Advertising. The Business That Fun Forgot?

Take the fun out of advertising and the spirit is gone. When there’s little to motivate the people creating it, then there will be little built into the advertising to motivate an audience.

The same could be said for taking the fun out of anything. Except for taxes.

Fun is the one thing that should be included in all aspects of the advertising manufacturing process, injecting the final product with an overdose. Fun is contagious inside the organization and out. It’s something the audience will grab onto and share with their friends. It’s something that will be remembered long after the campaign has ended.

“Up The Organization” is a book written in the ‘60’s by Robert C. Townsend, the CEO of Avis Rent A Car. In a chapter titled “Advertising” he writes:

Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency. Then go get the best new agency you can. And concentrate your efforts on making it fun for them to create candid, effective advertising for you. Unless you’ve just done this, the odds favor that you have a bunch of bright people working at cross purposes to produce – at best – mediocre ads.

Mr. Townsend hired Bill Bernbach’s agency, DDB, on one condition put forward by Bill himself, “…run every ad we write where we tell you to run it.”

Apart from Bill’s reciprocal promise to give Avis “five times the impact,” he gave good reason for this condition:

Our people work to see how effective their ideas are. But most clients put our ads through a succession of Assistant VP’s and VP’s of advertising, marketing and legal until we hardly recognize the remnants. If you promise to run them just as we write them, you’ll have every art director and copywriter in my shop moonlighting on your account.

Given the success of their arrangement, Mr. Townsend wrote the “Avis Rent A Car Advertising Philosophy” for his employees. In it, points 4 and 5 stand out:

4. To this end, Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve ads which are submitted. Any changes suggested by Avis must be grounded on a material operating defect (a wrong uniform for example).
5. To this end, DDB will only submit for approval those ads which they as an agency recommend. They will not “see what Avis thinks of that one.”

At the end of the chapter, Mr. Townsend said:

The rest is history. Our internal sales growth rate increased from 10 per cent to 35 per cent in the next couple of years.
Moral: Don’t hire a master to paint you a masterpiece and then assign a roomful of schoolboy-artists to look over his shoulder and suggest improvements.

As for the ads? They’re just as provocative and engaging today as they were in the ’60′s.

In fact, Avis is still running “We try harder.” But the motivating, “We’re No. 2″ has long since been abandoned.

We’ve gone through three technology cycles since then and we’re into the fourth. But despite all the new ways of consuming media, people remain essentially the same. They can be persuaded by a good argument, a point of difference, something new and useful – as long as the message is crafted and delivered in a way they will receive it. In a way they want to believe it. In a way they’ll be happy to share it.

And that’s the point of advertising. It’s not about the metrics, or analytics. It’s not about what everybody inside the organization thinks, or feels comfortable with. It’s not about fish bowl focus groups.

It’s about a provocative and persuasive message built on a product difference.

Even if it’s a negative difference. Like the Avis example.

Unfortunately, most companies would never run a campaign like that today. They wouldn’t run it even though the underdog position works. Proven by many movie franchises, books, documentaries and myths.

Today is a gutless age.

Add fragmented media; an overabundance of useless metrics; everybody and their mother tilting the CMO’s ear; confusion over terms, semantics and marketing language in general; gimmicks; quick fixes rather than brand building; political correctness – and what do you get?

Inertia.

But mostly, fear.

On his blog, a well known ad guy, Alex Bogusky wrote, “Fear is the mortal enemy of creativity.”

I think he’s right. Though, Jack Neary, a Creative Director friend at a large NY agency claims that “fear is my alarm clock.” Jack has always been very creative.

I think fun defeats fear. I think fun is contagious. I think fun gives everybody a good reason to get up in the morning, despite the alarm clock.

I think clients would get a lot of free extra value out of their agency if they had an attitude like Mr. Townsend.

And Corporations would get a lot more added to their bottom line if they had a CEO like Mr. Townsend as well.

Or Mr. Jobs. Or Mr. Knight. Or Mr. Branson.

Advertising works. It just doesn’t work as well as it could for everybody.

Posted via email from Flatacre

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Tagged as: Advertising, Advertising and Marketing, Avis, Bill Bernbach, Business, DDB, Marketing, Phil Knight, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs