How to do bad advertising well
Coke does it like a boss. Apple did it brilliantly for a decade. Dyson is up there, too. They all do bad advertising, and they make it work.
By ‘bad advertising’, I mean the kind of work that no self-respecting creative director would take to a client, and would never trouble the scorers at Cannes. A big packshot, a big logo, a headline that’s just the product name, maybe beginning, ‘Introducing the new…’. A TV spot that’s just a product demo.
If Aussie marketing guru Byron Sharp has given the world one gift, it is this: he’s explained why bad advertising isn’t a waste of money. That dirty great product shot that you see hovering over you every morning as you drive down the A3 creates powerful reinforcements that resonate when you see the cereal in a supermarket, or spot that car in a showroom. No wonder advertising planners start to twitch when Sharp’s name is mentioned in meetings. They fumble for copies of Grant McCracken’s Culturematic, the anti-Byron bible, which argues that brands accelerate their growth by hacking culture and becoming a part of it.
This can happen if you’re really, really clever and really, really lucky. The thing about hacking culture is that it can go wrong. Just ask Pepsi.
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