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Advertising's Most Important Word
By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

If you had to guess the single most important word in
advertising what would it be: free, special, discount,
sale, new, improved, bigger, better?

So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by
misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words
luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered
meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred
square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen
dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to
actually describe what's inside a package.

What advertisers have done is create a hyper cynical
marketplace, where the audience for whatever you sell has lost
faith in what is being said. The Web with its emphasis on
content gives advertisers an opportunity to redeem themselves
and to deliver meaningful information to its audience.

All Content Is Advertising, All Advertising Isn't

Some may cringe at the thought, but in the final analysis all
content is a form of advertising. Content is rarely if ever
neutral, even if it doesn't overtly promote a product or
service; content always has a point to make, or an idea,
concept, or position to advance. If content doesn't provide
some perspective, some meaningful knowledge, then does it really
qualify as content? The same can be said for advertising, if it
doesn't explain, enlighten or engage, it is just noise.

What Is Advertising's Most Important Word?

My vote goes to the simple innocuous word "like": a
nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization
power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand
personality, and to position your product or service in the mind
of your audience. A previous article of mine "A Website Without
Video Is Like..." uses the power of metaphor to illustrate how
this little four-letter word can crystallize an idea in the mind
of an audience.

Metaphor + Analogy + Stories: The Adman's Best Friends

A metaphor explains complex concepts and hard to comprehend
processes by comparing them to common everyday knowledge. We use
metaphors everyday without even realizing we're doing it. We
'race' to the office. We work like 'dogs." And we all know,
it's a 'jungle' out there. Metaphors are critical to the way
we communicate with each other and to the success of our
marketing communication and advertising.

Metaphors can be extended into analogies, and analogies into
stories, and stories into campaigns; and campaigns developed in
this manner have a higher probability of achieving the elusive
status of meaningful content that embeds your message in your
audience's collective consciousness. There is no better way to
overcome a client's objection than to put that objection into
perspective with an appropriate allegorical story.

Overcoming Objections: How Long Is Too Long?

We've all heard the constant bellyaching from impatient Web
users about how long they have to wait for everything on the
Web. Every time I hear this from somebody, I am reminded of the
story (perhaps apocryphal) of the early introduction of the
Polaroid Land camera.

Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography,
and instant video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for
their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera
shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a
finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the
era of instant gratification had begun.

So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the
Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When
they came across a tribe who had never seen outsiders before,
they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid
cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since
they had never seen anything like this before, but they did have
one complaint, 'why did it take so long for the pictures to
develop?'

The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception.
Like the natives who perceived the sixty second developing of
photographs to be slow, so to do many Web-users perceive the
Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible
technological achievement where anyone with a computer and
Internet connection can access information from all over the
world in seconds or, heaven forbid, minutes.

The Better The Story, The Better The Communication

The solution to the problem is better communication, making
yourself and your message instantly understood. People who are
truly interested in what you have to say will wait for your Web
page or video to load. What gets them frustrated is when they
wait, and instead of getting a meaningful message, they get a
bunch of nonsense that is irrelevant, self-congratulatory or
completely incomprehensible.

A video or audio message on your website is more easily grasped
than a page full of densely written text or cryptic bulleted
points. But you will loose your audience quickly no matter what
the form of your message if it's confusing, muddled, overly
complex, or buried in b-school platitudes and industry jargon.

You need your message to be understandable, engaging, and
memorable and one of the best ways to convey that message is to
compare it to something your audience can relate to. It's like
teaching your kids a life lesson by reading them one of Aesop's
Fables.

Finding Your Metaphor

Some people have a knack for expressing things in a way that an
audience will instantly grasp and more importantly remember. For
those of us in the communication, marketing, advertising, and
creative development businesses it is a necessary skill learned
over the years. But for those in the day-to-day grind of
business's nitty-gritty it is rarely an ability that ever gets
developed.

Creating a Web video campaign that your audience is going to
watch, remember, and pass on to colleagues requires a commitment
of time and money, and you want to make sure it communicates
your message effectively. Rather than using your traditional
approach concentrating on features and facts, try something
different; try developing a campaign based on a metaphor that
delivers your brand's personality and emotional value-add.

Where to begin? You need to set yourself free from the concrete,
and concentrate on the conceptual. If this seems like a
difficult thing to wrap your head around, then start with baby
steps.

Concentrate On The Conceptual

Any effective marketing campaign whether it's a series of Web
videos, direct emails, magazine display ads, banner ads, outdoor
billboards, television and radio spots, or any combination there
of, will only work if it focuses on a single message.

At the heart of all advertising is the promise you commit to
delivering to your clients. No matter how clever or memorable
your marketing, if you fail to deliver on that promise, you will
fail.

Learn a lesson from the politicians. The general publics'
opinion of politicians is about on a par with having a prostate
exam. Politicians can't help themselves, they promise the
electorate what the electorate wants to hear, and then fail to
deliver on promises that can never be kept. Consequently, people
become cynical and distrust everything politicians say.

Failure to deliver on your promise to be the cheapest, the best,
or the guy with the most features, is like a politician
promising no new taxes. Read my lips! Those kinds of promises
are a prescription for marketing disaster.

Taking the conceptual approach requires a certain degree of
confidence and an understanding that you are going to have to
give something up to get something in return. If you present
your identity as the Timex of widgets, inexpensive and
ubiquitous; then you are giving up the audience looking for the
Rolex of widgets, expensive and exclusive.

Audience Resonance: It's All About Striking A Nerve

One of the most memorable commercials ever to appear on
television was the 1985 introduction of the Apple Macintosh
computer. The anti-big brother message said nothing of bits or
bytes, or anything else computer related, but it did establish
Apple's character and personality with its allegorical message,
a message that is still valid today.

If your marketing message lacks this kind of power and
personality; if your advertising is getting lost, or drowned-out
by the competition, try finding a metaphor that instantly tells
your audience who you are and why they should care.
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Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design
firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and
http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com
or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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