You Can Read Part 1 Here.

Imagine you’ve been hired to create a PSA for the local police. Too many people are speeding in residential areas, and the police want a PSA-style radio ad designed to get people to slow down.

What kind of ad do you create?

If you’re like most advertisers, you DON’T dig for the facts and the insights and the logic. You won’t research the issue, and that means it’ll be tough to put real substance behind your messaging.

Instead, you jump right to brainstorming ways to dramatize your safety message:  How can we create the most shocking, dramatically powerful ad, built around a “Don’t speed or little Johnny will get hit by a car” premise.

And because you skipped that essential first step of digging for substance, you’ll never get the chance to create something as awesome as this:

Speed Limit PSA

“If you hit me at 40 mph, there’s around an 80% chance I’ll die. Hit me at 30, and there’s around an 80% chance I’ll live.”

You wouldn’t create that because you (likely) didn’t stop to ask: why is the speed limit set at that speed to begin with?

In order to say something powerfully, you must start by having something powerful to say.

And that means you have to spend as much time looking for the “stuff” of your ads (or radio drama) as you do writing or producing them. This is exactly what Ira Glass says in Part II of his video series on storytelling:

 

“The amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story. And that as someone who wants to do creative work, you actually have to set aside just as much time for looking for stories…

…I think that, like, not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

— Ira Glass

I concur with Ira on this.

Stop choosing to work the heart with “emotional” ads and great production when what’s required is for you to dig harder for the right insight, fact, product differentiator, or benefit that’s actually worth advertising in the first place.

The key is to start with what Leo Burnett called the “inherent drama” of the product or service itself. THEN you can add in all that great writing and production.

When you don’t start with the inherent drama of the product itself, you get something like this:

 

No one believed those ads because no one drinks milk as a high-performance sports drink. The advertiser was trying to stick a false drama onto the product, and the approach flopped.

Compare that to the “Got Milk” campaign. It started from the truth about — the inherent drama of — milk, as in when, and under what conditions, do real people actually crave milk and only milk? When eating a peanut butter sandwich or eating rich cookies. That’s when nothing but a cold glass of milk will do. An inherent drama that led to ads like this:

 

What about you? Are you setting aside as much time searching for great substance as you do for writing and producing your ads?

Or are you still trying to bluff with fluff?

P.S. I’d like to provide proper attribution and credit for the radio ad, but… I can’t seem to remember or re-find wherever it came from. My apologies to the ad group that created that PSA