Hegarty on Advertising-part 2

Here’s part 2 of my collection of posts looking at John Hegarty’s memoir “Hegarty on Advertising”.

Hegarty writes that truth is one of the most powerful strategies you can employ in advertising. And humour is an incredibly powerful tool to be truthful in advertising: don’t deny the facts, make a joke about them. Like in this Skoda advert. 

Another insight from Hegarty is that you can take a perceived weakness of a product/brand, realise it is unique and turn it into a selling point. This is what he did with Boddingtons and “The Cream of Manchester” campaign. Conventional wisdom said that “creaminess” was not an attribute anyone looked for in a beer. But Hegarty disagreed: “Here was a beer that was differentiated by its creamy head…It was and is what made it different. It was the truth of the brand. So, we created the slogan “The cream of Manchester” and exaggerated the creamy aspect of the beer showing it as an ice-cream cone, as shaving cream, as hair cream…we captured the consumers imagination with irreverent images and, in doing so, turned Boddingtons into a cult brand.” Here’s one of the adverts.

The idea of the weakness of a brand being what made it interesting reminded me of an article I read in the Style magazine in The Sunday Times this weekend by Stephen Bayley, in an essay on beauty. I have to admit a philosophical investigation of aesthetics is not what I expected to read in the Style magazine, which is normally just a series of meditations on what pants are cool, or whether I should hate myself for not knowing Prince Harry. I digress. Bayley wrote:

“Perfection is always tiresome. In human affairs, variety, risk, hazard, and surprise are much more interesting than predictability and order”. He went on “Beauty and ugliness are not opposites. They are part of the same thing: it’s called aesthetics”. The lesson? THE WORST THING ABOUT YOUR BRAND MIGHT BE THE BEST THING TO SELL IT WITH.

Hegarty writes that great advertisers aren’t just doing a job, they’re expressing their beliefs. They are evangelists, they believe in what they are doing. They have belief and passion that what they are saying is important. And this gives them that secret sauce of brilliant communication: conviction. You can smell conviction is advertising and in products. They feel authentic, important, confident. Apple products cannot be separated from the spirit of Steve Jobs who challenged himself, his staff and the world to “think different”. This ideology is authentic and bleeds into everything Apple do, and is best summed up by this classic advert. 

Brilliant ads don’t just try to sell. They try to inspire, improve, empower. Arguably Channel 4s brilliant promo for the Paralympics did more to change attitudes to the disabled in this country than the event itself. Remind yourself of the great work here. 

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.

2 quotes

Picasso

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”.

The message left on the door of every GB Olympic athlete:

“How do you want to be remembered?”

What can you learn from the writer of Gladiator?

Sky Arts are currently showing BAFTA’s star screenwriter lectures. I saw one starring John Logan on Saturday. It was reassuring and fascinating for a number of reasons.

People often say “I want to produce great work, but I have another job!” Here is something to hearten you: John Logan, writer of Gladiator and countless other great movies, spent 10 years working in a library and writing plays on the side. The whole of Joy Division held down second jobs even when they were huge (genuinely). Michael McIntyre worked in the Carphone Warehouse for 5 years before turning full time pro. Phillip Larkin worked in Hull University library for his entire career.

Another thing I found heartening about Logan was his thoughts on re-writing: he wrote 26 drafts for Any Given Sunday.  His first draft he submits for notes is after dozens of personal drafts. He says:

“Writing is easy. It’s the rewriting which is difficult. Having to put a critical analysis to your work is grinding.”

Finally, he says that when he writes films: “you’re always looking for a visual metaphor” in a scene. And once you have a motif you can seed it throughout the film.

To conclude, I thought I’d quote a section of that famous speech from Any Given Sunday which seems relevant to the life of a creative, and indeed almost anyone:

“We’re in hell right now gentlemen, really, and we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light, we can climb out of hell, one inch at a time…life’s a game of inches, so’s football…the inches we need are everywhere around us, they’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second, on this team we fight for that inch, on this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch, we claw with our finger nails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between winning and losing, between living and dying…that’s what living is: the six inches in front of your face.”

So go and make that first small step, claw yourself forward that inch, go make something.

Here’s Al Pacino making the point rather well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO4tIrjBDkk

What you can learn from Total Recall

People, like brands, can be redefined and re-launched. Choose the right story from your personal history, but a different one to the one you currently tell (to others and yourself).

Your brand positioning, what you stand for, who your brand is, is almost entirely arbitrary and created. In the result of a variety of choices you've made about yourself, and a result of a series of determinant factors in your past that are beyond your control.

I watched the remake of Total Recall the other day. The general story line is that a bad guy has given the good guy a new set of memories so he doesn’t got back to being the legend he once was, and thus threatening the bad guy again, because he can’t remember that he ever was that person in the first place.

In it, Howser, the good guy played by Colin Farrell, says an amazing line to the bad guy as he rebels against him again despite his memory problems:

 “Maybe I don’t remember who I was, but I know who I am”. 

THE LESSON:

You just need to decide in the moment what you stand-for, who you are, what’s important. Your past, your memories are not important. They don’t need to define you. We can reprogramme ourselves like Total Recall. Your self is entirely constructed. All experience is an illusion. For people and for brands.

Mark Watson on culture

The comedian Mark Watson did a tweet the other day which said “Basically the audience gets the comedy it wants (both at local level and in more general terms).”

The point is that the gate-keepers of culture: the channel controllers, the advertisers etc are responsible for guiding public taste. They set the agenda, the cultural bar, by what they let onto our screens and so on. Artists must react to that taste and give the audience largely what they want, otherwise they won’t have an audience. 

Basically: don’t blame the creative for cultural decline. Blame the gate-keepers that have started this race to the bottom.

A quote worth reading...

“Champions are comfortable feeling uncomfortable”.

Are you pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone every day with your creative challenges? It’s the only way you’ll get better.