4:17 PM Tuesday April 26, 2011
by Grant McCracken
If you are watching TV these days, you've probably seen two ads from AT&T.
One shows a guy working late at his desk. His wife calls to ask where they're meeting for their anniversary dinner. Oops.
The other shows a guy sitting in a diner losing a bet about the song "Whoomp! (There It Is).
Compare these ads to the one now running for Claritin.
This shows a glassy-eyed woman who shouts at the camera, "I can't let allergies stop me from leading the way, so I get Claritin Clear!"
She is leading a wilderness trek and at this very moment taking her team across a rope bridge.
"Whoa!" shouts the man behind her.
"Watch your step!" she shouts back.
"Thanks! I couldn't do this without you!" he replies.
These two campaigns are competing for the soul of advertising. The AT&T ads give us something recognizably human: a guy who forgets his anniversary, one friend besting another. The Claritin ad gives us the opposite. These people are not really people at all, but sandwich boards designed to communicate the USP, the unique selling proposition.
The Claritin woman is brittle and shrill. She is in fact an idiot. And the ad assumes that we are idiots too. Claritin begins to sound like Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, the brand shouting, "Can you understand the words coming out of my mouth?" It's as if the brand believes English might be our second language or that we are just too stupid to follow anything more complicated. This is more than sophomoric and irritating. It damages the brand.
We, viewers and customers, are alert to nuance. The AT&T ads engage us accordingly. In the first AT&T ad, we see our husband go from someone suffering a call from his wife ("Hey, baby, what's going on"), to a man suddenly in free fall as he realizes the order of his error and scrambles to control the damage. In the second, we see two friends engaged in that mock hostile banter with which many male friends regale one another. "Your fifth year of high school" is precisely that kind of familiar insult.
The strategic issue: brands get the consumers they deserve. Treat consumers like morons and they act like morons. They don't really pay attention. They use their DVRs with a vengeance, and rip through what we have to offer them. When asked, they will say advertising is something crafted by idiots for idiots. When asked, they will say they can't really remember that Claritin spot. And this can't surprise us, because after all the ad shut them out. It created a cultural artifact so obvious and annoying that no one will waste a second on it.
But if we give the consumer a little credit, they reward us. They watch the ad. They dwell on the ad. They relate to the ad. And they relate to the brand. Give the consumer a little credit and that credit rebounds to the brand.
I can't say who is winning this war for the soul of advertising. The Claritin camp is powerful. (The forces of evil always are.) And to be sure there will always be agencies and clients who prefer to make their marketing a laborious, clamoring, shouting match. But there is a small band of rebels, lead by the likes of A.G. Lafley, Henry Jenkins, Steven Johnson, and John Kay, who stand for nuance, depth, and subtlety. Soon may they triumph.
My congratulations to the makers of the AT&T ads: Bobby Pearce, Chief Creative Officer, Heather Gorman, copywriter, and Jeff Spillane, Art Director, at BBDO Atlanta. The creative and client team at Claritin shall go unnamed. (You know who you are.)
Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer.
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/the_war_for_the_soul_of_advert.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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