Earlier this year, in an Ask Me Anything, Milo Corbett of London asked what my half-a-dozen favourite ads are. Thanks Milo! A tricky question, so I felt a better answer is to name six ads that taught me something.
Some people go to ad school. Me? I learnt on the job. The musician Paul Weller was once asked who his best music teacher was and replied, “I had four. John, Paul, George and Ringo.” He had a point.
I’m still learning. So if this list changes by this time next year, so much the better.
1: An ad doesn’t have to look like an ad. Often, for it to be noticed, it shouldn’t look like an ad.
This ad came out in 1992. I was 18, and remember it emblazoned on a massive billboard in Bideford, North Devon, the small town where I grew up.
I loved it.
Bideford hated it, the local Conservative MP hated it, my mum hated it.
(It wasn’t up for long).
But that made me love it even more.
Plus, I was a teenager. And whatever everyone else loathed, I loved.
The word advertising comes from the Latin advertere, meaning ‘to turn towards’. Whether or not the ad is any good, if people don’t turn towards it and take notice, a business might as well just put up blank sheets of paper.
2: Treat the audience with respect: you’re a guest in their homes.
This ad is great because, for 90% of it, it’s baffling.
We see two guys. One’s putting up a poster; another is securing padding around a lamp-post.
And the dialogue doesn’t give away any clues.
‘How many more of these we got?’
‘Couple more, I think.’
…What the hell is this all about?
But it’s brilliant because, when we’re mystified, we’re drawn in.
In our era of seamless, problem-free, hassle-free UX, we often forget that audiences like a bit of a challenge. Plus suggesting that the people who watch your ads are smart is, let’s face it, never a bad strategy. After all, you’re paying them a compliment, and as a selling technique, that’s as old as the hills. (To read more about this, go here).
3. Some ads pivot on a beautiful observation.
An ad for McDonald’s, Denmark, 2015.
I’ve no idea how it was created, but I like to imagine a creative sat in a McDonald’s somewhere in Copenhagen or Aarhus, and just watched people eat.
I like to imagine he or she saw that, in the act of finishing a burger, we have grease on our fingers.
We extend our fingers, like a pianist.
And an opened burger carton looks like an illuminated laptop.
There’s nothing wrong with watching the people who might buy your product and noticing how they behave. If the result is an ad as good as this, I’d say that’s a pretty good day at the office.
4. Some ads need insights, other ads do just fine without them.
Hang around in an advertising agency long enough and you’ll hear talk of insights. ‘What’s our motivating, hidden insight? What’s the compelling idea?’ It all sounds tremendously important.
But here’s the catch: real insights are rare, very rare. Sometimes animating an observation about life is enough.
In the spring of 2016 my wife and I went to Dublin for a baptism. We had an afternoon spare. It was a rainy, dreary day, so we went to the cinema. Before the movie this ad (above) came on.
What’s it’s saying? Life’s hard.
Nothing ‘insightful’ in that.
But this ad turns that simple truth into poetry.
And it has heart.
What was the movie? I’ve completely forgotten.
5. Think of ‘small A advertising’ as well as ‘big A advertising’.
…This might all sound a bit enigmatic: let me explain.
This is an ad:
…And this is an ad:
The difference between the two?
In 2021 the first ad, for Dove, won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix, a D&AD Yellow Pencil, a One Show Gold and a Clio Silver. These are some of the world’s most prestigious advertising awards.
The second ad we barely notice unless, of course, we’ve jumped in a time machine to 1975 and are looking for a loin of pork.
The advertising industry loves the first type — what I sometimes call ‘big A advertising’.
But in focussing on the big stuff, too often the little stuff — the ‘small A advertising’ — gets forgotten.
One of my favourite ads is small A advertising. Here’s the ad, in full:
‘Before I turn 67, next March, I’d like to have lots of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.’
That was the lonely hearts ad that Jane Juska (below) put in the New York Review of Books in 1999.
On the back of it she got 63 replies, some wonderful relationships and, by her own admission, a new and warm perspective on men. She wrote a best-selling book about her experiences of sex in later life, later turned into a successful West End play, and found literary fame in her seventies.
‘It was the best piece of writing I’ve ever done,’ she later said of her lonely hearts ad. Did she win an award for her ad? Of course not. But this smart lady knew a thing or two about advertising.1
6. “A commercial is something you watch when you sit down to watch something else — you should at least be entertained.”
— Joe Sedelmaier.
Joe Sedelmaier was an American commercials director, who did outstanding work for many brands including FedEx and Wendy’s2. And in his quote he stated a point often forgotten:
Advertising people sit down to watch ads.
Normal people sit down to do something else.
And normal people are in the vast, vast majority.
So entertainment matters: Sedelmaier was talking in the age of TV but exactly the same applies with digital media. Humour is a key ingredient in entertainment: it makes people warm to the brand, the campaign and — above all — it makes them more likely to buy the product3.
Of course, a brand needs to know how to use it properly: this is what I do. So let’s finish with an example of a brand that’s doing it pretty well. This is by Macpac, the New Zealand outdoor brand4:
Many thanks, Milo, for your question and many thanks to you all for reading,
Paddy
Book a meeting with me here / www.studiogilmore.com / pg@studiogilmore.com / +44 7866 538 233 / Twitter: @mrpaddygilmore
I first learnt about this in Dave Trott’s very good book, Predatory Thinking, London, Macmillan, 2013.
This might suggest he’s been and gone. Far from it: he celebrated his 90th birthday just recently, on May 31st. If you’re reading this, Joe, many happy returns.
Eisend, Martin: ‘A Meta-Analysis of Humor in Advertising’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, June 2009.
A big thanks to my good friend Ian Gilbert, for sharing this ad with me.