Stop trying to win awards – a dummies guide to bravery in advertising

Forget the ‘right’ way to do things

I get it – there are politics at play or you think you need a very specific ad to satisfy a very specific goal. But if you’re in that frame of mind from day one it will be pretty obvious when you roll out the final product, because you’ll end up with the sort of thing that makes the average person on the street claim they don’t like advertising.

The recent brief we had from the Mirror was a great example of this. Trinity Mirror of course wanted to sell more newspapers and get more people online, but it also wanted to challenge the perception that its flagship title is not the ‘intelligent tabloid’ it claims to be. We could have very easily been tied down to a pretty boring ad talking up the quality of its journalism and the breadth of its coverage. Job done.

Instead, we had a company that was brave enough to put its head above the parapet and do things a little differently. Perhaps most importantly of all, in group marketing director Zoe Harris we had a client who would stick to her guns when others might get cold feet. We created an ad using the Mirror’s own journalists instead of actors, tackling people’s opinions head-on in a way that was designed to get people talking.

I’m also particularly proud of our work with Haribo, where we swapped out adults’ voices for children’s. They’ve been received really well by the public, but you can imagine the reaction when we said to the client we wanted to do a campaign for kids’ sweets and not show a single kid in the ad. That was a tough one, but they put their trust in us and were so pleased with the result that we’re working on another phase of activity along similar lines.

I like to think that if someone sees a client’s ad just once but remembers it enough to bring it up in the pub later, then we’ve done our job.

Create something truly different

There was a time when every brand I met would say ‘give us a Tango’. That’s all well and good but the reason You’ve Been Tangoed became engrained in popular culture was that nobody had ever seen anything like it before, and nobody has seen anything like it since.

With the Mirror campaign we did things differently by adding reactive activity to the media plan. We had a series of ads running over a number of weeks, but we only shot the first one in advance – after that, we were shooting based on current events in the news so had to turn each new video around in a matter of days.

That was obviously stressful for the client but again Zoe kept her cool, as well as agreeing to a sign-off process that didn’t involve everyone from the chief executive to the office cleaner. We streamlined things and that helped us go from concept to production to final approved version very quickly. Zoe had to be very positive and direct, but she also had to put a lot of trust in us as an agency to deliver the goods.

Thankfully the Mirror is more used to this approach than others might have been – they create a whole newspaper from scratch every day, after all.

Make me laugh…or make me cry

But whatever you do, don’t bore me to death. Ad blocking and the ability to skip ads are making things difficult enough without agencies throwing boring ads into the mix. Unfortunately there are plenty out there, but ironically I can’t for the life of me remember which brands they were actually supposed to be advertising.

I’ll admit I perhaps get bored more easily than a lot of people, but I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to see something that excites me; something that’s different and feels new. That’s how I approach all the ads I write and, while it’s a fine line that can bite you on the arse if you get it wrong, I think ads should be treated as entertainment that competes for eyeballs with the TV shows they sit between. You need content that people seek out online because they want to watch it again or share it with their mates.

Stop trying to win awards

This one really gets my goat. Too many people in our industry care too much about getting something written about their work in a book or winning an award at the end of the year – so much so that they’re terrified of getting a bad review from certain industry magazines, as if they’ll be branded and never work again.

I’m obviously not one of those people – you could drive yourself insane looking over your shoulder all the time worrying about whether your peers would like the ad you’re making. You have to remember that everyone has their own opinion, and our industry has its own sensibilities that it sometimes thinks every ad should adhere to. But really it’s about whether it’s right for your client and their target audience.

It’s not about picking up a gong; it just has to make my mum laugh.

Trevor Robinson OBE is creative director and founder of Quiet Storm