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Expressing character in just 29 seconds or less

AD FIGURES MUST BE GENUINE, AUTHENTIC TO MAKE POINT QUICKLY

If you’re locked in the battle for TV viewer eyeballs, here’s a morsel of marketing wisdom for you ... character sells. Please understand that I don’t mean “characters” like the ubiquitous infomercial shill, Billy Mays, Rula Lenska, Joan Rivers, Tim Conway or chimpanzees.

When I say “character” I mean well-defined, well-written and – especially – well-cast roles that have the ring of truth. While these are essential to any good drama, they are absolutely critical to the dramatic haiku of TV commercials, or as they are known in the trade, spots.

When you subtract the 1/2-second pull-up at the start of the spot that allows the message to be inserted into whatever video stream it’s going to play, and the mandatory 5 second wrap-up or button at the end, the story teller has a little less than 24 seconds to grab the viewer’s attention, set the scene and deliver the message.

You would think that after about 30 years of practice – TV spots settled into their current mode sometime in the late ‘70s – ad guys and girls would have it down pat. But as all of us who groan at the countless derivative, wooden, overly literal or outright amateurish swill that constitutes the majority of television advertising, it’s clear (to me anyway) that creating captivating and memorable TV spots is still an art and not a science.

One secret to the art of TV advertising – perhaps the greatest secret – is the effective use of genuine, authentic and appealing character to make your point.

Some examples that come to mind are the old guys in the Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler ads. It turns out that these two fellows were chums of Hal Riney, the recently deceased advertising genius who concocted the campaign. Note to all who would hope to clone this formula (like the agency that’s created the painfully lame idiots-standing-hip-deep-in-the-cranberry-bog series ads for Ocean Spray), what made the Bartles & Jaymes ads work was the recognizable, authentic character in the two men.

The memorable nature of the B&J spots is especially ironic, since the product they were shilling was anything but authentic – watered-down, second-rate, bulk wine injected with CO2.

My current absolute favorite television advertising campaign is the series of spots promoting AT&T wireless network. The premise of each spot is identical. There are two identical actors in the scene, but the one that does the talking represents the main character’s phone, and he (or she) is complaining that the subject character is going to make a mistake, miss out on something good or incur some calamity because they didn’t get AT&T wireless service and as a consequence don’t have “bars” in their current location.

“Bradshaw’s phone” tells the story of a salesman traveling to the Orient who fails to get the call telling him how to correctly pronounce the client’s name and instead offends a very important client by calling him Mr. Stinky Fish Face. “Jen’s Phone” shows an attractive teenage girl stuck in a run-down drive-in restaurant with some smelly, lumpy dork because she was unable to receive a call from totally cool Brad who wanted to ask her to the prom. All the spots in the campaign are extremely memorable (as you probably already guessed) and bear many repeat viewings, all thanks to the excellent casting and spot-on portrayals of genuine, authentic folks.

The products I mention are functionally unforgettable thanks to advertising messages that were routed in the recognizable authentic character of the people in the story.

You might want to keep this in mind when you’re tempted to save a few dollars by buying generic photos on the Internet that scream stock, allowing the radio station ad rep to read the lines in your radio spot because it’s free or cherishing the delusion that chimpanzees will make up for the lack of originality or imagination in your ad concept.

•••

Steve Rustad is co-owner of Rustad Marketing of Petaluma. He can be reached at 707-789-9347 or steve@rustadmarketing

.com.