You’ll like this story. It’s useful. Recently we were working with a client to help them strategize the new branding for their business. Granted, we need to purposely “fuzz-ify” the details here, so for the purposes of this story, let’s make two broad points: 1) The new branding was for a B2B service-based business. (Feel familiar to you?) 2) The name was something like “Rocket-Speed Consulting.” That’s totally made up, and not the name, but again, it will help us tell this story to you. This client had already created some “1.0” branding which they shared with us. As you can likely imagine from what we’d just described, the logo featured a picture of a rocket ship. And every single offering from this company was named something like “Flight Speed Service,” or “Supersonic Payload Power,” or “Blast-Off Engagement.” What’s wrong with that, you might ask? To mix metaphors (one of our dubious skills here at Copel Communications), this got our Spidey Sense tingling to the point where we had a Vietnam flashback. A higher power Ages ago, there was a car company called Saturn. You might not remember it. It was actually owned and launched by General Motors, with much fanfare. It was a really innovative brand, and car, and gained a loyal following for quite some time. For example, they introduced the concept of no-haggle pricing. Their car doors weren’t stamped sheet metal, but rather plastic: One of their TV commercials showed a supermarket shopping cart smacking into the side of a parked Saturn, only to bounce off, with the dented door of the car magically popping back into shape without so much as a scratch. They had a pretty logo, too. It was a square, with a minimalist illustration of the planet Saturn, with its signature rings, cropped within the square. Red and white. With the name “Saturn” underneath. Very nicely executed. So what’s this have to do with Spiderman? And Vietnam? Our Spidey Sense tingled, because there was something about all this “Rocket-Speed” 1.0 branding that didn’t feel quite right. And we experienced a Vietnam flashback, because this reminded of us one day, back in the day, when we toiled at an ad agency in New York. Inner vs. outer space That ad agency did a lot of “automotive retail advertising,” which is code for “screaming car dealership ads.” One day, we were working on a print ad for a Saturn dealership (see? it’s coming full-circle), and consulted the manufacturer’s ad planner to help us. Uh-oh. Jargon alert. What’s an “ad planner”? Back in the day, these would be printed books. Full of artwork and logos you could use in dealership ads, along with copious guidelines detailing what you could and couldn’t do in those ads. Today, these don’t exist as printed books, any more than Saturn exists as a car company. But branding guidelines live on. They’re important. They’re huge. Anyway, there was one page in this Saturn ad planner which showed what you could and couldn’t do in any ads. And it said, quite plainly: “No stars or planets.” Huh? Now, a typical guideline for ads like these will dictate that you use their logo, as a measuring stick, and be required to allow a certain number of logo-widths around it, as white space, to elevate it, to prevent clutter. To protect the brand. That’s common. And it was the case for Saturn, too. But no stars? No planets? Just as Saturn didn’t want to muddy up their branding with visual elements impinging upon the logo’s “breathing space” on a page (or screen), they also didn’t want to muddy up the powerful feelings that are implicit in the name “Saturn” by calling attention to it as a planet in the solar system. Think about that. That’s brilliant. “Saturn” means something to you. It’s cool. It’s beautiful. It’s hinted at in the logo. But not one of their ads mentions planets or stars. It’s forbidden. It would cheapen the brand. Can you think of another brand that does this today? Hint: Their logo also looks like a familiar object. Yet they make no reference to that type of object in any of their advertising. You guessed it. Apple. Their logo looks like an apple. Replete with a bite taken out of it. (Legend has it that the “bite” was added because without it, the original looked too much like a cherry.) But you’ll never see any mention of “fruit” or “juice” or “trees” in any of their advertising. Same reason. (The closest they came to that was naming the Macintosh, back in 1984, which is an intentional misspelling of the McIntosh variety of apple. But as you know, it’s only ever called a “Mac” these days.) Helping our client Fresh from our Vietnam flashback (which should give you a hint of what those New York days were like), we were able to tell this story, and make this suggestion, to our client: Keep the “Rocket Ship” name. But nix every other “rocket” reference in the sub-branding. Protect the brand. Elevate it. Don’t cheapen it. This client of ours is very smart. They got it immediately. And they implemented it, too. Today, their branding is very clean, smart, and dare we say, Apple-like. Need help with a branding challenge for your business? This story, and lesson, are just one small sliver of the type of support we offer. Contact us today to learn more. We’d love to hear from you.
0 Comments
Whether you’re a creative professional, have creatives under you, or simply need to hire other creatives, you face a common challenge: You want to get the most creative bang for your buck. Or your client’s buck. Same thing, here. This is easier said than done. Creative professionals know what they’re doing; that’s how they’ve managed to carve out a career in professional services. So shouldn’t you simply trust them to do the right thing? Of course you should. But if it were that simple, there would be no need for this article. Direction... give or take Every single creative assignment begins, necessarily, with direction. That creative person needs to know what to do. Where to go. How to proceed. They can’t work in a vacuum. And this—right at the first step—is where it gets tricky. Do it right, you get great stuff, and big bang for your buck. You can guess the other half of this equation. Or maybe not. It’s not just that you won’t get great creative out of your creative person(s), but you’ll waste time, energy, and effort. You’ll get frustrated, as you receive deliverables that don’t meet your expectations. Importantly, your creative person will get frustrated, too. And that’s not good. We hate to generalize, but we’ve been in this biz forever, so here goes: Creative people are higher-strung, and thinner-skinned, than most people. We like to say that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” In other words, their fuses are shorter. They’re like professional athletes: They like to perform. But if you, as their coach, keep calling the wrong plays, they’ll not only fail, but they’ll burn out. And they’ll resent you, since they won’t respect your judgment. So the direction that you give is everything. Just as important, if not more important, than the direction you give... is the direction you don’t give. And this, by the way, was the impetus for this entire article. Setting the stage As we’d noted above, creative people like to perform. Which points up a convenient analogy, beyond, say, athletes. Know who else likes to perform? Yep. Performers. As in, actors. If you’ve never directed actors before, or even if you have, there’s a cardinal rule—or perhaps cardinal sin—when it comes to directing them, and that is: “Never give your actor a line-reading.” Huh? What’s that mean? And how does any of this translate to, say, getting a good layout or web page? A line-reading is when the director actually acts out a given line of dialogue, telling the actor, “Do it like that.” It’s an easy knee-jerk reaction for a director to make when he or she doesn’t hear the right phrasing or intonation, but doing it is the kiss of death. Why? Not only does a line-reading “talk down” to your actor (“You don’t know this as well as I do, so let me explain”), but it also “pollutes” their process by planting an impossible-to-ignore version in their head from the get-go which makes them utterly miserable. It short-circuits their own, internal creative process. They will hate-hate-hate you for it. Same thing goes for creative people who work for you. Never tell them: “Use this font” or “Add a six-point black border.” It’s tantamount to giving them a line reading. So what do you do? Do the opposite. Talk around what you want. Describe it aspirationally. “Here’s what we’re looking to accomplish, in broad strokes.” Stay out of the weeds. And challenge them: “Think you can figure out a creative way to solve this?” Thin-skinned though they may be, creative pros like to show off, in their own way, and tossing down the gauntlet, appropriately, plays to their sense of pride and entices them to rise to the challenge, to outdo themselves. To show off. All of this is hard to do, but boy is it ever worth the effort. You’ll get better results, and improve your working relationship with the talent at the same time. Need help with interpreting, and giving, the appropriate creative direction? Contact us. We surmount these kinds of challenges, for our clients, all the time. Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s all about love. Today, fittingly, that’s what we’re going to talk about. But we’re not talking about another person. We’re talking about the heavy lifting of doing creative work. You—or the creative person you task with this—got into this business because they love it. That’s one thing that all creatives have in common. They have an intense relationship with their work. But like any relationship, this one can grow cold. Do your assignments simply feel like, well, assignments? If so, what do you do, on this day of chocolate and flowers, to re-kindle that old flame? Take hope. There are ways to do this. We’re here to help. Find new inspiration in old sources As a creative professional, you’re required to keep up with the latest trends in design, advertising, music, pop culture, all of it. People depend on you to be dialed in. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that that’s the case. So take a break from what’s new, and indulge your senses in what’s eternal. We’re talking about nature. We’re talking about looking out the window. Or better yet, simply walking out the door. Take a breather. Take a nature break. Soak in the beauty, the tranquility, and the relaxation. This is more than mere therapy. It’s also hugely inspiring. Study the veins in a leaf, or the shapes of the clouds. We wrote an entire article on grabbing inspiration from nature; check it out. We can dive down even deeper into this same category, with one sub-category of nature which we find extra inspirational: Birds. Yep, we wrote another good one on this topic, too; here it is for your enjoyment. (And here’s one more: On other overlooked sources of creative inspiration.) Update your retreat You can picture an MBA’s office in your head. Not hard. Now picture, in your mind, the office of the ultimate creative director. Pretty neat, huh? Now ask yourself: How does that vision compare with your reality? It doesn’t matter if you have a corner office, a tiny cubicle, or work from home. Your space is your space. And it needs to be your safe, comfy, inspiring spot. So “spa it up.” You can indulge massively, on the cheap. Treat yourself to a new chair cushion. Get yourself a whole collection of fancy coffees or (as in our case) tea. A little aromatherapy goes a long way; there’s everything from candles to simple hand lotion that smells nice. Don’t forget music. Even as we’re writing this, we’ve got some beautiful, relaxing, spa-style music playing, and it’s sure helping. The point is, anything that puts you in a more relaxed state will help unclog those creative juices. It can also be tech: Something as simple as a new keyboard or pen tablet. Here’s one: We found an inexpensive seat heater on Amazon, and installed it on our desk chair. It’s heavenly in winter. Makes us write better. Dive into the details Our last bit of advice is perhaps the simplest. Lots of times, creative work loses its luster simply because there’s so much of it. It’s overwhelming. It feels more like work, and less like fun. The way around this is via a subtle attitude adjustment. For every assignment on your desk, it has scores of details that you must knock out. Remember the days, earlier in your career, when you would enjoy every one of those details? Now’s the time to re-discover that passion. It’s not “I need to knock out this headline layout”; it’s “Let me enjoy the process of kerning these two letters so that they breathe perfectly together.” It’s not: “Let me slog through this video”; it’s “How can I have the most fun with this particular lapped edit?” It's not a change in the work. It’s a change in the way you approach it. If it helps, think of this, too: For every person—like you—who’s toiling, and earning a living, in creative services, there’s likely a hundred others who dream of doing it. Or talk about doing it. Or plan on doing it. But they don’t. You do. That’s quite an accomplishment in itself. So pat yourself on the back. Show yourself—and your work—a little love. Why not? It’s Valentine’s Day. Have a story or tip to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. It’s that time of year again: the end of the year. That’s when we provide our annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one is the former. Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of cool tips and tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear ‘em. Hello, all you creatives out there! Here’s a question for you: When—if ever—can you have fun with a serious topic? Are there lines you shouldn’t cross? How blurry are they? In this article, we’d like to touch on that topic. Spoiler alert: Yes you can, and sometimes you should. A financial inspiration This article was inspired by a recent assignment of ours. We need to obscure some of the details here, but the gist of it was this: We were writing social ads for a client that were directed toward banking executives. Specifically, we were tasked with promoting a new technology that allowed these banking executives to better deal with all of the onerous regulatory and compliance burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is known in the banking world simply as “SOX.” Maybe we were just feeling punchy. But we needed a can-you-relate grabber headline. And it needed to be super short, because social ads, although tiny, have a ton in common with massive freeway billboards (we wrote a nice article on this topic, if you’d like to check it out). Anyway, before we knew it, we’d written down: SOX SUX. Dumb, right? But it still makes us laugh. Before we knew it, the ad got laid out, with that headline (among others; this was a campaign), and went live. Importantly, 1) our client approved it, and 2) it pulled. Which begs the question: Did we overstep our bounds? Define the line We’re probably not going to reel in any Clio awards for “SOX SUX.” (We ought to know: We served as a preliminary judge of the Clio’s, back in the day.) But the fact that it passed muster, both with our client and our client’s prospects, answers the question above. Indeed, not only was the line-crossing possible, it was advisable. Think of the competition. Honestly: Do you think anyone else was approaching banking execs with humor like that? In other words, crossing the line cuts through the clutter. That said, you need to be careful. We once worked on a campaign for a cancer center, and there’s simply no humor to be found, or used, there. But banking regulations? Logistics snafus? Finance? Absolutely. There are tons of B2B verticals that suffer from a lack of humor, freedom, and creativity. There are two components at play here: The first is shock value. If no one else is using silly jokes, puns, or gallows humor, then your creative will stand out. But beware: Shock value simply for shock value’s sake, can blow up in your face. It can be offensive. Which leads to the second component: That’s what we might call “intimate expertise.” We didn’t say “Don’t let your bank tank.” That’s just fatuous. Callous. And it takes the low road: it leads with a negative. But “SOX SUX” comes with a wink and a nod: “We understand the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley. We know how much you dread it. Tacit implication: We have a solution to get you past all this, uh, suckiness.” If you can convey all that in just six letters, you’ve succeeded. Reward from the risk As a creative, it’s your job to be daring. To push boundaries. As we like to put it to our clients, we’ll always be stretching, and going for the edge. Because we can always pull it back, or dial it down, as needed. If we don’t go there in the first place, we’re not delivering the value that our clients pay us for. (Conversely, it’s impossible to “crank up the creativity” on something dull, so you can’t go in the opposite direction. You can always dial it down; you can never dial it up.) And of course the creative biz is a world of volume, of rejections, of second, third, and umpteenth passes. A hundred visions and revisions before the taking of toast and tea, as T.S. Eliot would say. But if you land a good one—or several—that cut through the clutter, that make you laugh in spite of yourself, and that, importantly, help your clients drive in new business, it’s sooo worth the risk. Have a story to share? Need help with a creative assignment on your plate? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you. Here at Copel Communications, we do a lot of writing. But a picture is still worth a thousand words. We craft a lot of creative concepts, too, involving visuals, which are typically handed off to talented artists and designers. This is where visual metaphors often come into play, and we love them. So much so that we’re devoting this article to them. Show me a story A metaphor is really a verbal construct. It’s when one word is used as a symbol for something else. (“Love is a rose.”) Again, words. If you look up “metaphor” in your thesaurus, you’ll get some decidedly “verbal” synonyms, such as “figure of speech,” “word painting,” and “word picture.” Whatever. More interesting is how you, as a creative professional, can use a metaphor visually. Where one thing stands in for something else. Or how you can be “literal” with your visuals, combining or juxtaposing elements that, in the real world, would never be combined or juxtaposed. Yet when you force that combination upon the viewer, bang, there’s synergy. (If you do it right, of course.) And that’s stuff that we love (again, when it’s done right). Put it in its place We developed creative campaigns for a company that served a large community. They were a private concern, yet funded by taxpayer dollars, providing an essential service. (That’s as much as we can divulge safely here.) We were tasked with creating a pride/public awareness campaign for them. So the thinking went like this:
Thus the campaign. You certainly think of those trucks as they drive through your neighborhood. But did you know that this company also does outreach to local schools? That it serves wealthy and poorer neighborhoods alike? So what if you saw those familiar trucks... in unfamiliar settings? Mind you, the truck is branded with the company’s logo; it’s unmistakable. So what if you saw it, parked... inside a kindergarten classroom? Atop a wealthy lawn in an affluent neighborhood? At the park? The images would be (purposely) jarring... at first. But then, within seconds, they’d make sense. “Oh, of course,” you’d think. “(Company) is part of the landscape. Part of the community.” It’s hard to connect them so inseparably with words. With images, it’s instant. It’s visceral. We did another creative campaign for this same client, along similar lines. What, we asked, are the essential elements that everyone needs? The answers are easy: Air, water, food, life, safety, security, and so on. So what if you depicted a visual/iconographic matrix of those elements... and simply added (Company) into the mix? You’re forcing the viewer to make the connection. Personification Personification represents an entire subset of visual metaphors. We worked on a creative campaign for a regional cancer center, in which the visual metaphor was arrestingly simple: We opted to personify cancer. The reasoning went like this: People are afraid of cancer. But what if cancer were afraid of (Regional Cancer Center)? That’s an interesting spin. Of course, you can’t see cancer. Not in real life. But in Ad Land, you can. Because you can personify it. The same way that Allstate famously personified “Mayhem” with its character who loves to trash your home and your car (underscoring your need for the services of Allstate). Cancer is a serious subject. You don’t want some cutesy actor portraying it. So you could just have a menacing pair of eyes... a shadow... just enough to walk the line between seen and unseen. A deep well We love visual metaphors because opportunities to employ them always crop up sooner or later. And there are always new ways to use them, to get creative, to make something that’s at once visually arresting and on-message. Need help with this kind of creative concepting? Contact us. We’d love to tackle that assignment for you. Boy is this ever a fun—if uncommon—topic. So many times, in these articles, we’ve addressed ways to deliver the most bang for the buck... and often, for the nickel. That’s not always the case. Every once in a while, we’ll work on an assignment for a client with incredibly deep pockets. Then the calculus changes. Not the creative. But the approach to the creative. Think of it this way. If you see some low-budget movie with no-name actors in it, everything is cheap. The sets. The music. Even the hair and makeup look bad. Now make that same movie, except with an A-lister. Would the music sound tinny? No way. Would the sets look cheap? Nope. Would one hair on that actor’s head be out of place, in even one shot? Never. But these two hypothetical movies are shot from the exact same script. Or are they? Playing Monopoly More times than we can count, we’ve used the word “stock” in deliverables we create: References to stock photos. Stock music. Stock illustrations. Canned material. Granted, that does pose some very real creative problems. How do you, for example, make your stuff stand out when you’re using the same ingredients as countless others? (We wrote a cool article on that very topic; check it out here.) But for a recent assignment, the sky was the limit. Of course we’re under NDA so we’ll need to cloak the details in anonymity, but the client was a major U.S. enterprise. You know their name, even if you haven’t used their service. And you likely have used their service. So. We were tasked (by this enterprise’s ad agency, to be clear) with developing concepts for a creative campaign that would span all media. Think network television spots. Bus sides in major cities. Blanketed social media. Everything. In the broad scheme of things—and this is pretty typical in situations like this—the client’s big budget item wasn’t the creative, but the media buy. (Yes, our rates are quite reasonable here at Copel Communications!) Think of, for example, a Super Bowl spot. There’s no way the production budget comes anywhere near the price-tag for the air time. But we still had what felt like Monopoly money to play with. Imagine an unlimited production budget. What do you do? How do you spend it? It’s all in the scale We’ll single out one of the campaign concepts we’d submitted here, because it illustrates our point nicely. We wanted to show (imagine that this is a “pride” campaign, showing the world how great this company is) that this company makes people’s lives better. So we’d start with, say, a guy on the street. A woman in a grocery store. A cop on the beat. (Remember, we’re fudging reality here a tad, to maintain confidentiality.) And we could then show how each of these people’s lives were improved by Big Company. That’s fine. In fact, it’s nice. It’s intimate. You, the viewer, can easily connect and identify with all these people. But what if it’s bigger than that? What if Big Company is helping entire neighborhoods? How do you show that? Know how? You show it. You go big. You go aerial. You broaden the perspective—try that with stock footage—and have all these people coming together harmoniously. But it gets even bigger. (Yes, Big Company has global ambitions.) Big Company, it turns out, is helping the entire planet. It’s all part of the “E” in what’s commonly known as ESG, for Environmental, Social, and Governance, i.e., corporate social responsibility. So we scripted time-lapse special effects which depict the world’s wounds, healing. Changes in the oceans. The weather. All orchestrated (what the heck, call in the orchestra) to this very human-level narrative which began, mere seconds ago, at the street-and-grocery-store level. That’s how you use a big budget. Stress-test it Note the progression here. We started small on purpose. The reason for this was twofold: 1) It established the intimate, human connection. 2) It effectively “showed off” the big budget: The spot grows bigger and bigger and more audacious as it goes. That’s intentional. Imagine if we didn’t work that way. What if the spot started with the planets and stars and special effects? Then it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s no exciting revelation, no expansion. In a strange way, it would be small. Here’s another stress test: Does the whole thing resonate with the client’s intent and vision? Put bluntly: You can’t bring in space ships and aliens if there’s no need for space ships and aliens. Everything must be justified. Overall, we’d say that lower-budget projects force you to be more, not less, creative. You have to do more with less; you can’t simply buy your way out of a problem. But big budgets, as you’ve seen, have their own special challenges. We couldn’t turn in a script for just-the-grocery-store-level perspective for this assignment; we’d be laughed out of the room. You need to make it appropriate for the assignment. And yes, even the budget. Not everything we work on is a multimillion-dollar project. Not that yours isn’t—but even if it isn’t, we’d be delighted to help. A creative challenge is a creative challenge, and we love rising to the occasion. Contact us today to get started. We love using extreme examples. They’re so helpful. They can really get you to the crux of a creative dilemma—or others—very quickly. Allow us to explain. So many times, in the creative field, you’ll be tasked with coming up with a novel approach to a given challenge; that’s the whole “creation” thing. And more often than not, the person handing you the assignment—your superior in the organization, or the client—will not want something extreme from you. They hardly ever ask for something that’s over-the-top in its creative interpretation and/or execution. So why do we love extreme examples so much? Calibrate your creative compass Like you, we find our assignments are more often vanilla than jalapeño. But using vanilla to solve for vanilla is unproductive. How can you take a bland concept and amp it up to the level you desire? You can’t. There’s nothing there to dial up. See where this is going? But if you start with an extreme concept, it’s easy to dial it down. To pull it back. And here’s the important part: It’s easy to pull it back to any level of intensity you desire. Now isn’t that useful? So start with the most extreme, over-the-top interpretation of a creative solution that you can possibly think of. We do this all the time. What if that ad for, say, a new software solution depicted, um, well, murder? Whaaat? Yeah. Go there. This is a creative exercise, wherein the end will justify the means. It’s also a lot of fun. So you’re now ideating an ad for an app in which someone is killing someone else. What on earth will this prove? How on earth will it help? First of all, it will loosen you up. You’re violently throwing away any of the assignment’s original creative constraints. That’s liberating unto itself, and an important prerequisite. It’s also quite likely that this extreme, over-the-top (again, murder???) concept is making you laugh, making you giddy. It’s like the suppressed laughter you had in school when you drew a funny picture of the teacher, not ten feet away. But here’s the thing: Like it or not, there will be a method to your madness. You just needed to uncork it. “Murder” in this case, can be figurative. It might be that this new software can slay the competition. Maybe it’s a novel depiction of a “killer app.” See how ridiculously easy it is to dial back the original, wholly inappropriate concept to something very useful? And it only took a minute. We mention the “method to your madness” above because, try as you may, you’ll still be on-topic, even when you try to be your craziest. You can’t un-think the original assignment as you brainstorm insane iterations for it. So you’re really just tricking your own sense of propriety into letting go. Now imagine, as part of the tried-and-true brainstorming process, you follow the first rule (by the way, we have a nice article on “The V-8 trick” and other brainstorming techniques) of “going for volume.” Imagine that you have lots of these insane, ridiculous, over-the-top ideas. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Because you can dial any of them back. An exception to the rule As we’d noted above, most assignments ask you for vanilla in the first place. But some don’t. For those—the jalapeños—it’s not just appropriate, but expected that you go over-the-top in your interpretation and execution (glaring fonts and neon colors, anyone?). So then you’re set from the get-go. These kinds of extreme assignments often ask for parody, or shock value, or brash humor. All of that works here. But again—go big. Go huge. Go over the top. Challenge yourself to out-extreme the extreme assignment. Again, you can always dial it back, easily. The opposite (cranking up something bland) is impossible. This trick is more useful than you think We’ve couched this entire article within the context of solving a creative assignment. But it’s so much more useful than that. We use extreme examples all the time. When a client asks us whether Option A for a certain business challenge might work better—or worse—than Option B, we dive straight for the “Extreme Knob,” and crank it. What would Option A look like, pushed to its ridiculous, over-the-top extreme? What would Option B look like, pushed just as much? We imagine, and describe these, for the client. Clearly, one of these will be closer to what the client wants than the other. We point that out to them; it’s instantly crystal clear; and within the context of that very conversation, we’re able to easily dial back the extreme scenarios, and help the client to pick the better of the two options. All this falls under the challenge of creative problem-solving. Which is what we do every day. Contact us now and let us help you, too. Some concepts are hard to convey. If you toil in the creative trenches, you can be tasked with presenting (and thus selling) ideas like love, or comfort, or peace of mind. Similarly, you might need to depict something malicious that can’t be seen: a disease. Or you might need an entirely new visual spin on something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer. There’s a common go-to solution for all of these creative dilemmas: Personification. It’s a term you learned in fourth-grade English class to explain how an author used it to bring something like a natural force (fire, thunderstorm) to life in the reader’s mind. It’s a literary device that’s been around forever; think of how “Awful Beauty puts on all its arms” in Pope’s “The Rape of The Lock.” And that was in 1712. But we digress. Sure, you can employ personification in the written form, in copy. But copy requires “diving in” on the part of the audience; it’s not immediately apparent. Aside from, perhaps, a headline, it doesn’t grab the way visual elements do. What looks like a person? There are plenty of great examples here, both from our own experience and from well-known campaigns. We’ll start with the former, and work our way to the latter. In case you’re not up on your latest enterprise technology, there’s a hot new thing out there called robotic process automation which, despite its cool name, is basically just a souped-up computer macro that spans more applications than just, say, Excel. We had a client that was able to use this tech to actually pull information from corporate directories and Excel sheets, and then draw a process map from it in Microsoft Visio. That’s really impressive. But how do you market it? In this case, it was personification—and more specifically, anthropomorphism—to the rescue. Our graphic designer on this project created an adorable character of a cartoon “artist” robot, replete with paintbrush, smock, and beret. You see the bot holding the paintbrush, you see the gorgeous process map he’d created, sitting on its little cartoon easel... the thing barely even needs a headline. Another: We were working with a hospital client, and they wanted to promote their new cancer-treatment center. And one of the campaign concepts we presented to them personified cancer. Granted, this is a delicate subject. You don’t want the over-the-top monstrous allergen you may have seen in TV ads for antihistamines. So cancer could be depicted as a malicious, lurking presence. Perhaps just a pair of eyes, spying for an evil opportunity. Or it could be there, without even being shown, borrowing from the style of classic horror movies by Val Lewton such as “Cat People.” Going big Two of the best examples of personification that come to mind are from national TV campaigns: one old, the other still ongoing. The old one was for what we’d mentioned in the intro: “something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer.” Depicting a gray box isn’t very exciting; it’s what you can do with it that makes it exciting. Or, conversely, what it can’t do (if it’s not such a great computer) that makes it frustrating and annoying. Remember “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC.”? If you don’t, these were ads from Apple, aiming to show the superiority of their computers over Windows-based machines. And the brilliant thing about them was that they never showed a computer at all. There were simply two actors standing on an empty white stage. One—the hip, cool dude portrayed by Justin Long—was the Mac. The other—the pitifully unhip office wonk, portrayed by John Hodgman—was the PC. The Mac talked about, and showed, all the cool things he could do. The PC tried to do the same, and always failed, in an embarrassingly humorous way. Apple sold a lot of Macs off this campaign. The other campaign that really nails “personification” is from Allstate. You’ve just got to love their “Mayhem” character. Think about that, and how perfectly that works: A single actor, a person, portraying all the terrible things, both human-induced and acts of nature, that can screw up your life and your belongings. You don’t think of all these random evils as one single force... until you see those ads. And then you see him positioned up against Allstate, and the brand gets cemented in your mind. When to use it, or not Personification, like any creative trope, is no magic bullet. It’s certainly not new. And as we’d mentioned above in our cancer-center story, you need to be careful in how you employ it; used flippantly or indelicately, it can backfire on you. But done right, personification is a great tool, just waiting for fresh new applications. Need help with it, or any creative challenge? Contact us. We’d love to help. We’re fond of saying that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” There’s a constant tension that exists in this field like nowhere else. The mere idea of selling a creative idea feels almost wrong. But it’s part of the biz. In this article, we’re going to relate a recent story in which we had to do just that. But pay heed: This is more than just “pitching the idea and seeing if the client buys it.” It was more subtle than that—and the way we succeeded here can help you, too. There’s a little bit of mental head-gaming going on here; let us explain. What’s your take on video? For this assignment, our client (a professional-services consultancy) had the opportunity to be featured in upcoming videos by a big enterprise which sort of straddled the line between “partner” and “client.” The important thing to note, for this story, was that the enterprise was going to be footing the (substantial) bill for the video production. So it was our job to basically pitch our client’s story to this enterprise, so that the enterprise would hopefully feature them in their upcoming videos. Note that this enterprise had tons of companies to choose from. Thus it was, in our view, a competition. We had to make our client the most video-worthy choice for this “Hollywood” enterprise. So what do you do in a situation like this? You listen. Reading between the lines The head video person at this enterprise (we’re blurring some lines here to protect identities) was the one in charge of making the selection of which companies would feature in these new “shows” they were producing. We wanted to learn more. So we booked a big Zoom call, with us, our client, and a few people from the big enterprise, including that Head Video Guy. Here’s where it gets interesting. Remember what we’d said about listening? The more you pay attention, and take notes, the better armed you are to succeed in a challenge like this. Here’s what Head Video Guy told us: “We want to make videos about a great company we’re working with. We want to feature the principal people of that company. But we don’t want to simply shoot ‘a talking head in an office.’ We want to tell an interesting story, one that really works well on video and takes advantage of the medium.” Ta-dah. There it is. We’d left off with the enterprise that we’d think about some ideas, and pitch them to them in a follow-up Zoom call. Building the “un-story” In our next, offline, meeting with our client, we asked the different team members about the kinds of things they like to do when they’re not at the office—and the more extreme, the better. We were pleasantly surprised. These people play as hard as they work:
Do you see where this is going? Pitching without pitching In our initial Zoom call, we picked up the signals that the Head Video Guy loved coming up with creative story ideas. In other words, he didn’t want to be spoon-fed. Read another way: He didn’t want to buy other people’s creative ideas; he wanted to come up with his own. So our job was to essentially pitch him “fodder,” and let him (easily) come up with cool creative ideas that were “his own.” All of the extreme sports listed above made this ridiculously easy. In the follow-up Zoom call, the conversation went something like this: Us: “We chatted and talked about different things, and just thought we’d tell you about what we learned about the different people at this company—specifically, what they do in their off-hours, compared to what they do at the office.” Head Video Guy (intrigued): “Go on...” Us: “For example, one of the top technical people, when she’s not solving difficult software challenges, enjoys going mountain climbing in her spare time. Can you believe that?” Head Video Guy (huge epiphany): “Wait a minute! This means that she’s always striving to reach new heights! What an incredible visual metaphor!” Us: “Amazing!” Yeah. Of course we’d thought of this. But we didn’t want to pitch it that way. The rest of the conversation, as you’ll see, was pretty predictable, but enjoyable and productive nonetheless: Us: “Our top sales rep loves deep-sea fishing.” Head Video Guy: “He likes to reel in the catch!” Us: “The Director of Product Development is an avid surfer.” Head Video Guy: “He’s catching the next wave!” Us: “The CEO enjoys skiing.” Head Video Guy: “He’s carving out the right path for the company!” And so on. The takeaway As you can tell, Head Video Guy was absolutely delighted by this call, and all of the brilliant creative ideas he came up with during it; they were all great for the upcoming video series. Just as important, note what we didn’t do: We never pitched any of these visual metaphors. We didn’t need to. Indeed, if we had, they would’ve ruined the call. We let the other guy make the (relatively easy) creative leap, and enjoy the rush and the glory. And oh, our client came out ahead in this “video competition.” As we’ve said, “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” But the more you know about selling, the better you can be at selling your creative. Need help with that next challenge? Contact us. We do this kind of stuff all the time. |
Latest tipsCheck out the latest tips and best-practice advice. Archives
June 2024
Categories
All
|