Exceptional ads emerge from trivia and experience
CampaignME January 21, 2007
By Hadi Zabad
Senior Planner
JWT Dubai
In Florida, I came across a curious species of fly with a life-span of just one day. They’d float around 5-feet above ground in massive numbers. And while my brief encounter with the mayfly resulted in my having it for breakfast one morning, BBH made a D&AD winner out of the little bugger.
I’d like to believe that had I been handed that same Vodafone brief I may have helped connect the dots between an insect and Vodafone’s thought of making the ‘most of now’. After all, somewhere in my brain the memory of the mayfly and its tragic, though endearing, I-live-for-one-day story is ingrained.
This leads me to my point: how many experiences, factoids, run-ins, memories, and tidbits of information do we have stored somewhere in our psyche that have the potential to be used for great work, and yet never are? Let me ask that question again: would your ad for Vodafone have started with ‘you see a guy...’ or ‘it’s about this mayfly...’? Regardless of whether you’re a creative, suit or planner anyone could have injected that little morsel into a briefing.
Part of the skill needed to create exceptional ads is to present yet another mundane product in an unfamiliar way; to remove a product or brand from a creative rut, and propose an entirely unfamiliar way of thinking about that brand. That means not dwelling on what the competition is doing and who won what, sidestepping the sameness we surround ourselves with and, more importantly, tapping into the potential richness of our individual experiences and knowledge.
The fact that planners are, generally, more freed up means we have the time to soak in tubs of ‘stuff’. And we should take full advantage of that.
I personally relish pouring over weird human trivia (you’re more likely to have nightmares in a cold room), popular psychology (why we’ll never truly be happy), blogs of interesting people across industries (one of the more interesting ones belongs to a call girl in London), YouTube, poetry (where would we be without poetic license?), short films, and comic strips (for a more peculiar perspective on humanity nothing beats strips like The Far Side).
Statistics have enormous potential to inspire as well. Take the following stat for example: last year New York policemen arrested 3,854 innocent people. On the whole, perhaps a little surprising but what can you do with it? DDB Paris made a killer commercial for Cluedo sarcastically suggesting the NYPD might ‘need more practice’. Simple as that.
Truth is, you won’t use your nuggets all the time; most of the time they remain dormant, hidden away in dark corners of gray matter, until one day you get a brief and something clicks in your head. There are no guarantees, but you are better off filling your head with stuff in preparation for that eventuality.
I don’t know why I’m going on about this when Tarsem Singh, the legendary advertising film-maker, said in a few words exactly what this entire opinion piece set out to do: “You don’t pay me for the film I shoot or the awards I’ve won. You pay me for every book I’ve read. My childhood. Every walk I’ve taken, every movie I’ve seen.”
