How to spot the school of lazy advertising

By Indu Balachandran

Ever been frustrated by all the ads that interrupt your favourite program- whether it’s a cooking show or a cricket match? But how do they keep you hooked? Indu Balachandran who has almost three decades of advertising experience spills the beans in the new book Don’t Go Away. We’ll be Right Back- The Oops and Downs of Advertising ( Tranquebar Press). In this excerpt, she tells us how advertising gurus figure out the formulae that work and just keep using them over and over again. We’ll let you match the ad to the formula.

There are some advertising people who wake up every morning, pump their copywriting or art directing arm every day and declare, ‘Today I shall push the frontier of advertising towards a new horizon…’

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Such people are a menace to the Lazy School of Advertising, who work by this formula:

a=bc=s

Or, advertising = banal clichs = salary for the month

Lazy advertising people lead peaceful, stress-free lives, always drive along the middle path, love sitting on fences or going for formulae movies, and are the darlings of clients who believe that if there are some good old ways of advertising, who are they to question the tried-and-tested?

[caption id=“attachment_23101” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“When you’ve run out of all ideas on how to make an ad fit into the brief of- hold your breath now- ‘a large corporate with a warm heart’, simply make kids run.AFP “]  [/caption]

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And so they dip into their basket of ready-made ads, and with no effort at all, shape it into another piece of communication, and leave for home at 5.30 p.m., most probably to a meal of instant, ready-made food.

Here are some familiar lines and visuals from their coveted cookbook of the safe and sound and tried and tested. Just add your client’s name, and stir.

‘Beat the Heat’

This is a useful headline to know that can bail you out of approximately 350 summer-related products, from ice creams to prickly heat powder to swimming lessons to toe rash lotions … but occasionally you can even stretch it to cover exam guides, when the heat is really on. ‘Beat the Heat’ is one of the most popular rhyming tricks that anyone, from babies to veterans, use in advertising every day, without having to strain the brain (hey! there’s another one with potential!).

Talking Babies

This is the film Look Who’s Talking’s gift to advertising land. If you want millions of householders gushing ‘So sweeeeet!’ in front of their TV sets, then simply shoot many chubby babies in nappies for a whole month, edit and put together some charming shaking heads, pensive looks, scowls, claps and laughs, and then write appropriate dialogues to match mouth movements, extolling the features of a product, from water purifiers to floor disinfectants, and hey, why not, perhaps a cute message to parents telling them to use contraceptives the next time.

‘Tough on dirt, gentle on hands’

A line found in every detergent ad. Perhaps the government has made it statutory copy, punishable by death if this phrase is not included. It’s such a taken-for-granted copy line, either as headline, body copy or baseline, that even if a prankster Copywriter working on a detergent had to flip the line to ‘Tough on hands, gentle on dirt’ no one would notice….

‘If you have a dream…’

Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know it then, but he’s helped inspire a million ads / films / corporate audio visuals with the ‘dream theme’. Nothing succeeds like the word ‘dream’, with ‘passion’ coming in a close second. Particularly a favourite of ad professionals themselves, during their awards functions.

The dream theme has its favourite accompanying visual too: sea gulls taking off at sunrise (the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull was specially shot to help out ad agencies).

Slo-mo celebrity flag runs

To make the nation’s heart beat faster, nothing like the slow motion run … a proud, smiling mix of kids, adults, villagers, tycoons, servants, film stars, cricketers, TV stars, Nobel Prize winners, barbers, Kathakali dancers, politicians, Olympians and their grandmothers all running, flags a-fluttering, punching fists in the air as they cheer our country onward. Spectacular shots of our beloved country can punctuate the proceedings. Guaranteed to create a lump in the throat for the first twelve viewings, but with the danger of creating other strange, gagging sensations in the throat, preparatory to throwing up, if overused beyond this point.

The gushing, public THANK YOU!

Now and then, manufacturers, banks, corporations, airlines and so on get so overcome that they have reached their fifty thousandth car, their one billionth deposit, their fiftieth golden year, their 99,999th export order for shrimps, their 77777th kitchen sink, their second millionth passenger that they ask their agency to announce this with a full-page release. And faster than the Servicing person can say, ‘Thank you Sir’ for that neat extra billing, the Creative team would have come up with a huge ‘THANK YOU!’ ad, with the headline set in 120 point extra bold. The copy will end with the mandatory line: ‘…and it’s all because of one reason: YOU!’ which they think will make every reader feel thrilled to bits for playing such a fantastic role in the making of that very precious twenty thousandth hydraulic valve.

The Beloved Dead Founder

All clients get choked up with sadness one day every year- this is on the birth anniversary of their beloved great great grandfather / founder / chairman / visionary- to it’s time to bring out that same fancy, twirly border template used for that other client’s founding father, and put the grim photograph of this client’s founding father. The copy for this was fortunately written long ago by a good Copywriter called Rudyard Kipling and probably handed out to all agencies free of cost:

Lives of great men all remind us,

We must make our lives sublime

And departing leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time

All one has to do is to end this with ‘…and we re-dedicate ourselves to re-fulfil his dreams …’ etc., etc. ‘Re-commit’, ’re-affirm’ and ’re-new’ are words that also work fine here - as this is, after all, the same old ad, re-done.

The running school children

When you’ve run out of all ideas on how to make an ad fit into the brief of- hold your breath now- ‘a large corporate with a warm heart’, simply make kids run. This is a variation on the slo-mo flag run, described earlier. Always start with a trickle and end with a flood. One kid, two kids, five kids, and then (as the music picks up), a dozen, a hundred, a thousand. In between, shoot a barking, stray dog joining in, a crow turning its head, and - never, never forget this shot - old people looking out of balconies. A poor handicapped child cheering them on will draw a sudden tear. This formula works brilliantly for any kind of corporate ad - from electricity boards (We keep things running in your life) to software companies (We never run out of ideas), even if the ad is one-minute proof that you just ran right out of them.

The klunky, bespectacled nerd wins

This kind of script is one all clients hate: when the ’loser’ wins in the end, because who wants to associate your brand as the choice of losers? But articulate agency people will tell the client that the consumer is basically a loser; when our loser in the ad wins, he becomes a winner, and our consumer, aspiring to this, rushes out to buy our product! Which is a pathetic public display of his losermanship … but the client often loses the argument on this and one more bespectacled clumsy geek can be seen walking away with the fabulous chick. Oh yes, don’t forget to steam up his gigantic spectacles in the last frame.

The reality show commercial

This remarkable idea - which came about when a client said he did not want to pay model costs - was first used to sell toilet cleaners. So dreary, surprised housewives with ‘real’ dark rings under their eyes and dried-up jasmine flowers in their unkempt hair were filmed with a jabbering presenter who rang doorbells and walked in unannounced into middle-class bathrooms to train his wobbly hand-held camera into toilet bowls. All timed to be on air exactly when your family is eating dinner, staring at the TV. Works very well still, for small budgets and very small thinkers in agencies.

The ‘scale’ commercial

This one requires a helicopter, so write the script only after first checking if your country is not at war, as most helicopters are heavily booked at this time. Sometimes you’ll come across a client who is so overwhelmed by the improvement in her product (sometimes a refrigerator with a breakthrough AH496 compressor; sometimes a new door handle), that she rejects every script because it doesn’t have enough ‘scale’.

The thing to do at this point, is bring out the ‘scale’ script: have thousands of people on a street look up at the sky, very suddenly (with cut-away close-ups of a Siamese cat, and a fluttering ribbon in a little girl’s hair), and lo and behold! From the sky emerges your client’s product! Everyone should now look awestruck, as giant fan blowers flutter their hair, and music rises to its expected crescendo. And the deepest voice-over in the business must be called in to say, ‘Never before … and never again! The revolutionary AH496 compressor for your favourite refrigerator …’ Oh yes, the helicopter is for that giant closing top-angle shot of millions of consumers with hair blowing in the wind, looking ecstatic. Or if the client twists your arm, collectively punching fists in the air and chorusing:

‘The AH496 is HERE!’

1,00,000,000 balloons in the air

As most discussions on making a film about a company’s corporate philosophy end up as a lot of hot air, much of it can be usefully channelled to fill up balloons, a billion if possible (for some reason, yellow ones work best), which can be released to rise up, up into the sky in dramatic slo mo. This fail-safe formula can also be combined with the running children idea and the ‘scale’ idea.

You may have visa problems here though, as the best really, really large picturesque expanse of ground to shoot balloons in the air with people looking up, is to be found only in Israel. And just to make sure that your film doesn’t get confused with three other hot-air balloon ads the TV viewer may have seen the same day, bring in the grand Human Logo, i.e. 2,500 people running towards centre of screen to dramatically form the client’s logo. But don’t use this idea if your deep voice-over earnestly says how you are working in every way possible towards a greener planet. Hot air and plastic balloons are not very eco-friendly.