Ads That Walk

Advertising, DNA, and Natural Selection

Great ads are greater than the sum of their parts. They earn our attention with a compelling idea; provoke us to stop flipping through Esquire, People or Playboy, and look.

Dumb ads don’t do this, they just add more crap to the system and weigh it down. They waste the attention they capture fade into obscurity, or worse, get ignored altogether. It’s Darwinian; it’s a jungle out there for the ad man.

Headline: Always Progressing

A bank promotes itself in Time Magazine with a picture of its vault (it looks okay) and a headline reading: This is where we keep your money. This is a bad ad. There’s a flat relationship between the language and imagery. It repeats itself. It’s boring.

Textbooks on copywriting place heavy emphasis on the headline and visual working together to create synergy, dimension. The two should be separate, and distinct (and may well make little sense on their own). But when brought together pop like Mentose & Diet Coke.

When the chemistry is right, it’s a simple, tight relationship between art and copy that goes all the way down to the molecular level. That’s where their strength lies.

Johnnie Walker as a brand can inspire and communicate ‘Keep walking and keep progressing in life’.

An ad that ‘pops’ is great, but it must be repeatable to have value. It’s easy to write one clever play on words, somewhat harder to create an integrated campaign. In Advertising 201, our professor required three different executions of every ad, the point was to think less about making clever ads and focus on developing ‘ideas with legs’.

An idea is the DNA of an advertising campaign, it’s the code that shapes print ads and YouTube content. And from this point of view, advertising is more like organic chemistry than art.

Kate Disten argues in The Selfish Meme that as DNA is a code for biology, we might imagine that memes (like genes, get it?) are the code of cognition, thinking. Consider a paper crane, she offers that the idea, the meme is the set of step-by-step instructions for folding the paper, what we see is simply the physical expression of this code in reality. An strong idea is the manuel, the code, the recipe, the map, the blueprints for a great campaign.

Consider that blue eyes and long legs or pink paper and wide wingspan are just different expressions of the exact same set of instructions. In this way, making a great ad is dependent on supporting it with code that’s well suited for multiple expressions, some “phenotypic variation”.

“A man is judged a success not by where he is but by where he is going”

Natural selection ensures only the fit survive. Most advertising flashes bright for a moment, then extinguish quickly, but the best burn slowly in the cultural consciousness and become a legacy that defines a brand (Whassup? vs. Think Different).

But of course, ideas don’t stand still. Once a great ad breaks through, engages with us, and sticks in our minds it tends to iterate and evolve—I’m on a horse, I don’t always drink beer…, …I guarantee it, have become cultural references that have, to varying degrees, evolved beyond their advertising. More substantially there’s orange juice for breakfast, the engagement ring, and Wayfarer sunglasses.

A campaign has done something right when the idea it sets forth begins to iterate and evolve on its own.

In the end, more of our ‘thinking DNA’ has come from advertising than we’d like to admit. Advertising is a major mode of socialization, it influences how we think and feel—what’s hip, what’s sexy, what’s normal (Be Like Mike), and what problems we need to worry about—lack of the latest e-gadget, insufficiently white teeth, mammary magnitude, etc.

Johnnie Walker has used advertising to root its brand in pop culture. Over many years, many different ad campaigns have been persistent in preaching the principle of persistence. The ‘Keep Walking’ positioning, or ‘big idea’ is a classic example of the art, power and efficacy of great advertising.

“The reason why the ‘Keep Walking’ campaign is so successful is the fact that it is a type of slogan that could turn a political candidate to a president.”

Creating a great ad takes a lot of work; the creative team must make connections between a brand and its consumer in a way that presents new, and compelling ideas, or expressions of that idea, that can be executed across a multitude of channels like frosting on a cake.

Advertisers (i.e., clients) rarely understand what gives their ads legs, or movement through culture. Agencies and researchers alike how might consider how we can re-frame and re-educate our clients on this.

Good ads arrest us in the present and then face the future — how easy can the idea evolve with the audience. That is providing value.

The Series is inspired by the epic journeys these agents took in their world travels, navigating their way along the famous trade routes of the world

It is an evocative expression of the vibrancy, aromas and spices that the Johnnie Walker agents would have discovered in the thriving markets around Asia.

I write about advertising and culture from the POV of an advertising analyst for the I Love Charts collection on Medium. More at languageofbrands.tumblr.com

First Article in series: “Warhol Was Wrong About Advertising & Art.”