a product over and above its objective contents). Advertising’s job is to create intangible value.

Sutherland argues that there is no such thing as “real” value. We find it impossible as human beings to differentiate between objective quality and the holistic experience we have when consuming something.

Perspective is everything: things are not what they are, they are what we think they are. And things are what we compare them to.

Yet we make psychology subordinate to everything else, obsessing over improving the objective quality of the product rather than creating intangible value. As he says: Eurostar spent about 5 billion quid taking 40 minutes off the overall journey time by investing in new tracks etc. But, instead (and with plenty of spare change), they could have spent the money hiring the world’s best male and female supermodels to walk up and down the aisle serving free champagne for the duration of the journey and people would have a more enjoyable, memorable experience and actually ask for the trains to be slowed down. Psychological value is often the best kind, for example: the value of a brand. I saw a couple with Louis Vuitton luggage outside South Kensington station yesterday. That luggage is not better made than something half the price. But it has psychological value: it is a status good. It says to the world: I am successful. (It also says: I am needy and have no taste, but that’s another story!). Symbolic value is real.

THIS HAS HUGE RELEVANCE FOR HOW YOU COMMUNICATE YOURSELF TO THE WORLD: take responsibility for your brand. Your brand is not who you are, it is who people think you are. “People don’t understand me, they don’t get me, they don’t know who I am, I don’t get the chance to show how great I am”: these are problems of communication, of image, that you can solve. It is a problem in picking up women as much as it is in stand-up comedy. Your hidden shallows, may allow you to communicate your hidden depths. And in advertising these depths we invite other people to explore them.

The psychological enjoyment people get from an experience is how they attribute value, not the objective quality of it (a 7 minute wait on a tube platform with a countdown clock is better than a 7 minute wait without one). It’s pointless improving the product with changing people’s perception. They will be getting a better product but be ignorant to the improvement. Like the Royal Mail: people think the Royal Mail is shit. But actually 98% of mail gets there on time. To improve the Royal Mail, they don’t need to work on the 98% figure but actually show people how good the service already is. We cannot tell the difference between the quality of the product and the context within which we consume it: if the restaurant is fantastic fun to be in, we just assume the food is good.

So you’re product has improved? Great. Now re-launch it with a new image. The novelty will get people to take notice and realise that it’s got better. Incremental improvement in the objective value of a product as little IMPACT.

Intangible value is created through fashion, how you wear your hair, your online presence, how you send your e-mails, your answer phone message, the gifts you give, your business card: your brand. “Brand” gets a bad name, because we associate it with faceless, cynical business. We also associate it with that awful man from The Apprentice who repeatedly asserted that he was “Stuart Baggs-the brand”. Bizarrely, by standing out and being a dick, he was memorable and created a brand that created him lasting value even a few years after the series was broadcast (spanning books, media appearances, an Edinburgh show, and a consultancy business). Now, I am not saying you should be an idiot deliberately to make yourself memorable, but you should appreciate the legacy of being memorable in some way, of standing out from other people, and also appreciate the value of your “brand” in achieving this.

It can be as simple as having a memorable and strange haircut. I know people criticise a lot of young stand-ups for being nothing but a haircut. Sometimes they have a point. But here is the important take-away: if you blend into everyone else, if you communicate you are average, then human nature is to assume that is what you are, REGARDLESS OF YOUR OBJECTIVE QUALITY. They will put you in the pile “solid, but uninteresting”. That is where mediocrity lives and careers die.

Fashion contains messages and you need to control these. For example, you can identify the tribes people are in from the way they present themselves to the world. People with loads of piercings, awful pony tails, leather capes, eye shadow and so on don’t dress like that because they think it makes them look good. It is because they want to be a member of the tribe, let’s call them “Goths” (although this is a simplification), the tribe that says: I don’t agree with this society, or the pressures of it, and I want to stand-outside of it. Appearance is a great way to communicate this. It is a low level protest that they can make all day every day. It is political, subversive, but in a very low level way. What does your appearance say about you? The truth is: we don’t want to stand-out really. We seek simply mild differentiation between very narrow variables, because we are all social cowards. Social cowards hug bland mediocrity like a warm towel. And no one knows who they are.

2.       Sweat the small stuff: Virgin Atlantic when it launched had salt and pepper shakers made from silver that looked like dogs. People thought they were cool and they were immensely memorable: they providing a talking point that helped the customers spread the news about the brand. Of course people thought about nicking them, but on the bottom Virgin wrote “stolen from virgin atlantic upper class”, another hilarious talking point. You remember this experience for years. Small detail, low cost, huge effect. Imagination is everything. Small innovations in your image and user experience make a massive difference in memorability and getting your brand to spread. The detail of your brand, your image, your product, your clothes can have a huge impact. What do you remember of someone’s clothes? What do you comment on? Usually an accessory. These are critical non-essentials.#

3.       The interface determines the behaviour. If you had a large red button in your living room that if you pressed it it would automatically transfer 50 quid into your pension, you would save a lot more. Marketing has done a very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. You change your decisions by changing the interface, but structuring the options differently.

4.       “Poetry is when you make familiar things new, and new things familiar”. He says that’s a good definition of what advertising is about, and it’s a pretty good definition for whatever art form you’re passionate about is.

5.       “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders”. Has your product got some magic in it? Something that will make them go “wow”. That will make their brain’s fizz, and their hearts ache?

Why I cried when I saw a car this week

Advertisers have discovered stories. There is an advert about a Volkswagen Golf at the moment that I can’t watch because for some reason it makes me cry. This is a major trend (the use of story in ads, not things making me cry. I’m OK guys.). The product is often not featured until the last second. As we have gotten better at ignoring adverts, so advertisers have tried to get better at keeping us watching them. Advertising is becoming a true art. They use stories to hook us in immediately: as curious humans we are truly fallible to narrative. They provide a compelling, emotive narrative featuring characters we can associate with and care about because they are vulnerable. And then at the end, when they have provided all the value, they try to sell us the product. Two conclusions:

1.  As an artist (or entrepreneur/marketer) you may have a great product but no one will care about it unless you can package it and sell it as a compelling, authentic story. This principle is applicable to everyone: screenwriters with great dialogue and hilarious characters that are wasted because of a flimsy plot, stand-ups with great jokes that are presented as an unconnected mess which reduce their impact and lose people’s interest, businesses with a great product but who can’t convince people why it is relevant to their lives and how it will fit into THEIR narrative.

2. Marketing is no longer about interrupting people to tell them to buy your product. It is about giving them a great experience for free and then suggesting they might get more of it they buy what you have to offer. You’re going to have to be creatively prolific and generous. But there is no other way.