How Can We Make Creative Advertisment?
MAKING AN ADVERTISEMENT
Advertising is both an art and a science. The art comes from writing, designing, and producing exciting messages. The science comes from strategic thinking and planning, including research. The creative professional or team must first deal with the problem of coming up with an idea. Then the professional or team must develop a creative strategy, establish suitable appeals, and select a styled of implementation. The ad must then be cast into a print, television, radio, or other format. At this stage, copywriters usually team up with artistic or production teams to build the actual advertisements. From start to finish, the process of ad creation involves a multitude of decisions that require understanding of both the product and the consumer as well as knowledge of the various formats and media.
Behind every good advertisement is a creative concept, a big idea that makes the message unique, attention getting, unforgettable. Though great ideas may be hard to come by, but some advertising experts dispute that for an advertising campaign to be successful, it must contain a ‘big idea’ that attracts the consumer’s concentration, gets a reaction, and sets the advertiser’s product or service apart from the competitors.
However, several methods can guide the creative team’s search for a major selling idea and offer alternative solutions or options for developing effective advertising. These methods include the ‘incubation’ technique, the process of lateral thinking, and the story telling process.
Technique for Producing Ideas: it will basically involve the following:
1. Gathering information: gather specific information, (elements directly related to the product or services) and general information (observed information about life and events). Then, absorb this material and give it a mental work over.
2. Incubate: next is the ‘incubation’ period, forget about it and let the subconscious mind go to work, and eventually the idea will appear ‘out of nowhere’.
3. Mull, develop, and adapt: finally, shape, develop, and adapt the idea to advertising. The idea of consciously forgetting about the project and letting the subconscious mull ideas over time is typical of the creative writing process. Insights may come from sub-conscious mind as mental pictures and images.
Lateral Thinking: this process explores new relationships, breaking established thought patterns to generate new ideas and escape old ways of thinking. Since ideas are turned upside-down and looked at in new ways, this concept is also called out- of-the-box thinking.
Storytelling: Advertising at its best is a form of storytelling. The most persuasive advertisements have all the components of a short story. They introduce characters, identify tensions and problems, develop toward a clash, and then offer a resolution that is usually provided by the product or service. Some of the best television commercials could be called emotional; they have the poetic quality of condensing well-known and mythic stories familiar to the target’s culture into spots as brief as fifteen seconds. For instance, an award- winning Australian commercial for Levi’s 501 jeans alludes, to both the myth of the American cowboy and the legendary rebelliousness of the 1950s. With no dialogue, the spot uses the classical rock single ‘be my baby’ as the musical backdrop for a sixty-second fantasy. Employing the familiar journey motif of American film, the commercial begins with an establishing shot of an isolated stretch of desert highway.
To create effective advertisements, ad creators must be familiar with the target’s cultural interests, e.g. the music, books and magazines they enjoy; the movies they are likely to have seen; the problems that typically occupy their minds. Familiarity with the classics and with various film genres allows creative to envision memorable commercial spots. However, creatively the big Idea may be conceived, the ad must do more than resonate with the consumer. The consumer, who views the ad must be able to understand, among other things, the product benefit and selling message.
Creative Strategy
The imaginative phase of advertising is guided by specific goals and objectives that require development of a creative strategy. A creative strategy focuses on what the advertising message will say or communicate and guides the development of all messages used in the advertising campaign. Some of the best-known approaches are:
• Unique Selling-Proposition Approach: an advertiser makes a superiority claim based on a unique product attribute that represents a meaningful, distinctive consumer benefit. Many of the successful USPs results from identifying real, inherent product advantages.
• Brand Image Approach: whereas USP approach is based on promoting physical and functional differences between the advertiser’s product and competitive offerings, the brand-image approach popularized by David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather Agency, involves psychological rather than physical differentiation. Advertising attempts to develop an image identity for a brand by associating the product with symbols. Perhaps the most successful image advertising of all times is the Marlboro campaign. The campaign has focused on western imagery (cowboys, horses, ranching). Since the United States is said to have two major myths systems-the Old West and the Old South- the cowboy is a strong and compelling image.
• Positioning Approach: the concept of positioning as Jack Trout introduced a basis for advertising strategy in the early 1970s. According to this approach, successful advertising must implant in the customer’s mind a clear meaning of what the product is and how it compares to competitive offerings.
• Generic Brand Approach: when you are the number one brand, you have no need to acknowledge the competition or claim superiority. Such an approach can be used only as long as a product or service truly does dominate the brand category. Leo Burnett chose to use a generic approach for Kellogg’s ‘Eat it for life’ campaign, a surprising but innovative choice.
• The Resonance Approach: this approach requires that the creative team have a deep understanding of the target audience’s world, including their experiences and emotions. Advertising created with this approach ‘does not focus on product claims or brand images, but rather is designed to present situations or emotions that evoke positive associations from the memories of the respondents’. For example, Hallmark uses this approach in appealing to the emotions of those who buy greeting cards with their familiar tagline’ when you care enough to send the very best’.
The copy platform, or creative brief, is the written document that specifies the basic elements of the creative strategy. The format of the copy platform varies from agency to agency, but it generally contains some variations of the following: a profile of the target audience, the problem, issue, or opportunity that advertising is expected to address; the advertising objective, the key customer benefit; supportive benefits; and a creative strategy statement.
Creative Execution Styles
Once the specific advertising appeal that will be used as the basis for the advertising message has been determined, the creative specialist or team must then turn its attention to execution. Creative execution refers to the way in which an advertising appeal is carried out or presented. In addition to using humor, an advertising message or appeal can be presented in numerous ways:
- Testimonial- also called word-of-mouth advertising; this approach uses well-known figures or an unknown, ‘typical’ person to provide product testimonials.
- Problem-Solution-this tactic presents the viewer with a problem to be solved and the solution is provided by the advertiser’s product
- Demonstration- this is designed to illustrate key advantages or benefits of the product or service by showing it in actual use or in some contrived situation
- Slice-of-life- a variation of the problem-solution approach, this technique portrays a real-life situation involving a problem or conflict that consumers face in daily life. The ad then focuses on showing how the advertiser’s product or service can resolve that problem.
- Fantasy- this approach uses special effects to create an imaginative place, events, or characters.
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