Method and madness

You know, the great copywriters all talk about how there’s no method to advertising. George Gribbin (the man who once wrote that his friend Joe was now a horse) has a particularly pithy how-to that goes:

1. With the help of your art-director, create a picture that will make a prospect look at the headline.

2. Write a headline that you are sure will make the prospect read the first sentence of copy.

3. Write a first sentence of copy that you are sure will make the prospect read the second sentence.

4. Continue this process until you are sure that the prospect will read the final word of the ad.

5. Make sure that the picture and all these words add up to a story that will make the prospect's mouth water for the product.

You don’t say, good sir!

If you scour memoirs and interviews and Ad Age and the Cutting Edge series though, you’ll find that it’s always a toss-up between lots of research, knowing the consumer’s mind, filling pockets of desire, understanding the deep roots of social subconsciousness, and the eccentric who shuts himself up in a room with a candle and an Ogilvy idol to produce greatness.

The practice has been in the industry to move towards more market research, more in-depth knowledge. I won’t say that this doesn’t work in America where the battles are fought on shelves and with subliminal packaging, wars waged across broad swathes of educated, sophisticated consumers in mature markets. (Yeah, right.) But when it comes down to the postcard press ad or the thirty-second tearjerker that invokes the ineffable, subtle magic of brand-building (which is not to say that packages and shelf-space don’t; I have a fantastic product with fantastic packaging and okay advertising that’s losing market share daily thanks to poor shelving), it’s all up to creative genius. Two words that should probably be banned for overuse, but then we’d all lose our jobs.

Creative genius—and use for it—does exist in Bangladesh. And consumer marketing is still at that wonderful stage where a good television commercial can actually spike sales, and a series of good television ads consistently shown, therefore, will lead to an uphill curve. But the telecoms have bought up so much television time, and their style of advertising is moving so rapidly towards the advertising-as-art (i.e. advertising as aesthetic achievement and not plague that’s killing Europe, that “creative genius” is still subsidiary to product differences. Pathetic product differences like price and distribution chains that we marketers should spit on! We don’t want people to love the advertising, we want people to love the product! We want them to ask for the fucking product till the stores store it, we want them to twitch their upper lips fretfully at the thought of consuming a lesser product that’s essentially the same but priced less!

I understand that the people should love the advertising for it to do its best. But when creative (creative!) agencies love the advertising as an end in itself, that’s when we’re done for.

What is art? Art is beauty or terror or the sublime or any number of things that exist for the sole purpose of existing. I'm using the word "beauty" in all sorts of ways in this post, but I mainly mean aesthetic pleasance or something which is at least aesthetically profound. Art is never functional. Functional things might incorporate art, like say an engraved sword which is a killing instrument with pretty pictures. Or a watch with jewels on the outside, which is a pleasing way to tell time. But there are no functional benefits to putting a diamond on a gun.


A gun's purpose is to shoot at people, an advertisement's purpose is to sell product. If I can murder with panache that's great, but I need be a murderer first and debonair second. Ditto with advertisements: I need to sell product first; if it's a pretty way of doing so, all the better.


But most human creations (as opposed to creations of God: the sun is infinitely beautiful AND enables photosynthesis!) strike a balance between form and function. The day we all have ass-gun watersprays in our bathrooms, the bodna will become a thing of beauty and a joy to see. We'll have bodna exhibitions at Alliance Francais and the musical band Bangla will sing songs about the joys of natural anal cleansing. Head Office will give away brass bodnas to their special clients. But nobody will use the humble plastic bodna in their bathrooms any more.

The whole advertising as function and advertising as art problem manifests itself thus. We all want to make beautiful advertisements. And since we’re in this business because we’ve failed as novelists, artists and filmmakers, we all want to cauterize our past letdowns and dreams of youth into middling achievement. “I was all set to be the next Kubrick but look at the way I present melamine plates, is it not a searing indictment of our fin de siecle obsession with imperialist household furnishings? Ay me!” But the point of advertising is that it’s meant to sell product, and we’re consistently failing to do so in the proper ways.

Our failures are threefold. Those who want to create beautiful advertising (where beautiful = countercultural, revolutionary, any one of fifty-seven superlative adjectives that agencies write on their manifestos, the worst of which was hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian, but that was one of mine and I put it in as a joke) do it terribly. I have almost never seen a good press layout. Most TV commercials are the same hodgepodge and they’re either Amitabh or Faruqi and not stylized for the sake of any sort of narrative purpose. They all suck. They’re all the fucking same.

Anyway, ads these days follow this type of thinking:

“Well, so we’re giving away three product units with the purchase of one. Let’s be totally LATERAL and OUT OF THE BOX and show three completely unrelated things. Like, instead of three soapcakes, we’ll show three eagles. Yeah, motherfuckin’ EAGLES. And then we’ll have a line of copy that says ‘Take it easy with our Super Offer’ and the guy reading it will be like WOW, I expected they’re giving away eagles but actually it’s soap, fuck yeah! And then he’ll realize that Take it Easy is an Eagles song and he’ll be totally awesomized!”

This example, which is not hyperbolic, illustrates all three problems.

First of all, the ad isn’t creative or beautiful in any way. It’s an inaccurate simile. “The three soaps lie on your basin like three eagles soar through the sky.” It might be, through various accidents of fate, well executed. I won’t count on it. But just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it has any aesthetic right to exist.

Secondly, it’s not communicating the core benefit of the offer, which is that Company X likes you so much and wants you to be so clean that he or she is prepared to give you three soapcakes for the price of one. Instead, we get “three is a cool number.” (Seriously, just sit in on any brainstorming session.

Thirdly, it does not build the brand. Soap X might communicate its beautifying qualities, it might be the cheapest, wash the whitest, get rid of germs. Eagles do none of these.

Which is not to say that exceptions don’t exist. The Djuice free-running ad used an internationally current and popular stunt (B 13, Casino Royale), and the dialogue turns it completely Bangladeshi. What’s beautiful is how Bitopi’s Awrup and Tanvir manage to take a shitty product benefit and use its commercial as such a powerful branding tool. The ad becomes an ad for the Djuice life and fuck the free minutes. They also make the free minutes appear attractive but that’s secondary. I love the thought behind it so much that I won’t even go into Kisloo’s excellent direction of the commercial itself.

Obviously, there IS method to advertising. If there weren’t, all our advertising wouldn’t have been so predictable and banal. The method—controlling madness, if you will—is easy, since this industry does support people like me in relative comfort. Over the next few posts, I’ll try and explain how perfection, glory, art, effective sales results, are all possible. Not always easy perhaps, but possible if you put your mind to it.

But right now I must flee. Work needs to be accomplished and boy are we gonna to lateralize the fuck out of some milk packaging!