There was a period, a long period, back in the history of advertising when certain things held true. An ad could give advice, for example, or have an opinion and the agency would be pretty certain it would be received as intended. If they made a claim that doctors smoked cigarettes because they were good for your health then you and I would simply just accept this as a fact. If the agency, on behalf of their corporate overlords, assured us that the oil pouring out of a hole in the seabed was actually beneficial to the sea life, well, who could doubt the printed word?

Authority was absolute. At least for the purposes of selling.

The change in behaviour, however, was coming. Our relationship with consumerism and the companies which provided us with product after product was bound to be affected by mass media which showed us different cultures and the impact of our actions upon them. We were given the means through which we could see, test and then question the decisions our political leaders made and we could organise like never before.

These insights into how authority operated affected our relationship with advertising. Like seeing the flaws in a parent as we get older, so were we able to see how misleading the claims of advertising could be.

The past ten years has seen change of this sort again but at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has begun to affect us in ways we were not prepared for and still don’t truly understand. It may well be decades before we adjust to modern life, if such a thing is even possible anymore.

Businesses, and the advertising agencies which represent them, have reacted in different ways. A tiny few have embraced, and appear to understand, the responsibility granted by social marketing but many still adhere to the Authority model, filling their pronouncements so painfully with jargon as to make it appear archaic.

The reasoning, I believe, comes from too much love.

The people who work with these brands all respect the process too much. If a decision is made to make bottled water from tap water then, because they understand the process then they respect the decision. It’s the same logic that swallows the line about a company’s interest being its customers so why would it ever do anything to jeopardise that interest.

The balance comes not from cynicism, however. This leads to being unable to sell what the company has to sell. A cynical creative is one not in a position to see the good in a product that might lie beyond the jargon-filled nonsense.

The balance comes from questioning authority, from demanding it to explain itself in terms you can understand and by using talking points and conversation starters, not declarations.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

My phone isn’t very good at making calls. I wouldn’t swap it for another.

I have a computer that isn’t very comfortable to type on. But that’s ok. Because I have another that is. That one just doesn’t show video very well.

Luckily I have a solution for that. I have a third computer that is perfect for typing and has a great screen. Everything looks amazing on it.

Only, it’s not portable.

Many people won’t go to these extremes of course. Many people will have one computer that does more or less everything they need, more or less satisfactorily.

I have a TV like this. It’s not flat. The colour is fading and the sound gives the sensation I’m sat in another room.

I’m ok with that.

Most things in life are about balance, about finding the one thing that matters most to you and just accepting the failings of the rest.

Sometimes advertising has to face up to this fact too.

You listen to a bunch of really cool things about a product and you realise that for every cool thing, there will have been a compromise. It could be screen size, it could be portability.

It will be something.

The trick is to understand what matters most and focus on that.

You can’t be everything to everyone.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been riding a bicycle. After more than thirty years I thought it time to saddle up and try again. Ok, that’s not strictly true. After more than thirty years I was persuaded to try it again.

And yes, they lied. You do forget.

Still, the excitement remained the same. Triggered from the first sound of the chain ticking ; an over-wound clock catching up the years since my last, childhood ride.

It’s a powerful thing, memory. Try as we might to hold onto a moment we find it can slip away whilst other, less desirable memories hold on.

I can’t remember my first kiss even though that is the one thing everyone claims to remember.

I do remember the first time I snuck a book beneath my pillow and, as the sound of footsteps receded, brought out Bobby Brewster and his typewriter to read by the fading light. I remember it because I went to the library on my own that day. I know I wouldn’t have cared about holding on to the memory. I just did.

Advertisers plunder our memories mercilessly. The first kiss image is used time and again to urge us to relate to things things they want us to imagine never forgetting. The not so subtle implication (and why should advertising be subtle?) being that their product is unforgettable.

As a creative it is often important to be able to find that common demoninator of human memory in order to leapfrog the work needed to make people understand the relevance in your message.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Advertising isn’t new.

Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s the plain and simple truth.

Yet many people think it is.

They must do.

Because when it comes to advertising on the internet, they seem to throw out all the experience we’ve collected over the past hundred or so years.

Perhaps in the early days of Flash, after seeing nothing but blue hyperlinks, white text and grey background, people saw image led advertising as new, as a drink of water in the desert. Perhaps.

These days there is no such excuse. The prevalence of ad blockers show that we are, in the main, quite used to advertising on the internet and hold it in the same, suspicious regard as all other forms of advertising.

So where are the messages.

And why do so many ads not only avoid supplying us with a reason to buy but actively discourage us from making an informed decision on the purchasing process by holding of on the information until we ‘clickthrough’?

It must be a new form of advertising.

And I’m not sure I want to buy into it.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Somewhere in between all of this lies the duty of the outsider agency. Understanding where that buzz is created (and just how much money it can take to generate) is only a tiny part. In the vast, interconnected web of our consumer lives the real effort goes in knowing the many different faces of the gamer and seeing the product as they would see it rather than how the product manager would.

Yet being an outsider isn’t as easy as it might at first appear. In reality the outsider agency must not only be an outsider, but every outsider. And what a lot of outsiders there are.

A child, a teenager, a father, a mother, a single twenty-something – even that list, quickly generated, can spiral out of control and, in reality, tells us nothing. Take one: the father. Who is he? Why is he looking to play a game? What is he looking for? Does he go to the cinema? Does he buy books? Did he play games as a child and so is familiar with terms and conventions easily as complex as those of the Internet (and there’s a future article in itself)?

A person could sit down to a multiplayer game of Metro 2033 and be paired with a person they would all but despise in real life. The markers that resonate enough for them to choose something as simple as a shirt will be wildly different which leads to choices in design as to what terminology to employ, what nods to make, what visual cues to activate.

In such a world the question of how alien the main player character is takes a backseat. Indeed understanding the intricacies of the product itself can also take a backseat as our audience becomes as alien and unknowable as any blue skinned warrior robot could ever be.

Here, the outsider agency must arm itself with wit and a genuine interest in portraying the open, honest coolness of a product and fire it into the hearts of whoever walks on this strange digital battlefield.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

It also had the effect of exciting an awful lot of media buyers who know that wherever Apple walk, premium pricing “opportunities” are sure to follow.

The system was heralded as something new, as adding value to advertising as only Apple can by being more than than just animated text over a background – something most marketing people seem happy with when it comes to online advertising.

It’s a welcome move.

But it certainly isn’t new.

The Great Enemy – Flash – is capable of doing everything Steve Jobs demonstrated. It just isn’t done very often. All creative advertisers (not just Head First) understand that people don’t really want to click through because, well, they were on that page for a reason. Enabling consumers (or people, as we like to call them) to be diverted but not distracted is something we would all love to do because we’re people too. I’m reading a story and I like the cut of your ad. That doesn’t mean I want to marry it. I might explore a little further, see what the rollover state is but really, I’d like to carry on reading.

iAds “solves” this by not taking you out of the App space. It has the benefit of working within a fixed frame, thereby ensuring designers can make full use of space rather than be restricted to 300×250 or 728×90. And creating a mini-site within the ad, with all the hooks into the system is a great idea. It’s what closed systems can excel in.

But it’s not new.

Our recent ad for MotoGP 09/10 enabled people to choose from a variety of different trailers depending upon their interest in the game – from balls to the wall action to the more strategic coolness the game offers.

Much like the iAd proposition, it didn’t demand that you visit the website in order to explain why you really ought to buy the game. It showed you what was cool and then left it to you to decide.

We think that’s sensible. We know it helps sales.

Not all briefs enable us to this of course. Some briefs are written so that the client can increase traffic to the website.

And that’s ok too.

iAds will be a lovely advertising system. But it’s not new and certainly not innovative. All products can benefit from such an approach if they opt to bring the sales message to the person, not send the person to the message.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Recently Head First was invited to contribute to a discussion regarding art in advertising. Among our observations was a statement that advertising rarely innovated and so rarely became art.

And I figure that if advertising doesn’t innovate then there must be a reason.

Consider the rise in ‘crowd sourcing‘. Ideas are emanating from people. Ordinary, non-industry people.

Consider also recent reports of big companies plagiarising ideas from sole traders and designers. These designers are acting on a small scale, pleasing a small number of people. They have no brand to protect, no image to damage. They are unencumbered by procedure or responsibility. Like artists and like ordinary crowd-sourced creatives, the people who create do so in the hope that others will respond to the creation in a positive manner. If they are creating funny videos then there is little or no concern for an audience. When the need to sell is removed from the process, creativity takes on a raw beauty that has great power.

We, as viewers commonly branded as consumers, see this power as honest in scope. As clever, as entertaining as we can be as professional creatives, can we ever hope to reach this level? Can we, in other words, set out to create with sales or even brand propagation as an afterthought?

With FMCG the answer might seem to be a resounding no. Even those peculiar products which don’t quite fit the FMCG model (games and books fall under this banner, at least to my mind), can’t afford to release marketing without some kind of sales message directing it somehow. Books, it has been observed, are having to step up their marketing activities and in doing so may be forced even further from simply presenting their author’s vision and letting it settle naturally into the hands of the reader.

The need to inform can override the desire to entertain. But it is the entertainment value of any good ad that does the engaging.

We are, I believe, entering a phase of advertising where this process, this collision even, are being blurred. Games which technically are adverts throw off their need to inform, or reduce it to a bare minimum. They seek to entertain by not letting the brand get in the way. Good, crowd-sourced ads seem to work because suddenly the agency creative isn’t having to steer a course through briefs and personalities in order that their idea get greenlit and as the more savvy brands cone to understand this we are seeing some engaging creative content being released through any and every means at our disposal.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Working with the new breed of developer publisher has been an exciting challenge. In a world of digital downloads how are you going to make your product stand out? Do you confine your promotions solely to the online world or do you learn from companies such as Google and utilise the power of old media and the attention it still attracts?

At Head First we ask all of these questions and help shape the creative campaign to suit the product and the client. With The Mysteries of Little Riddle we have been lucky enough to bring our skills to this issue and create a series of images that are sales focussed.

And luckily there is still great fun to be had in creating real world objects.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

If I were to leave you with an image of a broken rattle and an NSPCC logo you could fill in the blanks. As far as advertisements go you would be in no doubt as to the message. That is, of course, assuming you are aware of what the initials ‘NSPCC’ stand for. So whilst the advert could be seen as a risk (the risk being leaving you clueless as to its intention), it’s a minimal one.

Stood upon a train platform at 6:30 in the morning each day I take special note of the billboards that cycle through my early morning life. Even on the darkest of mornings, when it’s hard to see the person next to you, the powers that be ensure a warm glow surrounds the hoarding as it sits, fattened by years of paper and glue, by the platform edge.

If I were to leave you with an image of a guitar on a chair and a strapline of ‘It pays to be confused.com’ you might ask why, you might guess at the meaning by knowing that confused.com are in the insurance business or, like me, you might not understand what the message is supposed to be.

Teaser ads, ads that don’t give you a clear understanding of their purpose are a difficult form of advertising. Sometimes, as with the excellent campaign for The Economist, the tease is the message. But often they are designed to intrigue the viewer enough to peak interest and spark some sort of follow through whether it be through the viewer talking about the mystery or tapping the company name into a search engine.

Often, these campaign elements are a part of a larger, linked concept.

The result hopefully being greater than the sum of its parts; but that assumes the tease concept has sufficient power to spark that interest.

When I saw the billboard for confused.com I gave it quite a bit of thought. I didn’t understand its aim but I carried on thinking because advertsing is what I do. Was it just there to reinforce the brand name (which seemed like a waste of money) or was there a clever sight gag I was missing? I just didn’t know.

I’m reminded of something Dan Chung once said, that we naturally form ourselves into patterns. He was describing the way people will form unconscious patterns by the choices they make when sitting down ( so people might choose to skip a seat in order to retain personal space and in so doing form a checkerboard) but the observation works equally well for describing how we naturally look for such patterns.

And when it comes to interpreting advertisements this behaviour can be used (and is used) to great effect.

I couldn’t see a meaning, however. So I sent out a Tweet.

The socially aware guys over at confused.com came back to me saying that if I watched the TV ad then all would be made clear.

Why didn’t they tell me that on the billboard?

Maybe the TV ad would make it all clear. Maybe if I’d seen that first I would be more receptive to the billboard; receptive enough for it to give the old brand retention a dig in the elbow. The bus and underground ads show the real message and it’s a cool one. It makes sense, offers real incentive to use them by being appropriate to people’s lives – all a great campaign apart from the billboards. Which makes me wonder why they expected me to see those and run to a TV set to see what it all meant.

Which I didn’t.

Mainly because the imagery and approach weren’t interesting enough to compensate for the lack of message, the lack of reasons to engage that would prompt me to action. I work in the advertising world and so have a bit more motivation when it comes to pursuing this sort of thing. For others, advertising is an inconvenience; street furniture that can get in the way. They aren’t proactive.

This tendency to assume knowledge of a wider campaign isn’t a pecualiarity of teaser ads. Nor is it confined to confused.com (whose social media policy, incidentally, I admire). Look around at the billboards on your way to work and ask yourself whether you get their message and on what level.

MacDonalds have an ad running featuring a burger and the headline “The best things in life are 3″. Now of course I get that they sell burgers and I get the free/3 joke. But what does it mean? There is a pay-off line at the bottom of the ad with a list of ingredients but it doesn’t seem inclusive of all the real ingredients which make up the burger so I assume it’s part of an in-store promotion. But what in-store promotion? Do I get three items for a low price? Are there three really lovely new burgers to choose from? Or is it really just a burger with three ingredients (one of which is onion)? What? And why should I find out?

The message needs to be clear. And the message might be as simple as “remember our name” which is fine of course. Putting your brand out there for people to remember next time they go in-store is as worthy an aim as pushing a specific product or feature. The way in which they are achieved, however, differs greatly.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

I have read a bold claim.

An agency claimed that a piece of creative they were responsible for had led to an increase in sales.

It might be true.

But the claim came on the back of the information that sales rose after the ad was aired.

So was it the creative?

Or was it just the media buy?

How do we know where responsibility lies?

The problem with making a claim is that once made, it is open to question. A designer who claims their logo concept boosts sales has to do so with confidence that the rest of the activity isn’t also having an affect.

Regardless of this, however, is a deeper question: what does advertising do?

My feeling is that advertising doesn’t sell…

It creates the urge to buy.

There’s a big difference. I’ve had arguments as to the effectiveness of advertising. Friends not wrapped up in the world of advertising claim that an advert has no effect on them; that it doesn’t influence them. The fact that companies are spending billions each year to reach people like them has no effect on the argument. They just insist they aren’t influenced and that’s that. Then they go and buy a BMW.

Whilst there is little doubt that many companies waste huge amounts of money on ineffectual advertising, it’s certainly not true to say adverts have no effect. Even as a barrage of messages upon our collective consciousness they have a cumulative effect.

What matters to me is whether that effectiveness is selling or creating the urge to buy.

The difference may seem pedantic but it governs the way we approach the creation of advertising.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.