Your Ads Are Boring. Your Brand is Boring. And No One’s Buying
Let’s start with a quick test. One of the following Ads is real and the other one is fake. Can you guess which one is which?
The actual ad is the one on the right.
But it’s the one on the left, the fake one, that brought SelfLender a ton of new clients. So what happened here?
After seeing their original ad, a Twitter user wanted to have some fun with it. “I decided to photoshop it because the original ad was like ‘eh,’ and I was like, it’d be pretty funny if the ad looked like how people actually talk,” he said.
His post went viral. It has been retweeted thousands of times and brought extremely valuable traffic and followers to SelfLender. The company was praised for having a marketing team that genuinely could speak and connect with its audience.
But SelfLender had actually nothing to do with it.
Despite being grateful for the free press, Brett Billick, their CMO, said this:
“Our mission is to help people build credit, but naturally as a [financial technology] company we typically would need to be a bit more conservative in the language we use.”
Here’s my question — Why?
Why do you have to be more conservative? Why do you have to watch what language you use?
Who are you afraid of? Is it the market? Is it your Board of Directors? Is it your investors? Because, trust me, all they care about is your bottom line — not how you get there.
Breaking through the Internet’s clutter of noise cannot happen with “normal communication.”
We are now bombarded with ads. Seriously, new reports say that we face around 5,000 ads every day. So getting people’s attention is harder than ever.
And trust me, you won’t do it by taming your language. I get it, as a company, you want to sound perfect and corporate. You want to be professional, whatever that means.
But, guess what? That is what everyone else does too, and it’s boring. And you’ll be thrown into the social media oblivion.
Without the help of the mysterious photoshop man, Selflender is now back to publishing regular stuff that no one cares about. They are more effective at putting me to sleep than my nightly Nyquil-Vodka cocktail.
They’ve lost their edge (and everyone’s attention). I mean, look at this:
Pushing boundaries, assuming risk, and not being politically correct are the core ingredients of the most successful marketing campaigns.
Last September, Nike aired one of the most controversial ads in recent history. Amid the NFL drama of players kneeling for the National Anthem to protest against police brutality, they decided to take the leader of the movement and have him be their brand’s face.
Despite alienating some of their consumers, the ad resonated extremely well with their target audience of 18–29-year-olds. They became a more polarizing brand but, more important, one with personality. Risky, but it worked.
Taking a stand on social issues is one way of making your brand more personable (see Nike or Chick-fil-a), but there’s more:
Dollar Shave Club sold to Unliver in 2016 for $1 billion, and most of its success and brand recognition comes from its out-of-the-box ads.
Their first campaign — “Our Blades Are Fucking Great” — has over 25 million views on Youtube, and most of them came organically (aka free) because it went viral.
Narrated by Mike, its founder, the commercial includes humor-packed moments like this:
“And do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flash light, a backscratcher and 10 blades? [Passes an old photo of grandfather on wall behind] Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade… and polio.”
It even makes (light) fun of a Latin woman:
Mike: Alejandra, what were you doing last month?’
Alejandra [grinning]: ‘Not working’
Mike: ‘And what you doing now?’
Alejandra [still grinning]: ‘Working.’
I don’t know about their blades, but their ads really are fucking great.
Social media is crowded. Every single brand is fighting for attention and, as the rule of the jungle goes, only the fittest will survive.
There, in the scary land of Twitter, fast-food restaurant Wendy’s has proven to understand how to connect with their consumers much better than anyone else.
Using sassy language, clever jokes, and even “beefing” (pun intended) with its competitors have positioned them as a young, cool brand — opposed to the boring, more established McDonalds.
The takeaway is not that you should be controversial just to make noise — consumers can sniff that out, and they will think you’re annoying.
The takeaway is that the way you communicate with your audience matters.
Sounding professional and corporate might seem the best way to gain people’s trust, but it makes you generic and boring. Instead, give your brand a strong personality that’s rememberable and connects on a human level.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +387,966 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
