 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.
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