If there's no tension, it's not interesting.

I finished the last post with a Cormac McCarthy quote, “If it doesn’t involve life and death, it’s not interesting”. Which, if you extrapolate, basically means that if there’s no tension, it’s not interesting. (This quote came from a recent discussion with Darby Hudson, check out his work - ig: @darby_hudson, plenty of great examples.)

Think about your favourite films. TV shows. Books. Video games. Songs. Art. There will, almost 100% certainly, be an inherent tension built into the premise. It might well be life and death, but it also might be something fairly innocuous. But it will be there, somewhere. And it’s the underlying reason as to why you’re so interested in it.

Same goes for advertising.

Pick any classic ad. The stuff that people still reference to this day.

We all know this one, but it’s one of the ads that started it all, along with ‘Think Small.’ DDB famously convinced Volkswagen to call their beloved Beetle a ‘lemon’, the worst possible thing you can call a car, to highlight just how strenuous their testing is. That even the slightest hint of a fault picked up is enough to pull a car off the assembly line, helping mould this aura around German engineering that STILL exists to this day.

What a way to sell a computer. When Chiat Day & Apple launched it’s Macintosh PC in 1984, it leveraged general unease around technology, and tapped into George Orwell’s famously dystopian vision for the year of its release, by painting rival IBM as the ‘blue big brother’ that they were coming to smash and save humanity from. Tension points everywhere. Still to this day Apple is seen as the more ‘creative’ and ‘less corporate’ technology choice despite it mostly being a complete facade. Nowadays, they sell overpriced outdated tech in a nice casing. (As I write this on a MacBook Pro, fully aware…)

I mean, tension is basically the entire idea here. Guinness takes longer to pour than other beers. Something that, in an increasingly rapidly world, obsessed with turnover and profit and speed, was becoming a perceived negative. So AMV BBDO took the thought of ‘good things come to those who wait’ and turned it into one of the greatest pieces of advertising ever made. Not everything is meant to be fast. Which anyone who’s sat out past the break for two hours waiting for a ride, or two minutes or so waiting for a perfect pint of Guinness, can attest to.

And who can forget Fallon London’s Cadbury Gorilla. A spot that many still call the best ad ever. An ad that completely bombed in research and almost never saw the light of day. What’s the big insight here? What’s the big tension point? Where’s the friction?

The insight is that chocolate brings you joy. The execution was one of the most joyous pieces of film anyone had ever seen. It’s a fucking Gorilla playing a drum solo to ‘In the air tonight’. In a chocolate ad. That is the tension point. And I just want to labour this point a bit because the word ‘tension’ can have negative connotations - tension is not an inherently bad thing. Sometimes it can be a really joyous thing. But, either way, it is almost always an inherently interesting thing.

(I like to share examples of my own work on here just to follow through on my own opinions and advice. The field of marketing (and especially in LinkedIn Land) is full of people tearing campaigns down, shitting on brands and agencies, and attention-bait vitriol from people who have never actually made anything, and likely never will. It’s one of the worst parts of the industry, and these types should be overlooked for those who can and do act on their own advice.)

Here is an example of a really simple tension. When we began working on a new strategy for Ocean Blue, based on the fact that their salmon comes from Norway, we landed on the line ‘From the coldest waters of Norway’. Because that’s why the salmon is better. The colder the water, the healthier and tastier the salmon is. The interesting tension point was that the water was so bloody cold that, while the fish might love it, humans hated it. Fun campaign ensued.

When briefed to put together a series of films targeted at young workers, highlighting workplace issues like sexual harassment, bullying, overwork, inadequate equipment, we face a number of hurdles. First, that’s a LOT of ground to cover. Second, the media buy was only 15 seconds. Third, young workers are by nature inexperienced, so don’t actually know what does and doesn’t constitute inappropriate behaviour, let alone that WorkSafe is who they need to contact. So that tension point became the driver of the idea. We wrapped all of this up in a universal ‘feeling’. When you just know something isn’t quite right, when something just feels a bit ‘Ummm….’.

Phonewords is a business that sells exactly that. You know those 1300 and 1800 numbers? Like 1300 PLUMBING? The brief contained a fact that ‘words are 5x more memorable than numbers’. That is a tension point in and of itself. Phone numbers are numbers and numbers are hard to remember. So we made that the premise for the campaign. (You can probably argue that sending Sem Kekovich on an iguana-fuelled acid trip in a telecommunications ad is also a tension point…) There’s also a series of radio spots that won a bunch of metal, and we even created a 1300 IGUANA hotline.

When YourBreast, a breast augmentation clinic, had all of their content banned from Facebook, two female creatives in the agency, Izzy Evans and Ana Pareja Calvo, spotted a brilliant tension point. That women didn’t need breasts in their face, they didn’t need models and influencers, and that, tbh, they’d rather a platform that let them research something like breast surgery in a more casual fashion. The tension point became the idea.

I feel like this is a big reason why a lot of modern advertising fails to captivate like it once did. Because there’s no tension anymore. There’s no playful friction. We’re beholden to ‘best practices’ that talk about the number of logos and framing and warm colour grades and run times. Testing models that count the number of smiles and positive feelings and whether the music is uplifting. All of this stuff is fine to consider once you have an interesting idea. But that’s the problem. No one is actually asking that question - “Is this interesting?”

(Which, if we’re honest, is the only ‘best practice’ proven to stand the test of time. Being interesting.)

And if there’s no tension in your idea, it’s probably not interesting.

^{Writing tip #1} 

^{DON’T CHAIN YOURSELF TO A WHEEL}

^{Writing tip #2} 

^{READ YOUR SHIT OUT LOUD}

^{Writing tip #3} 

^{WRITERS DON’T NEED TO READ} 

^{Writing tip #4} 

^{MANIFESTOS MAKE MILLIONS} 

^{Writing tip #5} 

^{STRAIGHT HEADLINE, TWISTED VISUAL ISN’T JUST FOR PRINT}

^{Writing tip #6}

^{PUT SOME ORDER AROUND YOUR CHAOS}

^{Writing tip #7}

^{BECOME THE BEST PRESENTER IN THE AGENCY}

^{Writing tip #8}

^{CRAFT YOUR SCRIPTS AS YOU WOULD SHARPEN A BLADE}

^{Writing tip #9}

^{CAN YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC?}

^{Writing tip #10}

^{15 SECONDS IS STILL 15 SECONDS}

^{Writing tip #11}

^{NEVER BE CONTENT}

^{Writing tip #12}

^{THINK THE OPPOSITE}

^{Writing tip #13}

^{SEE YOUR SCRIPTS FIRST, THEN WRITE}

^{Writing tip #14}

^{MISIDRECTION AND HOW TO PASS LIKE MAGIC}

^{Writing tip #15}

^{TURN A PHRASE INTO YOUR OWN}

^{Writing tip #16}

^{HUMANISE THE PRODUCT}