 Never miss an opportunity to leverage curiosity and drama in your work
We exist in spacetime. Events move from the past to the present. We are all passengers aboard time’s arrow, hurtling inexorably toward the future. In other words, WTF?? Stay with us on this one. It will get real practical, and real concrete, real quick. But we really have to start this article with incredibly broad, almost Einsteinian strokes. Life is a temporal medium. That is, it moves through time. People will say that music is a temporal medium. That’s true. You can’t listen to an entire Beethoven symphony, or Beatles song, in one instant. You must start at the beginning, and experience it as it progresses through its middle to its to end. It’s been said that painting, by contrast, is not a temporal medium. You can see the entire Mona Lisa in one blink. But what if you put a headline above her head? Hmmm. Now things begin to change. Thus our segue into the core of this matter. If you’re in the communications business—whether creatively or not—you need to appreciate the way that people move through life. The way they experience your work. The sequencing of events they undergo. And—and here’s the basis of this entire article—their expectations and instinctive desire to enjoy a story. Wow. Took a while to get there, didn’t it? Is the medium the message? Let’s start simple. Let’s say you’re scripting a TV commercial. You can set up the viewer’s expectations with some kind of tease at the outset (“What is Brand X?”), and then effectively keep them in suspense while you hit other copy points in your script, knowing all along that you’ll pay off those expectations—and thus satisfy the viewer—at the end of the script, when you “button” it. (“Brand X is [Blank].”) As we said, that’s pretty simple. You already knew that a 30-second TV spot runs for 30 seconds. But what happens when you go to print? Where’s the timing? Where’s the temporal factor? What’s the sequence of events for you to capitalize upon? Now it’s subtler. Now you need to do a little more creative extrapolating. Let’s return to Mona Lisa. If she’s your “print spokesperson” for Brand X Ice Cream, you might have a headline that reads, “Mona Lisa Loves Brand X Ice Cream.” (Creative, huh?) But now look at that image, that painting, which we've posted atop this article for your convenience. As you can see, it's a vertical composition, with negative space above and below it. Sure, you could park that entire headline above Mona’s head. “Mona Lisa Loves Brand X Ice Cream.” Now think: How would that placement affect the viewer? If you’re the viewer, seeing this for the first time, you’d recognize a woman’s face, instantly, and then read the headline. Face, headline. Just like that. That’s the sequence. It may seem simple, but it’s very important. Because now you can deconstruct it. You can leverage it. You can make it better. What if you break the headline in half? “Mona Lisa Loves…” Loves what? What does she love, for goodness’ sake? See? There’s that instinctive curiosity and desire for completion that we, as humans, have hard-wired into our brains. In fact, if you just put that first-half-of-the-headline atop Mona Lisa and left it that way, you would drive viewers absolutely nuts. Is this a mistake? Not if you plan it. What if you’re launching the Mona Lisa movie, and want to run a teaser campaign in advance? Heck, that “unfinished” layout would work great. Back to ice cream. If you now typeset the second half of that original headline, and set it, small, beneath Mona’s face, you’ve—just like that--taken the viewer on a little journey, replete with a satisfying destination. The journey goes like this:
Bet you never thought of if that way before. (If you have, kudos!) This was a purposely simple, and made-up, example. But here comes a real one… The big reveal We were recently tasked with redesigning a slim introductory brochure that would sit within a pocket inside a larger presentation jacket, part of a “company overview package” for a big professional-services firm. This firm specializes in addressing a business problem that many of its prospects take for granted/assume can’t be fixed. Hmmm. The old brochure pitched the solution in terms of a metaphor (both verbal and visual) on the cover of the slim brochure that pokes out of the pocket. Once you opened it and read it, you could see how they played out the metaphor. Now think back to Mona Lisa. And consider the incredible creative opportunity that was handed to us by this assignment. Think:
What’s the sequencing then?
Now you can see how we approached this creatively:
We won’t—we can’t—get into client details here. But suffice to say that the “problem” the company addresses is a form of “chaos” or “disorder.” So that’s what we depicted in the top half. You already figured out the rest, didn’t you? You’re so clever. Yep, the bottom half represents perfect, lock-step, anal-retentive order. It’s perfect. And—and here’s the fun part—you actually get to see the transition take place as you pull the brochure from the pocket. Heck, it’s enough to make Mona Lisa smile. Wider. Moving ahead As you can hopefully appreciate, there is no limit to this set-up/payoff principle, or its applications in your work. Think about, for example, the discrete steps somone goes through when they open and read a basic trifold brochure. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a business memo can benefit from the set-up/tease/pay-off approach. It’s simply a matter of putting yourself into the shoes—and more importantly, the head—of the recipient first, and deducing the sequence that will take place, and the expectations that will follow. Need help applying this principle—or any other creative approach—to that next challenge of yours? Contact us. We would love to help.
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