by Jeffrey Hedquist
I’ve talked before about making your client’s commercial sound different than his or her competitors’.
One way to do that is to research how advertisers in completely different categories talk to their audiences. You can do this by listening to their commercials, by reading specialty magazines or checking out web sites.
You’ll discover promotions, marketing ideas and points of view that will help your client’s campaign stand apart from the crowd.
Got a client in the home healthcare business? There may be an idea you can borrow from the way motorcycle retailers talk to their prospects.
Just today I got an idea for an amusement park from a state tourism print ad in an automotive service magazine. Who woulda guessed?
The principle here is unexpectedness. It’s what makes Indian food so tasty. According to an article in MIT Technology Revue (you never know what you’ll find at the public library), many common recipes use complementary spice flavors. Indian food combines spices that do not share the same flavors. This has the effect of waking up our taste receptors.
We can apply this Asian culinary technique to creating an ad which will help your client make his or her customers’ mouths water.
As an alternative to mining inspiration from another industry, connect the advertiser with something seemingly unrelated. For example, how is your client’s product or service like an avocado, bungee jumping, or the Planet Neptune?
Write down every connection you can think of, no matter how outrageous. It’s a creative activity that will take you beyond the world of ordinary copy and may forge new neural pathways in your brain.
This exercise may yield a great commercial, or at least start you on an unexpected path you never would have traveled that will result in good audio marketing.
Go ahead. Make an unexpected connection. It’s another way to break writer’s block that can create unexpectedly good results.
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What’s your favorite writer’s block buster? Email
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