Making a good ad

"People don’t mind being advertised to. We’ll freely sit in a pub and chat about fantastic Guinness commercials. But we do mind being interrupted by 30 seconds of stuff not fit for our U-bends."

If there’s a secret formula to what makes a great advert, then no one told me. And if they had, I would have just sold my third agency. I would be angling for grouper fish from the window of an idyllic pad.

The ingredients of a good ad

 

What is it that makes a good ad?

It’s all the obvious stuff: being memorable, making a valid claim for the product, and lodging the name in people minds.

How to do this:

• Make people laugh
  
• Inspire them
  
• Make them think
  
• Make them reappraise
  

The changing face of advertising

 What do adverts like the Smash Martians or Cadbury’s gorilla have that most other ads don’t?

They all come from a totally unexpected place. They’re very different from anything you’ve seen before. They have something for which you just have no point of reference.

There was a time when adverts needed to follow a stricter format. To begin with, being sold exciting new products was a novelty in itself. Now we have to work very hard for people’s attention. And in ever more challenging ways.

Since the dawn of the internet, people have become exposed to a higher quality and more varied output of entertainment: from writing to art, from design to advertising. This is why creative teams frequently get caught out when they’ve ‘borrowed’ an idea, whereas in the pre-www days they’d probably have got away with it.

For some, this makes the job harder. For me, it’s just more interesting and more challenging. We all just need to throw our nets wider and soak in stranger stuff.

O2 was once seen as a serious, dull, business-focused brand. But with the creation of the most populated music venue in the world and a nifty exclusive contract with the gurus at Apple, they seem a very different proposition indeed. All without the use of a ‘conventional’ advertising campaign.

Get creative with advertising

As a rule, people don’t mind being advertised to. We’ll freely sit in a pub and chat about fantastic Guinness commercials. But we do mind being interrupted by 30 seconds of stuff not fit for our U-bends.

Engaging with someone’s emotions in a fresh way is the key. But this doesn’t mean we have to create something bizarre and entirely new every time. It’s often about the context you place something in. The following advert transposes a rather average conversation about mobile phone bills into a super-villain cartoon, which suddenly (with the addition of the smartest written dialogue around) into something spectacular.

The now legendary Dunlop commercial is just a road test for tyres advert, but rather than using crash test dummies, test tracks and oil slicks the viewer is taken to a very surreal place indeed.

We all love to post-rationalize adverts. But in our search for the secret formula, all we are doing is creating formulas which are ultimately counterproductive to the very thing that makes a great ad great – how different it is.