Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp discovers that genuinely compelling facts are dead and buried.

Creativity. I mean. What’s it all about?
Take this morning. On the way to work, I see a new poster – a big one, a 48-sheet. A picture of a four wheel drive I don’t recognise, and a headline saying ‘The Customer Is Always Right.’

This says nothing to me. The poster has hit me with its two best shots, its headline and its visual, and I still don’t know who it’s for or what it wants to say.

Mystified, I pull in to the side of the road for long enough to read a line of much smaller print right at the bottom of the poster, actually hidden to me for most of the time by the stream of cars going in the opposite direction. The copy tells me that the Kia Sorento has been voted best 4x4 two years running in the JDPower customer satisfaction survey.

This is of course what the advertiser wants me to know – first that the car in question is in fact a Kia Sorento, and second that its owners are very satisfied with it.

And so the crucial question, obviously, is whether a headline and visual that say none of the above are a better way to draw people into the communication than a headline and visual that say some or all of the above.

I know what you’re thinking – I myself did pull over to see what the smaller print at the bottom had to say. Perhaps that’s how it works. Perhaps there are drivers pulling over every few minutes on Camden Road to see what that smaller print at the bottom has to say.

I’m not about to stand around for hours in Camden Town gathering the evidence with a video camera, but I really, honestly, truly don’t think so. I think I pulled over out of professional curiosity, and to be honest at least in part with a view to writing something about my experience afterwards. I think the overwhelming majority of drivers heading south down Camden Road just see a four wheel drive they don’t recognise, and a big headline saying ‘The Customer Is Always Right.’

And if I’m right about that – which I’m 100% totally and absolutely certain that I am – it’s a pretty-much-perfect demonstration of the all-too-commonplace counterproductive use of creativity, or Counter-Creativity for short.

Counter-Creativity
Counter-Creativity happens when those responsible for a communication somehow manage to forget that the purpose of creativity is to make the communication more successful, and to fall into the absurd fallacy that it exists for its own sake quite separately from the communication that’s intended.

It’s a folly that’s more common in some media than others. Actually, it’s quite rare on 48-sheet posters – most people understand that in such a succinct and immediate medium, you can’t afford to prat around for long with irrelevant and obtuse distractions. At the other extreme, for some odd reason it’s very common indeed on radio, where somehow or other the idea has arisen that the trick is to write 34 seconds of fourth-rate comedy with the identity of the product, its proposition and very likely its web address rammed into the remaining six seconds.

There is one excuse for all this nonsense, although it isn’t a good one. There is of course a large amount of advertising that isn’t really concerned with delivering a factual communication at all. Advertising of this sort may or may not contain a factual communication, but even if it does it’s not really important – it was just a springboard for a piece of branded entertainment designed to affect brand perceptions at an emotional level.

Emotional stuff
I wouldn’t be brave enough to claim that ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’ was the first major campaign of this kind, but it was certainly one of the most famous and successful. There is no serious attempt to communicate or support the claim of ‘refreshment’ in the true sense of the word: it’s just a springboard for a series of entertainments around the idea of what ‘refreshment’ could be taken to mean.

There are many other examples, particularly in markets like fashion, drinks and cars where image is often more important than factual claim. Guinness’s ‘surfer’ commercial was based upon the proposition that a pint takes two minutes to pour: but no-one really cares whether you noticed that or not. It was just a hook for an exercise in advertainment.

So – coming back to that excuse I mentioned for Counter-Creativity, which serves to conceal a proposition rather than to amplify or dramatise it – what’s quite often happening is that those involved have become confused about what kind of communication they’re actually trying to produce. Do they have a factual proposition that they actually want me to notice? Or are they just using a factual proposition as a springboard, so that it doesn’t really matter whether I notice it or not?

But although I’m sure this confusion does often arise, I must say that it’s sometimes hard to see how or why. Returning to the Kia poster, I’d have thought a) that this obscure Malaysian brand beating Range Rover, Toyota and Nissan in the four wheel drive category was obviously a proposition worth trying fairly hard to communicate, and b) that showing a picture of an unknown car with a useless, clichéd and irrelevant headline was obviously completely rubbish advertainment.

Clichés and irrelevances
Enough said. It would be cruel to subject this miserable ad to any more abuse. But watch out, next time you’re driving down Camden Road, or listening to commercial radio, or reading the paper. Are all those clever creative people really helping the communication? Or are they just concealing it behind banal and witless blatherings?