Last week I received an email from a kid who used to work for me. I was his Boss. Now he's a big time Creative Director and a boss of other people. Even though I helped guide his career and helped him win a One Show Pencil, he never hires me for any freelance gigs. But that's a different story, which I will take up at a later date, but should in no way be taken as a threat.
Anyway, he asked me if I still had a copy of a White Paper I had written a long time ago. He wanted to share with some of his colleagues.
So I thought I'd share it with you.
Warning; the references are dated and the piece is mercilessly long. If I had any respect for you, or even myself, I'd edit the article or start over. But that's not gonna happen.
Why We Should
Never Not Use Negative Advertising.
Or
A White Paper On
Negativity.
“Does
it have to be so negative?” Ask any
copywriter or art director and they will tell you these are easily the seven
most dreaded words ever uttered by a client reviewing work.
Dreaded,
for two reasons.
First,
because it is a rhetorical question. It’s not a question at all. What the
client is actually saying is, “I don’t really want an answer and any reply you
do give me will be sadly insufficient and met with an uncomfortable, stony
silence. Though I will thoroughly enjoy watching you hem and haw, stop and
start, and generally make an emotional ass of yourself.”
The second reason it is dreaded is…oh, who cares what the
second reason is, the work is dead.
Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
Once
work is labeled negative there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Or
is there?
In
tenth grade, a geometry teacher proved to me that the hypotenuse of a right
triangle was the square root of the sum of the squares of the other sides.
What’s more amazing is that the Pythagorean theorem can be proven 417
different ways.
Unfortunately,
the great Euclidean thinkers never got around to dissecting the mysteries of
advertising. That does not preclude us from an equally rigorous, though
admittedly, more anecdotal proof of why we should embrace ‘negativity’ or what
I like to refer to as ‘reverse positivism.’
Guess what? It works.
Ask 100 people to name the greatest single television
commercial ever produced and 95 of those people will cite Apple’s “1984”, a
nightmarish trip into an Orwellian future inhabited by IBM-drones. The tone was
dark. The people were unattractive. The environment was oppressive. And
probably to the product manager’s dismay, there was not a single word about any
product attributes or features or benefits or anything. The copy simply said
that with the introduction of the Macintosh, “1984 won’t be like 1984.”
Can an ad get any more negative?
Probably not. And yet despite the fact the spot aired
once during the Super Bowl (though countless times on unpaid news programs),
many will tell you that this spot not only launched Macintosh, it launched the
brand. During the course of the next few weeks following the Super Bowl,
Macintosh inventory ran out and Apple had to reconfigure their entire manufacturing
process.
What about print you say?
Ask any student of the advertising industry to name the
greatest single print ad and many, OK many older ones, will point to a
Volkswagen newspaper ad from the 1960’s. There was a simple picture of the VW
bug and a one-word headline that read, “Lemon.”
(In the automotive vernacular,
there isn’t a single word that carries as much negative baggage as the word,
“Lemon.”) The ad is about a VW bug that didn’t pass its final inspection
because of a blemished chrome strip.
Today, Volkswagen is a household word in Germany and in
America, because a brave client who understood the power of ‘reverse
positivism’ approved ads with negative headlines like, “Lemon”, “Think small”
and “It makes your house look bigger.”
Need more examples?
I’ll name the brand and I’ll bet
within seconds you can think of their commercials. Alaska Airlines. Federal
Express. IBM. All employ so-called negative advertising, whether it is
portraying how their competitors operate or illustrating a situation that can
benefit from their product or service.
Would anybody argue that these commercials are not
successful?
Why? Would somebody tell me
why?
Trying to explain why negative advertising works is like
asking someone to define the number three without using your fingers or a
pencil or other numbers. In Luke Sullivan’s book, “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This”
he writes:
Negatives have
power. Try writing the Ten Commandments positively…It would not fit on two
stone tablets. Negatives are a linguistic construction we’re all familiar with.
And how did we become so familiar with this particular
linguistic construction? From our books, our magazines, our shows, our films,
our stories.
Think about it. If we expressed everything in positive
terms, our nightly news wouldn’t last three minutes much less thirty.
If you took away the negative linguistic construction from
a stand up comedian, how long do you think it would be before he or she was
back to bussing tables or driving a cab?
And what about the movies?
Years ago, the powers that be
at Paramount Studios, put Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a small movie called,
“Sleepless in Seattle.” Probably for the same reason that peanut butter goes
with jelly, people love to see Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together. But here’s the
deal, the movie runs a little less than two hours long, and yet the two
superstars are together in just one scene for three minutes. THREE MINUTES.
Did somebody in research say, “we have to change the
script, they keep missing each other.” Maybe they did, but fortunately that
person was sacked. Because it is the very tension, the conflict, the situations
that keep them apart that make their union at the end of the film so
gratifying.
Syd Field, in his book SCREENPLAY, writes:
All drama is
conflict. Without conflict you have no character; without character, you have
no action; without action, you have no story; and without story, you have no
screenplay.
Though we are not writing screenplays (OK some of us are,
after hours) it can be argued that TV commercials need to work even harder at
telling our stories: the story of our product.
And why would we not use the very same tools, drama,
conflict, tension, humor, that have served great storytellers since the first
markings were put on a cave?
“This White Paper isn’t all
that convincing.”
Some researchers at Cleveland State University made a
startling discovery.
The researchers created two fictitious job candidates
–Dave and John – two identical resumes, and two almost identical letters of
reference. The only difference was that John’s letter included the sentence
“Sometimes, John can be difficult to get along with.”
The researchers showed the resumes to personnel directors.
Which candidate did the directors most want to interview?
Sometimes-Difficult-to-Get-Along-With John.
The researchers concluded that the criticism of John made
the reference’s praise of John seem much more believable, and that made John
look like a stronger candidate. Showing John’s warts actually helped sell John.
(Excerpted from “Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith)
The point is, sometimes we propose headlines or copy that,
at first blush may not seem all that appealing or flattering. But honesty has a
unique disarming quality. Particularly when it comes unexpectedly from a large
organization.
And as the Cleveland State University professors pointed
out, honesty can go a long way in the eyes and minds of consumers we are trying
to persuade.
Persuasion. Persuasion.
Persuasion.
In the end, why we do, what we do, is to convince other
people to do, what they sometimes don’t know they need to do, or even want to do.
This is complicated by the fact that human beings are as
Harry Beckwith states, “unpredictable, frustrating, temperamental, often
irrational, and occasionally half mad.”
If using ‘negative’ advertising can get us closer to a
more successful persuasion, and I believe that historically it has, we would be
screaming, lobotomized, half-wits(was that too negative) not to use it.
