I remember back in the day when I was working as a staff copywriter at Agency X (the name has been changed to protect the innocent) on a car account, and our client was providing feedback to one of the newspaper ads we had just created.
“No, no, this is all wrong,” he told me. “We need more of those explosion callouts around the prices. And where are the exclamation points. I gotta have more of those.”
I started laughing out loud, thinking he was making fun of how many explosions and bangers were already in the ad, but on the other end all I heard was silence. Me being a lowly copy grunt and he being our biggest paying client, I quickly apologized and obliged. At the time I thought I was the naive one. Come to find out it was my client.
All the screaming and ranting and loud tactics and garish graphics in the world – what I like to call shock marketing – aren’t going to differentiate your brand in the marketplace. This for the most part includes those goofy, edgy YouTube ads companies are wont to release these days; if you are the fortunate few to actually get traction from one of these ads, your agency will probably get more work from the ad than you will.
Aesop has already taught us that the screamers in life are usually ignored, so instead of relying on flamboyant tactics that only call attention to the fact that you weren’t inventive enough to do something original, it’s better to craft a concise message that is remarkable even when it is whispered.
