What’s the Golden Rule of Advertising that these ads break?
These two Persil ads appear in the latest issue of Luerzer’s Archive, a quarterly publication which brings together advertising design for print, television, product packaging, commercial illustration and more.
(Find out more and subscribe at www.luerzersarchive.com.)
Creatives from around the world submit work and hope for selection. Most of the stuff you see is great. But occasionally something slips through that just doesn’t cut it.
These two ads are a good example. They commit the cardinal sin of ‘headline repeating visual’.
An old creative director of mine who’d worked at JWT in the 70s once told me this is called a ‘Mickey Mouse’. That’s because on old Disney cartoons, one of the other characters would always say, “It’s Mickey Mouse” whenever Mickey Mouse appeared. Well guess what? The audience can see him and don’t need to be told.
Similarly, in these ads (which incidentally, aren’t a campaign as they’re basically the same execution) we can see it’s a prison inmate and don’t need to be told.
Actually, this is a really strong idea which will engage parents instantly. But there are two better ways to make the idea work with better copywriting:
Put the kid behind prison bars with an inmate’s clothes on and use the same headline: CHILDREN NOW SPEND LESS TIME OUTDOORS THAN A PRISON INMATE
Or drop the kid and just show the inmate behind bars with the headline: CHILDREN NOW SPEND LESS TIME OUTDOORS THAN HIM
Don’t do all the work for the reader. Let them make the connection and get the idea. It’s like when you get a joke. It makes people think, I get that, it’s interesting, I didn’t know that, it’s shocking.
The communication is much faster and more effective: It’s going to get the kids off their phones, laptops, tablets, PCs and get them outside in the fresh air.
Same idea. Better execution.