Seems to me we don’t reward our prospects enough.
If we want to break through the clutter and win the battle for people’s dwindling attention, we ought to offer them something. And no, I don’t mean something just to lure ’em into our spider web, like 40% off if you order the Ginsu knives right now, or a one-in-a-trillion chance to win a round-the-world cruise.
I mean something that gives them pleasure in return for giving us their attention. Some interesting information. A little unusual entertainment. A good joke works too, but jokes too often overwhelm the product. (‘Hey, did you see the great ad with the guy facing backward on the horse? Yeah, it was for ummm…they were selling errrr… yeah, amazing expression on his face, eh?’)
Last month I landed in London’s Heathrow Airport, and was immediately rewarded big-time. The rewarding ads were presented as a shock-and-awe media buy, where the advertiser buys everything you can see, so your attention is compelled. But of course, your interest isn’t automatically compelled. Here in Toronto, when advertisers buy an entire subway car, they generally run the same ad over and over again, which compels attention but also quickly triggers the gag reflex.
In London, one advertiser had bought the entire corridor from the airport to the underground station (yes, Virginia, in London you can take the subway downtown, and businesspeople do). The advertiser was HSBC Bank, and their use of the space was brilliant.
HSBC is the old Hong Kong Bank, an international monolith with all the image problems that come when you are huge and your turf is worldwide. HSBC’s creative people took that globality and, judo-style, turned its power around to work for them.
Each of a couple dozen billboards carried the same theme line: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE. Then the pictures showed the same or similar object, and explained its very different meaning in countries throughout the world.
My favourite was a large and truly ugly bug, thrice displayed and captioned: USA – PEST; CHINA – PET; NORTHERN THAILAND – APPETIZER. Then there were two feet, up on a desk in what we’d think of as a comfortable position, and sure enough, it named a Western country and said, RELAXED, then an Eastern nation, captioned RUDE.
The campaign analyzed world culture from many different angles, all of them interesting and amusing. One showed three objects that the locals all call footballs – but in the U.K., it was a soccer ball, in the U.S., an elliptical pigskin, and for Aussie football, something halfway between the two.
They displayed different lucky numbers…different meanings of a bright red square…different (and very important!) meanings of the same hand gesture. Tired as I was after an overnight flight, I stopped and looked at every single one.
The boards had a signature line as well: HSBC – THE WORLD’S LOCAL BANK. Perfect. Everything fitted together. The bank had made the point, powerfully, that if you want to sell to the world, you’d better understand the segments of the world… and they demonstrated that they do.
Lesser advertisers would have filled the space with smiling foreign faces and some pompous line like ‘WE KNOW HOW TO SHOW YOU THE WORLD.’ HSBC did it right; they rewarded me.
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I want to thank publicly the many people who responded to my recent plea for new members of the Humber College Copywriting Advisory Board. We were surprised and delighted at the number of people who want to give time to this crazy business, and we hope we can make room for all of you. And to paraphrase the famous Sally Field weepy moment at a long-ago Oscars night: ‘You read me! You really read me!’
John Burghardt’s checkered resume includes the presidency of a national agency, several films for the Shah’s government in Iran, collaboration with Jim Henson to create the Cookie Monster, and a Cannes Gold Lion. The letterhead of his thriving business now reads ‘STRATEGIC PLANNING * CREATIVE THINKING.’ He can be reached by phone at (416) 693-5072 or by e-mail at burgwarp@aol.com.
