Mini [Spec Ad]
One cool technique for writing well targeted advertising that I’ve found is to take a universal concept and figure out a way to narrow it to a specific demographic. Universal concepts are a given in advertising because it guarantees that your ad will speak to the most people, but there is an inherent danger in using these because they’re just so stupid and cliché more than anything else. Sometimes I read advertisements and I can’t for the life of me understand what the copywriter was thinking. Maybe I just haven’t been around long enough in this game to understand, maybe the client demanded it, maybe the copywriter just wasn’t getting paid enough to care. There’s lots of situations that can lead to bad advertising. Generally though, I’ve come to believe that the most common mistaken assumption amongst cliché advertising is that broader is better. It ain’t. Not always anyway.
The way I see it, narrowing and focusing an advertisement is more effective in the same way that speaking directly to someone is better than shouting into a crowd of strangers. It’s just less crazy sounding. It may speak to less people, but it will have a much larger impact on those it does speak to. “So then,” you may be angrily hollering into your computer screen right now, “what is an effective way to use universals in advertising?” It’s simple: Combine the universal with a specific. I feel it’s effective for a couple of reasons. First, your ad starts off with something that everyone can relate to, but second, it hits them with something that speaks directly to them. It sounds like common sense, but the one-two punch can really hammer your message into a person’s head. The universal gets you in immediately, and the specific makes the person reading think on some base level that your product now helps define them as a person.
For this ad, I wanted to try to brand a car (in this case, the Mini Cooper) as a hip product for younger buyers. I took my inspiration visually from the Honda Element animal ads a few years back, which I felt were just awesome. They were cute, funny, strangely clever, and spoke directly to the young audience that they were going for (I feel my art director captured the look I wanted perfectly). As for the universal / specific dynamic of the piece, I took the boring, cliché universal of the backseat driver, and combined it with a concept appealing directly to the 18-30 year old audience of the Element; video games. Anyone who’s played a video game with a friend could tell you that a backseat game player is just as annoying as a backseat driver. Finally, I made sure to have the video game in question be something very universal. I won’t say exactly what the game is to avoid copyright infringement, but let’s just call him “barrel throwing ape” for now.
This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s visually striking, it has a good sense of humor to grip the person reading, and the underlying one-two punch present in it makes it effective. It’s a little weird, but let’s be honest: The 18-30 year olds of the world are also pretty weird now. Just watch Adult Swim.
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