Ad Awards

The holy grail of advertising will become even more important, far more important in the future, than the tools used in today’s merely ‘entertaining’ messages.

Here’s a word – just one word – that should guide young creative people (and their directors) when they’re conceiving their advertising communication concept. Relevance. Relevance means something that is applicable, pertinent, important, valuable, usable and having consequence. Advertising, commonly, doesn’t, which is why people find advertising intrusive, irritating and a waste of their attention.

The more relevant advertising is the more effective it necessarily becomes. To be relevant messages can be customized, but in mainstream media (TV, radio etc) messages cannot always be customized to an individual level. They can be customised to certain fragments of the market, such as males, or females, or mothers (as KFC has done).

Being relevant may seem boring, but with discipline, hard work, and a conscious approach, relevance can produce advertising that people actually appreciate, and a message that is actually high-quality. In short, relevance is the best way to produce advertising that actually works. But being relevant is tough. It’s not easy because to be relevant and high quality means the number of options become limited. Here advertising needs to find the ‘truth’ that shows off the product or service best to the consumer, but in a way that also promotes the product honestly. This is the perfect trade-off. The seller and buyer meet one another halfway, with neither seeking to rip off the other.*

The challenge behind being relevant is being clever in a way that demonstrates high degrees of insight and perception into the contemporary social mainframe.

Rocks

There’s an excellent new ABSA ad which, for once, has something really useful and vital and real to convey to consumers. It shows various purchases, instead of in cash terms (or as credit card transactions), but with actual objects, as metaphors, being swapped in exchange for food or clothes. The commercial is about giving away your dreams, by spending your way into debt. It’s about the opportunity costs of unconscious and self indulgent consumption. What’s quite poignant, for me, is a mother at the counter handing over her young son’s (who is right there beside her) university education (symbolized) by the graduation hat and gown, and then, seeing the look in his eyes, thinking better of it.

2 other good, relevant ads are the Med Lemon/witchdoctor ad and the Sunlight soap 650 (or something) dish washing ads.

Another ad that is just fun to watch (and shows off the product brilliantly) is the one with the mini racing to hospital, after the guys girlfriend gets stung by a bee. Same with the Jetta and the guy who pitches up late with the pink feather in his collar. Nice, but not relevant. What, beyond what these cars look like, can they offer? What we’d especially like to know now is how much do they cost and exactly how fuel efficient are they?

Huh?

Carling Black Label must think masculinity and intelligence are mutually exclusive. You have to be a dope to drink Carling Black Label, well, based on their advertising anyway.

In their latest offering, we see some men – ferrymen I think – who fall into a river. Suddenly the river becomes a raging mass of whitewater. The heroes on land get on motorbikes and get far enough downstream to saw through a conveniently located pine tree growing right beside the river. The tree falls in the water (presumably serving as a very long lifebuoy). Here’s what makes this ad incredibly stupid. By having a giant tree slam down in the river with approaching swimmers only metres away it’s perhaps a more effective way of killing them than the river. Also, in the section of river where the tree crashes down the river looks pretty calm to me. Not a sea – er – riverhorse in sight.

This is as bad as the previous Carling Black Label ad, where fleets of bakkies illuminate a makeshift runway for a plane in trouble (thereby somehow out sprinting an airplane that appears to be flying in a straight line).

I have an idea for a dodgy follow up to this one. Two guys are out in the desert hiking, when one of them gets bitten by a snake in the hand. His buddy calls a nearby farmhouse, and the farmhands grab mountain bikes and the odd horse and quickly find the two hikers. One muscular chap then pulls out a knife, and slices into the snakebite while others hold him down, and apply tourniquets. Maybe they can even pour beer over the venom bubbling out the bleeding wound. Cut to a fellowship campfire shot (backlit by Death Valley type mountains) with the luckless snakebitten fellow looking sheepish but – raising a beer – well on the mend. It’s right in line with the other two ads, because the last thing you should do to a person with a snake bite to cut them. Some people have bled to death that way. But at least people may buy the beer for use as an anti-venom.

Rubbish

This ad would be quite promising if it wasn’t about baby foods. It might work well for a university or advertising school promoting its courses, or to promote the use of the internet or some kind of unusual educational product. You see a young person doing apparently silly things (watching a washing machine while ‘floating’ on a steel table on wheels, shooting upwards in a glass elevator at night, watching a television upside down etc.) All this creative silliness makes sense when we see the boy as a grown up astronaut, floating in space. Nice, clever, but what does all that have to do with baby food? If you’re advertising baby food, try to remember that it has something to do with those tiny little human beings that the gooey food is made for. Odds are this commercial was conceived by a young guy with a girlfriend, who hasn’t seen or held a baby in months. Too much of a giant leap of the imagination guy. Try something else, and make sure it’s relevant.

*Buyers attempt to ‘rip off’ sellers by always demanding discounts or special offers, and not making transactions unless offered ‘special terms’. Sellers do so by pretending to offer something that is better than it really is.