Reason to believe

Here’s an interesting one from LG, a full page ad that exists primarily to make the point that the 4:3 aspect ratio of their phone screens allows you to see more of an image.

Now one of the first things that you should do when you are writing an ad for anything is make yourself a list of all the reasons why a person should make the purchase that you are asking them to make – the ‘reasons to believe’ that the product or service is worth the money that you are asking for – infact not just that it’s worth the money but that it’s the most amazing value for the money that they will come across between today and the next Mayan end of the world.

Once you have written this list of all the reasons why the thing that you are selling is so wonderful, the next thing that you have to do is write similar lists for all the competing products/services within a similar price bracket in the market.

Now that you have all your lists, the question becomes twofold: is there anything that your product or service is offering that the others don’t and, if not, is there something that you are offering that your product or service does better/faster/more easily than it’s competitors? The answer to these two questions form the basis for putting together an ad…

There is however, as almost always, a but, and this ‘but’ can and will be the cause of more than one ‘heated discussion’ between you and your clients. When you get an answer(s) to the questions above, before you proceed to write an advert, you need to ask yourself a subsequent and crucial question, which is ‘are the reasons to believe that I have identified relevant to my target audience?’ This second question is often forgotten, which is why (as a creative) you will often get a brief that lists seven great features of a product and then get a dirty look when you revert with an ad that only talks about one of them, or what’s worse that talks about something other than the seven ‘great features’.

It is the ability to answer this subsequent question that separates the ‘men from the boys’ in advertising. Now matter how great you think the product is, and no matter how great the client thinks that the product is, you have to be able to honestly analyze what value, if any, the product is going to add to your customers lives.

Someone once told me that the first role of an ad agency is to represent the consumer. This means that you have to put everything that your client and (often) suits are telling you about product X to one side and look at it through the eyes of the targeted consumer. This is why you cannot be a good creative if you lack empathy, as you need to be able to think and feel like a teenage girl, teenage boy, housewife, retired pensioner, bachelor, CFO and DINKY couple, often over the course of the same day…

The ad shown here focuses on a highly functional ‘reason to believe’ – wider ‘real estate’. The key question is to what extent a sufficient proportion of the target audience will be sufficiently moved by this ‘competitive proposition’ to chose LG over the iPhone. My instinct is that it is a differentiating factor that is distinctly of the niche variety.

So to recap. What are your strong points, what are your competitors’ strong points, what therefore are your relative strong points and which, if any, of your relative strong points are most relevant to a majority of your target audience?

N.B. It is essentially the job of a good suit to answer the above series of questions, to sell the answer arrived at to the client and then to put it in as a creative brief. It then becomes the job of the creatives to figure out how they are going to communicate the well-thought-out and relevant proposition to the audience in as effective and engaging a manner as possible.

N.B.2. It is the inability to answer the above series of questions that lies at the heart of the failure of many an ad agency (as professionals and as a business). You can have the best creative team in the world since the renaissance, but if that team isn’t strategically guided as to what it needs to be saying, the chances are that your agency will produce no more than the occasional ‘hit’, mostly by accident. The converse is that if your agency is strategically sound, you do not necessarily have to have the best creatives in town (communicators) because your ads will be saying the right things to the right people, even be it in a slightly dull way. This is far superior to saying the wrong things to the wrong people, no matter how well you are saying them.

A final note to creatives. Remember that there is what a thing does and there is what a thing does. The ad here talks about what the screen does – it displays more of a picture – but it doesn’t really talk about what the screen does – let’s you see the ‘bigger picture’, helps you capture ‘more of the moment’ or even ‘treats your eyes’ – none of these is a very good example, but the point is that it is never really enough to declare an attribute, what you have to do is figure out how to package that attribute as a clear and tangible benefit (emotional if possible) to the customer. Remember the question that every consumer on the planet asks of every ad they ever see every day of their lives: What’s in it for me…?