No two minds are the same. Two people, with the same creative brief, will produce very different campaigns. This is because ideas do not materialize out of thin air. They come from what has been read, experienced and observed every day.
Also, some people are more creative than others, because they exercise creative thinking more frequently. The creative power of the brain is like a muscle: the more it flexes, the stronger it becomes, and the faster ideas come.
Many of the techniques that art directors and copywriters use to create advertisements are techniques borrowed from fiction writing, film, and theater. Books on these topics are good background reading.
Having a good selection of art and industry advertising books in the office is a must. Get some copies of D&AD and specialist readings like Alastair Crompton. copyright crafts.
Here are some techniques you can use to strengthen your campaign creativity, improve brand awareness and campaign response rate.
keep it simple stupid
KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Express the idea in a reduced space. We have a post-it note, we have a napkin. If you can’t express your idea in a concrete diagram or sentence, you probably don’t have an idea. At most, it can have several unrelated parts.
What many marketers find difficult to assess are ideas in their infancy. Without the idea represented with finished images, they cannot visualize how far the idea can go or how feasible an idea is. However, evaluating ideas without too much polishing is advantageous.
It allows concepts to emerge and good ideas to shine.
Cover territories – own spaces
The more ideas you can generate, the more areas or territories you can cover. Proposing a few disparate ideas is not enough. Instead, creatives assign ideas to spaces or territories. They identify these territories based on customer insights, research, and simple intuition.
An idea may be good, but is it strategically located in the right territory? Choosing the right campaign can be a matter of finding the right idea, in the most fertile territory.
Creatives are looking for new territories or new ways of seeing existing territories. Otherwise, your ideas are not original and lack impact.
Make your idea a campaign
Creatives and clients hate campaign ideas that can’t scale across media. These require too much exposure and too often only work on television.
Marketers should look for campaign ideas that can work not only in the richness of television, but also in small-space commercials. Otherwise, they lose important touchpoints.
turn it upside down
During the brainstorming session, clients and agencies often complain that they “have the same ideas.” This may be because the group is afraid to challenge the thinking, or the group is suppressing ideas that sound absurd at first glance.
Unless the group is prepared to take roads ‘not traveled’, brainstorming sessions will always produce the same results. Participants must put aside their fears and criticisms, and turn their thinking on its head.
If car manufacturers always advertise their cars with four wheels, try an idea that features the car without wheels. These are the kinds of ideas that challenge consumers and lead to free press coverage.
By incorporating a “what if” exercise during brainstorming, you can increase the volume of ideas and the effectiveness of the group. Such that the sum of the parts contributed by the group is greater than any contribution of a mind.
Direct owner, peculiar image
The basic ingredients of a print campaign are a title and an image. Creating an ad that features a quirky image and a quirky headline typically results in an ad that is too bizarre for the audience to interpret. Similarly, if the headline and image are direct, the ad feels literal and doesn’t provide ‘ahhha’.
To get the right balance, it sounds like you need equal parts of the literal and the weird in your ad. It’s worth mentioning that not all ads have a headline or image. Some are just visual and some are just a headline.
Is the title the same as the image?
Young creatives often make the mistake of creating ads with a headline and visuals that say the same thing. It is also an example. This creativity is not working very hard. Both the title and the visual say the same thing.
Instead, try placing an unrelated title and visual on the page. Separately they don’t mean much, but when put together they become a puzzle for the audience to solve.
Smart? Or too smart?
The debate about ‘smart’ advertising never ends. Clever ads risk your audience missing the point entirely. On the contrary, boring ads go unnoticed.
Both statements are correct. Blade ads lack impact. And being too smart to isolate everyone but the judging panel at the awards. The medium, the brand and the creativity must be balanced to produce the desired effect.
For example, a piece for EPURON, designed to be a viral video, could be considered too clever. The idea works on multiple levels, personifying the wind and requiring the audience to see it twice. You have to see it to get it.
If this were a TVC, asking the audience to watch it twice is next to impossible. However, given the fact that the creative was meant to be a viral YouTube video (so it can be played more than once), the clever element works in its favor to make it more viral.
Reference current affairs
Ads can take advantage of the context of the current public domain. Sports, religion, politics, sex – these are all fertile places to take advantage of the reference. Building an idea around a hot topic can be very powerful and often creates controversy.
Humor, gags, jokes, bribes
Humor is the joke, the joke, the payoff: these are good techniques to keep the audience reading. Please note that most advertising is interrupted. Compensating consumers by making them smile is the least we can do for having interrupted them.
Ideas that feature pranks that are genuinely funny can get a lot of love and mileage. In fact, the funniest ones often offend some segment of society.
When implementing humor, make sure it’s fun and connected to the brand. Otherwise, the gag will be remembered, but the mark will be quickly forgotten.
impact value
For some industries, such as anti-smoking, the presentation of real people dying from smoking-related cancer has been statistically shown to have a greater impact than other techniques. They lose shock value. What was shocking today is mundane tomorrow.
This forces advertisers to look for the next powerful statistic or visual. It is not easy to sustain these campaigns in the long term.
Word games and visual word games
These were once very popular techniques. There was a time when you could flip through a magazine and almost every page had a pun on it.
The smartest puns aren’t created as a headline, they’re expressed visually. These are called visual puns. Most creative people agree that puns should be avoided.
Word games are risky. In the background, there is often no central idea and therefore they are a threat to the campaign.
Puns are really a last resort.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is achieved when the two dipole images are brought together. Take, for example, the faces of two coaches from opposing soccer teams; or a cheap car and a luxury car. They are two extremes that share a common relationship, but are very different. Together they create a striking image, their extreme differences give birth to a new meaning when placed side by side.
The juxtaposition can be useful to challenge a stereotype and change opinions.
metaphors and hyperboles
Metaphors are one of the most common narrative techniques. It’s no wonder advertisers use them so often. Metaphors borrow from a construction that the audience understands, to explain another construction about which they have little knowledge.
For example, plugs could be a metaphor for sexuality.
Metaphors can also be hyperbole. A hyperbole is a deliberate exaggeration for emotional effect. The effect is intended and the audience is not expected to take the hyperbole literally.
Ironically
Irony is a mode of expression that draws attention to the discrepancy between two levels of knowledge. The definition of irony, in its simplest form, is the difference between what someone would reasonably expect to happen and what actually happens. Which means that something that happens that you wouldn’t even reasonably expect to happen is considered irony.
Alliteration
Alliteration is a series of repeated consonant sounds, occurring at the beginning of words or within words. Alliteration is used to create melodies, set a mood, draw attention to important words, and point out similarities and contrasts. They appear in headlines, slogans and campaign titles.
Alliteration makes a sentence sound a little catchier and more memorable.
sticky ideas
Sticky is normally what you get when one or a combination of the above works great. You end up with an ad that is talked about and written about. An ad campaign that gets sticky is viral. Without much intervention or expense in the media, the audience transmits and shares the idea, often modifying it and making it their own.
This recent TVC from Heineken combined several techniques covered in this article and succeeded.
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