Advertising Worth Talking About
Actions Click Louder Than Words
When Alex Bogusky was creative director of the agency that bears his name, he insisted on being read the press release before seeing the creative work. If the press release was uninspiring, he would refuse to look at the work. Bogusky understood that the role of advertising is to make things famous.
In the ad-saturated environment of the noughties, the decade of which he was crowned creative director, the best way to ensure that was to make advertising generate its own PR.
If an idea wasn’t newsworthy, it wasn’t good enough.
He also understood that part of the job is making your clients famous and part is making the agency famous. Famous agencies have a stream of suitors, both clients and talent. Being at the mercy of the pitch process is expensive and exhausting. Thus, junior creatives weren’t allowed to work with clients until they had cut their teeth creating award entries. Awards are advertising for the ideas and agencies that win them.
Bogusky’s approach has become the dominant form of ‘integrated’ idea in the industry. Ideas that inform advertising and earn news coverage are winning across the interesting categories at the awards shows, be they innovation, integrated or NEW.

Grand prix winners like Amex’s Small Business Saturday, REI’s OptOutside, Burger King’s McWhopper, and ideas that were never entered into shows but that would have definitely won (like Red Bull’s Stratos project), are all something somewhat new.
They are ideas that are not confined to media, to execution and craft. Their substance is their power — that they exist as actions in the world, not just utterances in media.
Of course, marketing activations that hack the news are not new. Edward Bernays, the father of PR, laid claim to the very first, for American Tobacco.
In the early twentieth century, there was a taboo against women smoking in public. In order to create a lucrative growth opportunity, Bernays organised an action designed to catch the media’s attention. It was framed as an issue of women’s liberation.
Strolling on Easter Sunday had evolved into the Easter Parade, where the great and grand would regale society with their finery. In 1929, Bernays arranged to have ten impeccably dressed, respectable young women, with husbands and boyfriends in tow, defiantly smoking as they promenaded. The New York Times printed photographs of them and various think pieces followed.
Their leader, Bertha Hunt, issued a statement at the end of the parade:
“I hope that we have started something and that these torches of freedom, with no particular brand favored, will smash the discriminatory taboo on cigarettes for women and that our sex will go on breaking down all discriminations.”

The catchy imagery and brand sensitivity are more easily understood once you know that Miss Hunt was Bernays’ secretary.
What’s different about today is that actions used to be separate from advertising, like church from state.
Now, some of the most interesting advertising is informed by these actions that live outside media. Church and state are blurring too and the superfluity of news-like misinformation in the digital stream has eroded trust in both advertising and the media.
A decade ago, I collaborated with global creative award show the LIA Awards to create the ‘NEW’, an innovation category, to champion advertising that sat outside traditional media and helped drive the industry forward.
This year we announced a NEW sub-category for the kinds of ideas described above:
BRAND ACTIONS that are distinct from, but may inform, advertising.
Actions that exist outside media are a way to rebuild trust in brands because they feel real — slightly removed by the taint of fake news.
Looking at the most awarded ideas from Cannes this year, the Grand Prix winning ideas won across a raft of seemingly discrete categories, reflecting the blurred lines of modern media and the ultimate requirement for ideas to garner their own press coverage as an intermediate measure of creative impact.
But, at heart, what connects them, is that they are actions that occur outside of media, that in turn inform both advertising, social and mainstream media coverage.
- FEARLESS GIRL
a bronze depicting a young girl looking at the Charging Bull on Wall Street, conceived to promote State Street Global Advisors as part of a corporate diversity program addressing the lack of women on the boards of companies.
It struck a chord with people, has become a landmark for tourists and a lightning rod for discussions of equality in business, as well the co-option of public art and public spaces for commercial use. With 18 Lions and 4 Grand Prix, it’s one of the most awarded ideas at Cannes ever.

2. MEET GRAHAM
Australians had become desensitized to shocking films warning them about the dangers of traffic accidents. The solution they developed was an interactive sculpture [yep, another sculpture. Could anything be more physical?] with an accompanying exhibition augmented reality application. Based on what a human would need to look like in order to survive a traffic accident, “Meet Graham” won a Cyber and a Health Grand Prix and 27 other awards across Outdoor, Direct, Design, Promo and PR.
Again, it’s an idea that bleeds across other media because it exists outside of them and was picked up by the global news media.
3. CARE COUNTS
Based on the surprising and saddening fact that 20% school children in the USA miss school because they don’t have clean clothes, Whirlpool put washers and dryers in 17 schools as a research project to see if it improved attendance — and it did.
This sort of intervention as a one-off has been commonly seen with brands setting up stunts disguised as social good in emerging countries but in this case it was done with some longer term programmatic goals in mind and is actually expanding further next year.
4. BOOST YOUR VOICE
Boost Mobile noticed that their retail footprint overlaps considerably with the areas in the USA least well served by polling stations because unequal voting access is a real problem and it disproportionately affects the low income and minority population.
So Boost decided to act and make all of their retail stores polling stations on voting day and then mobilized communications and community actions to spread the word.
Brand Actions click louder than words so DO THINGS, TELL PEOPLE.
ENTER YOURS IN THE NEW@LIA AWARDS BRAND ACTION CATEGORY.
THERE ARE A SUITE OF NEW CATEGORIES: Native Advertising, Influencer Advertising, Media Creativity, Creative Data and Self-Promotion, Creative Tech, Product Innovation, Media Innovation, Experiential,Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
Developed from an article originally published in ADMAP.
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