👽 Go Odd Or Go Home - How To Make Unignorable Ad Campaigns

Marketing Unfiltered 7 - Harry Guides You Through Odd Advertising Successes

Happy Friday! You’re going to enjoy this week’s Marketing Unfiltered…

Thank you for the brilliant emails and LinkedIn love for John’s CFO approved, investing in brand take last week.

» Onto this week: we see the return of Harry and he writes just like Harry can on - how ad campaigns have to be unignorable…

There's a hell of a lot of flim-flam, hubris and overexuberance on LinkedIn, and marketers are more guilty of glorifying themselves than most. 

Inflated numbers, phoney awards, induced reviews or just self-serving opinions that humble-brag their way to likes, comments and PR puff pieces.

What's often (increasingly?) forgotten is that the only metric that should matter to marketers is:-

"Does your work work?"

We have numerous KPIs that can help us understand whether a campaign 'works' or doesn't. Prompted and unprompted awareness and NPS scores for brand, incremental sales volumes, CPA, conversion, net revenue for direct response - the list goes on. And on... 

Whatever KPI you're trying to hit, none of them relate to whether the world actually likes the campaign.

A Look Back

Back in 2014 I worked for Mecca Bingo's digital business in Gibraltar. We appointed an agency, isobel, to create a direct response TV ad campaign but one which would also put Mecca on the map at a brand level, too. If memory serves, we encouraged them to go as weird as possible. When they pitched concepts, we asked them to double down on the oddness. 

We wanted standout. We wanted to make people talk. We wanted something unignorable.

What we got was a fake doctor (think clipboard holding, glasses wearing, white coated lady, as per generic healthcare ads) introducing a twerking cactus.

It was batshit, it was nonsense, and it took a hell of a lot of selling to get it past the Mecca bosses back in Maidenhead.

In Marketing hubris terms, it was never going to win any awards, and its (purposefully) homespun production values made it feel a bit crap (it should be noted the agency and production company NAILED the brief across the board in this respect). I wasn't proud of the work in a 'Look, world, at the art we've created and rejoice!' way. 

But I WAS proud of the results. 

Double-digit new account openings, significant brand awareness and salience uplift, increased new customer deposits. 

Tick, Tick and Tick. 

Enter The F*uck It Button

I often talk to teams about hitting the 'F*ck It' button - to go outside the norm with their creative design, to make things that are entertaining, amusing or just so strange they're different, unavoidable and therefore MEMORABLE. 

In my recent past I was marketing mobile, PC and console games. The mobile App games industry is a high-volume ‘test and learn’ exercise game played at a million miles an hour, so the team was building hundreds of ad creatives for the App networks every week. More often than not, the high-performing creatives weren’t the ones we slaved over or were universally enamoured with – they were shite, from a creative craft perspective but unusual, eye-catching, funny, often brain-scrambling shite, which was why they outperformed the polished executions by 10X. They stopped gamers scrolling at a million MPH in their tracks and tempted them with intrigue into installing our game.

Whenever the team got stuck with a game that wasn’t converting, it was these ‘mother of invention’ ad creatives that came out of nowhere and just… worked.   

Consumer Recall Struggle

Consumers only remember around 10% of TV ads after 24 hours (Provoke Insights summer 2023 report), so your ads have to work ten times harder to get a full return on your media spend. 

Whether you're running DRTV or brand campaigns, you can't get anywhere if your campaign is ignored. 

Charles Vallance (the V of VCCP fame) said:- 

“The human brain is not designed to remember, it’s designed to forget. The greatest brands understand this”.

Vallance’s agency runs what it calls ‘The Memory Index’ alongside Cowry, a behavioural psychology consultancy, in which they review the memorability of ads both past and present to ascertain what it is about them that sticks in consumer’s minds. Their rationale for this expansive research is clear, as they state unequivocally:- 

“Ads not aired since the 1970s can still sit fresh in people’s memories”.

Today, the standout TV ads when measured by effectiveness share common traits of being different, often unusual. They weren’t created in siloed data farms – more likely, they came when the creative team was two pints in and panic shopping for an idea with a deadline fast approaching. 

A quick browse of creative effectiveness platform System 1’s ‘Ad of the Week’ chart for 2024 shows it’s littered with examples of the unusual, the absurd and the unexpected. Haribo, Irn Bru, Paddy Power and Warburtons all deservedly feature, and all are A/ funny and B/ unexpected. 

In his 2012 article for Forbes ‘What Makes A TV Commercial Memorable and Effective?’ Steve Olenski polled a number of industry pros, with my favourite response being:- 

“A TV spot has to score high in 2 areas to be memorable: sheer entertainment value and disruption/ thought-provoking ability”

In short it turns out that ‘surprise and delight’, that old creative brief cliché, really is the magic formula, if executed well.

And that, inevitably, is where I must pump the brakes of enthusiasm and doff my reality hat towards the inevitable – the tipping point. It is, of course, possible to go too strange. To try and be too funny. To go a few inches beyond the perfect balance. This year alone, Pot Noodle’s ‘Slurping’ ad by Adam&EveDDB was amazing for recall but caused a slew of complaints by disgusted viewers. 

Ricky Gervais & Vodka…

Then there’s my personal nemesis campaign – Ricky Gervais acting as a smug, know it all, ‘Christ aren’t I a kidder, eh? EH?!!’ mouthpiece for Dutch Barn Vodka in their self-proclaimed ‘Worst Advert Ever’. In an effort to emulate Clooney, MacGregor, Dan Ackroyd et al in making billions as the owner/ ambassador of a spirits brand, Gervais’s campaign falls woefully short, using a broken interpretation of reverse psychology to flag the downsides of alcohol abuse. In an ad selling vodka. Using a fake doctor in a white lab coat (which rings a bell, somehow…).

There’s something quite meta about having the balls to call your campaign ‘the worst ad ever’, meaning for it to be self-deprecating but then accidentally - almost endearingly - making the actual worst ad in history. Gervais is one of the few men who could pull it off – I mean, if smug were a superpower, he’d be God in the Marvel Universe.    

Boring Or Brand Fame…

If you want brand fame, and you want to drive any consumer action whatsoever, you can't do it by being boring. Generic is your enemy, safety is a threat and humour is a weapon. 

The great ad luminary David Ogilvy captured this sentiment perfectly:-

“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible”.

You want to stand out? Go different, go funny and go odd. 

Just not too odd…

We will land in your inbox on the 13th.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks,

Danny, Harry and the brilliant contributors to Marketing Unfiltered

PS. Remember if you’ve missed any previous newsletters you can enjoy

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