In Spec Ads with no comments
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.
In Spec Ads with 3 comments
When I was younger, in high school and early college, I used to read a lot of Maxim magazine. I eventually grew out of this and started making an active attempt to read more books and less articles on sexy dames and muscle cars. Still, as pretty much the first real magazine I read consistently, the advertising aesthetic stuck with me through the years. It’s amazing how effective an attractive woman can be in convincing men to do things - even if they’re just printed on a piece of gloss paper.
This idea came when I picked up a Maxim for the first time in a few years. I looked through, and was now more conscious of the advertising and its tone. I decided to try my hand at a simple “sex-sells” type ad, and this is what came out. It also happened to be December when I made this piece, so I decided to try to combine it with a holiday angle. I imagine the holidays are a perfect time to sell expensive jewelry to men scrambling to please their partners, so I combined an accessory which could fit a holiday theme (red and green jewels in this case) with one that could show off a nice pair of legs (an ankle bracelet). As I picked the specific product to focus on, I saw this exercise more as a marketing piece, advertising the store as a whole, rather than a piece whose purpose was to advertise a product assigned by the company. Just something meant to make the Zales name stick out in the readers’ heads and lure them into the store, even if they weren’t going with the specific advertised product in mind. Sneaky, no?
In Spec Ads with no comments
The Cup was a small, family owned coffeehouse I worked at a few years back. It’s a nice little place about two miles down the road from my house, right under the train station in Wantagh, NY. The genesis of this project came when I was puttering around town in my little green motorcar and happened to pass the ol’ girl. I started to think back to my days as a waiter there, serving coffee to yuppies and teenagers and all the drunk kids from the bar down the street, working ’til 3 in the morning, making five dollars an hour.
*sniffle* I’m getting all misty just thinking about the old days of manual labor.
No time for that though! Times change and I’m no longer a waiter anymore - I’m a copywriter now. And as an obsessive up-and-coming copywriter, I’ve begun subconsciously branding and re-branding everything I see in my daily life. It’s a gift and it’s a curse, but it’s a trait that leads to a constant flow of ideas. I began to wonder what kind of image would be effective marketing were they to expand into a chain. It hit me that the clientèle of the establishment - the yuppies, the drunk adults, and the hip teens - they all were visiting for the same reason. It was a fun, relaxed kind of place where you could just go to talk. A little less flashy than a Starbucks, but a little more like home.
My brainstorm on this project came together in this campaign you see here. I took the idea of “The Cup,” and transformed it into a motif for these three ads. Then I took three subjects which I considered were in direct opposition to the homey, fun atmosphere of the imagined chain. I also insisted my art director on this take a very basic, minimalist approach; I wanted the cups to do the speaking, not some fancy design. We came up with this layout together, and he designed a rather nice looking modern logo (a vast improvement over their current one).
Everyone who sees this project tends to giggle a little at the 2nd ad specifically. This makes me very happy.
In Spec Ads with no comments
The second piece in the spec campaign for The Cup.
In Spec Ads with 1 comment
The third and final piece in my campaign for The Cup.
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