Ira’s third video on storytelling is by far the most popular. He's describing the positive side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think this video speaks to: Linear, no-threshold thinking, Minimum Effective Dose, and Cumulative Effect.
“The amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story… I think that, like, not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”
When you advertise, you typically make bullet points of what you “want customers to know.” Giving a customer an education so he’ll have no choice but to pick you is as fanciful as it is arrogant.
The first video covers Ira’s two basic building blocks of storytelling: the Anecdote and the Moment of Reflection. And in advertising terms, these are roughly analogous to Relevance and Credibility.
In many businesses, what most customers are really buying is transformation. Groundhog Day plays to three very powerful psychological dynamics you can use to captivate and convert.
A roadmap for TV and Radio that works. If your ad campaign is conceived to get real traction, you’ll see these first four milestones within the first three to five months...
If the humor isn’t tied to the message; if you can’t talk about one without talking about the other, then any attempts at persuasion will be short-lived and not very memorable.
You probably read this and thought: that’s an unrealistic expectation. Kind of like expecting an ad to “go viral.” Who gossips about ads, of all things? And why would anyone want people gossiping about their brand?
The Coors campaign took market share from Bud and Miller while spending one-third as much money. They used a half-dozen smaller differentiators to build up “quality” and “caring” as what set their beer apart.
Heck, even one out of three is enough to get traction. But a trifecta is the stuff of legends.
We remember the bold. We don’t remember them for what they said. We don’t remember them for what they did. We remember how they made us feel. Advertising is no different.
How do you get the attention of the public when your product or service is a grudge purchase at best? Every home services provider suffers from this.
I’m not talking about a campaign that has run for 50 years, I’m talking about a single ad that still runs to this day and still drives results. So what’s behind the magic?
“Bill, why did you buy a highway billboard”? “It gives my company great exposure for getting more clients” Here’s the reality. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills.
We can use the recruiting spot to sneak messages into the minds of eavesdroppers that might have “bounced off” of skepticism had they appeared in a “regular” ad.