- Death to shit ads.
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- Think the opposite. About everything.
This is going to be an incredibly simple tip that you can apply at almost every stage of the creative process. ‘Think the opposite’ as a creative lever isn’t new at all, but it’s possibly more relevant than ever before.
I can’t remember a time in this business where creativity was so constrained. Where so many ‘rules’ about creativity were governed by uncreative people. Endless ‘Best practices’. Logos have to be in the first five seconds. You can’t have a ‘reveal’ at the end. Runtimes have to be short. Prescribed templates in order to get ‘star ratings’. The list of ‘mandatories’ on each brief is now a mile long before anyone has even put pen to paper - and the output is on display for all to see. Homogenous monotony. Everything just ends up looking the same.
But therein lies the opportunity. It’s never been easier to stand out. And to do that, often all you have to do is ‘think the opposite’.
For example, look at what Geico did here.
In the earlier days of YouTube pre-roll hype, brands were told by the platform that everything had to happen ‘before the skip button’, branding, messaging, punchline, etc… which was then passed on as a mandatory to agencies. The idea was that if you did everything before the skip button, the ad would be ‘unskippable’ even if people ‘skipped’. (Yes, these were the meetings we had to sit through…). It was a nightmare, and if anything, led to the proliferation of people hitting the skip button because of how intrusively bad the ads were. Until Geico did this. They thought the opposite, and ran 60 second 15 second pre-rolls where all the box ticking still happened before the skip button, but viewers were given a bonus if they didn’t hit skip. And it was a hit. Proving that people are happy to watch something longer if you don’t disrespect them in the first place.
But this isn’t just about ‘rules’. This is about concepting and writing and art direction and everything. Throughout the entire creative process, always ask the question. What’s the opposite of this? What’s the opposing force? What’s the friction point to this thought? This behaviour? This character?
What if night was day? A dog was a human? A villain was a hero? Colour was black and white? Footage was animated? You can ask this question endlessly and constantly open up new avenues.
For their big Superbowl ad, Liquid Death asked ‘What if we made a beer ad, but with no beer? What if the beer was water and the adults were kids?’
These Direct TV ads are classics. When asked to sell Direct TV, a satellite TV service that replaces traditional cable, the creatives instead thought not ‘what good things happen when you get Direct TV’, but ‘what bad things happen when you have cable’. The campaign was built around what you lose, not what you gain. Sell a negative as a positive. A powerful creative premise that’s almost an impossibility nowadays.
I’m assuming the brief here from Tubi was to make an ad showing how popular they were. Mischief took that and simply thought, ‘Ok, well what’s not as popular as Tubi then’. It really can be that brutally simple.
This one is a great example of how a string of opposites can come together like Voltron to make a great spot. Sarah loves to spend time with her dog. What if that means she prefers it to humans? What if she prefers it so much we hire someone to replace her? What if it’s a man? Then you get to run through all the scenarios where a man playing a woman feels like a fish out of water. It’s a 90 second ad for dog food with hardly any dogs or dog food in it. And it rules.
To show how practical this tactic is, here’s some instances where I’ve employed it. Last year, we were briefed by our client, Ocean Blue, to make a series of outdoor that focused on their salmon being from Norway. The reason the salmon is so good in Norway is the fjord water. The freezing cold temperatures make for better salmon. But also, horrifically cold for humans. So, rather than making a run of the mill ‘provenance’ ad, the executional thought was that the cold water in Norway was ‘bad for humans, good for salmon.’
Some years ago, I was working on a brief for Telstra Phonewords. They sell those 1300/1800 numbers, like 1300 PLUMBING. The brief was to sell how memorable phonewords are. So we instead made a radio campaign that showed how unmemorable numbers were.
In 2020, we received a crisis call from a small client, YourBreast, a breast augmentation clinic, that all of their ads had been banned from Facebook - their main platform. The new algorithm was not only cracking down on skin and nudity, but even ads without nudity that linked to a website that contained any. Disaster for a breast augmentation clinic. The brief was to work out how to get their ads back online, but instead, we thought the opposite.
There’s endless examples I could dig up, but that’s probably enough for now. So, the next time you’re stuck, or even just starting a brief - think the opposite. And see where it takes you.
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