Creative Strategy Made Easy: How to Crack Any Brief for Advertising, Branding or Design

1. Creative Strategy Made Easy: What's the problem with creative work? Why is it so difficult? And why does so much of it missed the mark? Well, a lot of it comes down to strategy because all too often we have no clue where to start. No clear vision for the end, and no clear creative route in between. That's why mastering strategic thinking. It's one of the best things you can do to improve your creative output. And yet it's often the last thing any of us work on developing. Because after all, strategies that bit the No Fun wit and for many the confusing them. But in this course we're going to change Ola. We're gonna make it quick and easy to drop straight onto the right strategy to crack the brief, nail the proposition, and set all your campaigns up for success. Also, you don't have to spend hours sweat and go over a brief, a concept, a piece of coffee or design, only to have to abandon it when it fails. Now just as the name suggests, it's creative strategy made easy. So whether you're a designer, copywriter, or our creative, while the one writing the brief and the first place. Then this course to go into my life way easier for you. First of all, get clear on what matters when it comes to getting better creative results. Then I'll show you a really simple hack that will help you crack any brief or problems with one magical little question. Asks for me, I'm robust bundle, a copywriter specializing and concepts for over 16 years in the world of advertising. In that time, I've got really good at getting to the truth of a brief or problem and seeing the right creative solution right from the off. Because after all, when you're working into tight deadlines, you don't have time to hang around. And if you don't produce the goods from the word go, don't tend to get rehired. Now I want to share what I've learned and developed with you. Sound like a plan that I look forward to seeing you on the course. 2. MODULE 1: STRATEGIC THINKING: What you're about to learn in this module, you're about to learn how to work with a brief to spark better ideas. And in fact, how to improve a brief as you go as well. Even as a creative, we can actually work at an early stage on enhancing the brief, so we can enhance the results we get to later in the process. You'll also learn why one-size-fits-all solutions really don't work. They may work to an extent, but they're really not cut out for the job of doing really great creative work. So we need to get super specific and superpose spoke when it comes to our creative thinking, you'll also learn why starting with the end goal is actually the key to success and also why funnily enough? Well, lots of people don't do this or they may think they have a clear end goal. The shoe and in the wrong direction will also move on to how to determine your true goal or problem. This is a really key skill, whether you're the one writing the brief or whether you're looking at a brief to be able to do this, to be able to really cut to the truth of what we're trying to achieve will make the whole creative process far more effective in easing. 3. Why Are We Doing This?: So why are we doing this? This is the first question to ask ourselves. It's amazing how many times this question isn't really asked at the start of the creative process why we really, really, really doing this? Because you wouldn't set off on a journey without a clear destination in mind, and neither would you start off with our map. But that's exactly what a lot of people are doing. They don't really have the true goal in mind. Sometimes they don't even have any kind of idea about what the goal is. Never mind the steps to get there. And they may not be the best person to know the steps to get to know the strategy. Because creative thinking, it's not so much an art form. It's more about strategic thinking. In other words, how to get something or someone from point a to point B. So we can't rely on the creative brief to give us the full set of directions. On occasion, they may, it may be a great rock solid, brief. It may have everything you need, but we really need to have the skill of being able to interrogate the brief and find out which way we're playing, if you like. Because if we're not shooting in the right direction, we're going to be score and a lot of angles, so many briefs that we find out what we would call info dumps. It's like somebody picking up a big trashcan or bin full of information and dumping it on your head, expecting you to sift through the wreckage of Eli, peace it altogether out of some kind of miracle and some amazing rock-solid concept. Well, it's unlikely to happen and it's certainly going to be a difficult job for us as creatives. So our first job is to make sure that we have both a destination and a map. We have a clear goal. That's the right goal for what we want to achieve. And also we have a clear way forward, how we're gonna get there, what's the strategy and what's the correct strategy to get the result that the business, once this all starts with the proposition, and the proposition is the number one thing you should be looking for. Me personally. I'm always thinking straight away once somebody starts to talk or they send me over a document to look at, the first thing I'm looking for is that proposition, because I'm now if they haven't got a proposition, then we need to work on that and we need to really ask the right questions to get to one. And if they have got a proposition, but it's not very clear, then again, we know straight away that we need to be asking certain questions to tease that proposition out of our clients. So wishy-washy propositions, you can expect wishy-washy creative work. A rock solid, crystal clear proposition. You can expect a robust piece of creative work that does the job and it's creative in the process. If you don't have a strong proposition, you really need to identify 1 first. So this starts with asking the question, very simple question. What do we want to achieve? Also known as, what's the problem we're trying to solve. We're always trying to solve a problem on behalf of the business we're representing and often on behalf of the audience, we're speaking to. Answering this question is priority number one. Now, a lot of people will skip this stage or they won't really go in depth in really nailing it down because it takes work, it's hard work to think through this, to do the strategic thinking in the early stages. And it's very tempting to just get onto starts it knock out ideas and headlines and do the fun stuff. But if you do the hard yards early on, this puts you would have an immediate advantage because a lot of creatives, we will skip this part of the process and they'll jump ahead job or, you know, you'll overtake them, light around. 4. Get Super Specific: So we really need to get super specific. And there are three big questions we need to ask in order to do this. The first we've already covered, what we want to achieve Now, is it more money, more sales, more revenue, more customers, more awareness. What's the priority here? Because people will often say, okay, well, we just need to do some advertising. But again, there's no destination and therefore we cannot have a clear strategy of how to get there if it's just something that's generic as that. Or people might think, oh, well, we, we did a campaign like this last time and it works. You just do the same again. Well, the problem with that is tried and tested. These good to a certain extent, book tried and tested is soon to be better invested if you like. I mean, you see a lot of companies that keep doing the same thing, assuming it's the same world with the same technology, with the same people. And, you know, they soon run aground. And I'm thinking of a recent example of a package deal operator in the UK. They put package holidays together of hotel and flight and everything else and provide the customer service. They're called Thomas Cook and the BGN, huge here in the UK for years have been dominated in the travel market. But in recent years, or in your own holiday package together has become the norm online. So you know, you've got things like Trivago, like sky scanner, like booking.com. But they haven't adjusted their approach. And unfortunately we've now gone out business. And you can see many other examples of companies like this. Blockbuster for instance. Unfortunately old enough to remember go into a blockbuster and renting out video. But unfortunately, again, there's another business that didn't move with the times that didn't change the overall strategy and they lost out unfortunately. So we need to start with this question, What we want to achieve, and we need to get really specific on why we're coming out with an advertising campaign and what we expect it to achieve. The next question is, how are we actually going to achieve it? Is it by enhancing the brand or service? Is it by developing and launching a new product? Is it attracting new talent to a business? Now, you may get a brief, and I've had this happen many times where we've asked a couple of piercing questions, if you like, what do we want to achieve? How are we going to achieve it? And it's made the client thing can then we're not actually ready to brief this in when I actually ready to do an advertising campaign because we don't have a strategy. We don't know what it is we actually want to do. So he didn't want to talk yourself out of grades, have work if you're a freelancer, but it's better to do that and then delay the work and then do it right further down the line. So we need to ask how we are going to achieve this. So we've got our destination and now we've got our map. But there's another interesting question to ask and it's actually, there might be things along the way that you hadn't anticipated, that might be obstacles on this journey to get where you wanna go. And this question will help you identify any problems and help you adjust the course before you start off. So why haven't we achieved it yet? It might be that the products you, so it's no good doing a campaign to sell a product if no one's aware that your brand exists or your brand image might be a problem. There might be a more successful competitor who can now punchy on the budget side. So you need to bear that in mind if they're going to outspend you, outdo you in that area. How can you get around that? How can you box clever if you like, against your competitor? For instance, I'm remembering the classic example. There was one car rental company in America years ago, and I forget whether it was Hertz or Avis. But they said we're number one, that was their advertising strategy to say what we're number one, car rentals in the USA. So that's a pretty strong campaign message. It's like saying, well number one for a reason, everybody comes towards because we're the best. So the number to the nearest rival, they developed a strategy to get around that. And their strategy was because we're a number two, we try harder. It's obviously using their competitors weight against them. It's almost like Judo. And certainly that catapulted them to number one. Because people were thinking of the service is way better. I'm going to be treated better as a customer. And if you've ever tried to hire a car or rent-a-car, you'll know that's pretty important. Customer service is not always the best. So that was them thinking, what do we want to achieve? Because we want to be number one, we're number two at the moment. How are we going to achieve that? Okay, we're going to achieve it by having a strategic campaign that convinces customers that we provide the best customer service. Why haven't we achieved that yet? Because this brand is out there and they're shouting from the rooftops that an animal one. And that's why people are going with them. So they were able to come up with a strategy around that. 5. Seven Levels of Why: So one, if you haven't got a really good proposition, one of you don't know what you need to say, you've thought about it and you just can't get to the bottom of it as a creative, or if you're a client or working with your client, how can you get to the truth of what the real issues are and what the real goal should be. Well, there's a great system of thinking here called the seven levels of why now it actually comes from a guy called re Dahlia and his book Principles. Now radar, Leo is a billionaire many times over essentially a hedge fund manager is a financial genius, but his genius lies in the ability to look at systems and strategies. Essentially, he gets better results for his clients because he's better strategic thinking. Now he got this from a friend of his in Atlanta in this book Principles. So if you want to check it out, I highly recommend doing so. What we can actually apply it to the Great of advertising process, it's very, very simple. The truth often lies beneath the surface. It's a bit like an iceberg. And ISPOR looks pretty big on the surface anyway, but you can have the equivalent of a mountain underneath the water. Now, in order to get deeper, in order to see what lies beneath the surface, we need to ask ourselves why? And it's thought that seven is actually the maximum number of times. You will need to ask yourself why before you hit the rock solid truth that the ball. Now, I've done this exercise a few times. It is very, very effective. You may need to actually ask yourself a few more times depending on how complex your issue is or whether you're struggling to get an answer. But if you check out the resources as part of this course, you'll find seven levels of why worksheet where you actually, we actually give you more attempts if you like, just to make sure that you've got enough wise to ask yourself to get to your truth and you'll see if you download the worksheet C1 and talking about that. But let's look at the exercise itself, will look at to really super generic examples so that you can see how it works. 6. Seven Levels Examples: We start off by asking ourselves, what do we want to achieve? On the surface, the answer might be a new look and feel for our brand. That might be the brief that you started with as a creative Number one, y well, it needs a refresh. We'll ask why again, number two, so it better represents our offering. Okay, you think, Okay, that makes sense, but it's still generic, isn't it? So we asked why again. Well, we've changed we've streamlined our business to focus on XYZ had whatever that might be. Number four, why it only accounts for 40% of our resources yet it generates 80% of our profits. So why wouldn't we focus on it? Number five, why is what customers want from us? Why again? Well, we have the best technology. Again, we ask why? Number seven, while we lead the market for innovation, there you go. This is our proposition. It's very strong, it's very clear now, if the brief was a new look and feel for our brand, we'd be thinking, well, what should that look? B, what should feel be WhatsApp message, you know, where do we, we could end up with anything. And if it doesn't really represent what we're really trying to achieve and what our audiences think and what they're looking for from us. And it's not gonna be very effective. Now if we stopped, it needs a refresh. Again, we're not gonna get very far. So it better represents our offering and okay, we're getting somewhere, but what's the offering? We streamlined our business to focus on X, Y, and Z at now again, somewhere now we're thinking OK, we know what to focus on. We know why we're doing it as well, because it generates 80% of our profits. It's what our customers want from us. Oh great, okay, so we know they want it. We know that if we market this to our customers is going to land, but we still need some kind of steer when it comes to what's it going to look like? What's the message going to be? Well, we have the best technology, they go right straight away. We know what we're doing now, but we can go one further with this and really hone it. We lead the market for innovation. We have a really clear proposition. It's very strong, we know what to do. So let's look at another example. And let's look rather than focusing on what we want to achieve so much, this one's more focused around kind of solving a problem. The answer again, on the surface is we wanna create a new advertising campaign. Why? Because we need more exposure for our life's problems. Sounds fair. Number two, why it's not selling as we hope to upland. Why again? Well, the last campaign we ran was a flop. The creative didn't work. Well. I wonder why, why it was a flop? Well, very few people responded to the campaign. Number five, why? Well, people can't tell the difference between the new model and the old six. Why people don't realize the new features we've added or they don't realize the value in actually upgrading to the new product y. Well, we didn't focus on the differences between the old model and the new. Here we go again, this is our creative strategy. Essentially. We know now is creatives exactly what we need to do in our campaign ideas. We know we need to focus on the differences between the old model and the new on. We need. We know we need to big this. We really need to highlight why you should be upgrading and educate people on the benefit of doing so. So, as you can see, when we ask why, when we nail down these questions early on, it becomes a whole lock layer. Again, the point of creativity is moving people from point a to point B. And if you think of it like you're standing on one side of a chasm and where you wanna go is on the other side. So we're standing where we are now, where our customers are now, what we're thinking now, and on the other side is what we want them to think. And this is where we wanna go. Well, greater thinking is the bridge over that chasm. In, in order to build that bridge, we actually have to do this work early on to get the strategy in place. 7. Think Like Kubrick: Stanley Kubrick is lauded as one of the greatest directors of all time, having written and directed movies such as 2001, a Space Odyssey, full metal jacket, a Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and a whole list of others. And he's a great example of focused strategic thinking of having a clear vision of the end goal and the end product, if you will, in a creative sense. Because he wasn't always a big name Director. Of course, everyone starts somewhere. And in 1960 already have in a string of really good films behind him. He landed the job of directing in 1960, the classic Hollywood epic Spartacus. And it starred warring heavyweight Thessalonians, Lawrence Olivier, GE, and Charles Lawton, who were engaged in a constant, bitter onset rivalry. And then he also had Kirk Douglas, who was not only a massive star at the time, but he was also the producer of the film. So Kubrick AT a lot on his plate. Yet Kubrick, who was only 30 years of age at the time, he had the ability to stay focused on his own singular creative vision. In spite of everything else going on in his mind, he knew what he ultimately wanted the film to be, even if he didn't have all the details in place, you had a general vision at the end of what he was trying to do. And this was even when he didn't have the final say over the way scenes with scripted film that acted yet, Kubrick vision pulled everything together in the end to make Spartacus a huge commercial and critical success. Was it the movie he would've made a VR, ultimate power no book. You still had enough of revision to pull it all into enough of a line to not only deliver on an artistic freedom, but also on a commercial front as well. Now in our game, the conceptual advertising game, it's not about our own singular vision. It's all about the audiences unique vision of how they want to live in relation to the problem or the solution, the pain or the pleasure, or the nightmare or the dream. Our offer is revolving around when it comes to create even campaigns. We need to be as laser focus to Stanley Kubrick and how we work. Not so inflexible that we can't pivot when the situation demands, because it often does, but with a clear line of sight and essentially a slave like devotion. So what will resonate with our audience? And that was no pun intended there actually there against them. If you've seen the movie Spartacus, this will get you noticed, and it will also get your products noticed. It will also set you apart and it will set your brand apart. The singular vision of what the audience ones, just like it got Kubrick noticed. And just like it's set Kubrick apart as an iconic movie director who fused the artistic side of his craft with big blockbuster results. But we need to stay true to this creative vision. We need to stay true to the audiences vision of what counts for them in their life. Their vision of moving away from a problem or a pain and towards a pleasure or desire. This all starts and it all ends with determining what the creative strategy should be from the outset. 8. Module 1: Class Projects: So now let's look at class projects. Take a brief, you're working on that Eve yet to write all that you've worked on in the past. Alternatively, you may take something in your life that you'd like to solve, make a decision over or plan for. It doesn't matter what it is. These exercises are all about practicing the techniques and the lessons so you can apply them quickly and easily to work in the future or your life if you wish. Now, have a go at both exercises that we're going to go through here. You can use them in combination or separately. Let's look at exercise 13, simple questions. You'll remember this from the videos. Ask yourself these three questions, then write down your answers. You can ask them on behalf of your brand, business or client. We can even ask them of yourself, just substitute the Wii. But I question one. What do we want to achieve? As we covered before? It could be sales, revenue, costumers, brand awareness, or any other specific change in result. Now question two. Now what we're going to achieve it? For instance, again, by enhancing a brand or service, by launching a new product, recruiting new talent, whatever it might be, just be specific, and just answer the best way you know how right now. Then let's look at question three finally, why haven't we achieved it yet? Is it a lack of awareness, lack a brand image or a background image, perhaps a competitor, a change in business circumstances, or maybe even the marketplace. This question will help you identify any potential obstacles in the way. And they actually, it's very good for triggering a creative strategy in the first place or even a campaign idea at this stage as well. Now plan your strategy. Once she know what you want to achieve, how you're going to achieve it, and anything that might stand in the way you're in a great place and develop a simple creative strategy to build on. Try and sum it up in a short sentence for yourself if you can. And for anyone else involved as well, it's going to help them to really get hold of what you're trying to say. For instance, raise brand awareness using Instagram influencers. Crater campaign aimed at poaching the unhappy customers of the more established competitor. Align our product to relieving a key concern in the media. Or maybe we could run a festive campaign that communicates the family values of our brand. It's just shortened as simple as that. It's just about making it really clear what we're trying to achieve. And if you can build in the way you're going to achieve it, and also any obstacles in the way as well into that little short sentence, then even better, for instance, we said, create a campaign aimed at poaching the unhappy customers, have a more established competitor. Well, the thing in the ways, if you've got a more established competitor, the aim is to poach these customers and how we're gonna do it. Well, they're clearly unhappy. Obviously, that kind of hints at how we're gonna do. We're gonna appeal to the sense of unhappiness with competition and then highlight the benefit of our service as a direct opposite to that. So let's say the customer service wasn't very good. And you've got five-star customer service, then that's perfect for those customers. Now finally, let's look at several levels of Y. Just a quick reminder on what to do. Step one, write down what you want to achieve or what's stopping you from achieving it. So for instance, we want to do X, Y, Z, i want to, or this is, this is a problem because now step two, very simply stopped to ask yourself why and ask yourself why until you can't ask why anymore. When there's just nothing left, you've hit your final answer. This final answer will likely be the true goal or problem, or the crux of any strategic decision that you need to make. In other words, what will determine the success or failure of the really important thing that you need to focus on. Every goal a problem is different, so just keep going if you need to. In the worksheet, I've provided you with some extra goes to 14 wise, so you can have a go all the way through and hopefully get your true goal a problem, and build a strategy from there. 9. Module 1: Takeaways: So we can see that you can't expect strong inspiring, creative work from a vague on inspiring, brief, Effective Thinking. Essentially, when it comes to creativity is Bespoke creative thinking. It's not going OK, well, this worked for them and that worked for these. And I've seen this plenty of times where I've seen, for instance, agencies selling things they've done before to clients for a completely different client going. Well, we did this for them, so we'll do it for you. And the client buys it because they think, oh right, great, achieve this, achieve that. So it'd be the same for us well, because it was completely different client, completely different set of circumstances and their challenges and goals, not necessarily the challenges and goals of the other client. It's amazing that this happens, but it happens all the time. So we want to, we're not interested in that. We can raise our game and we can raise the game of our clients by actually applying, bespoke creative thinking and insisting on it as well. Start all your creative projects by determining the goal and anything that stands in the way first, because if you think about it, how many people in life know exactly where they're going and exactly how to get there. How many people sit down and work that out and stick to a plan. Not many people do that in life. Never mind creative advertising, but a few people who do any outstanding results. That's what we want to embrace his greatest. So if you're ever stuck knowing what a problem is or trying to get your client to the point of realization what the problem is, what the destination is, what the strategy should be. All these questions can be asked by using the seven levels of y system. They'll help me get to the truth about what you want to achieve. If you start with a proposition of what you want to achieve, how you're going to achieve it, and anything that might stand in the way and then work backwards from there. This will get you to the right solution for faster and easier. I highly suggest you download the seven levels of why worksheet and use it anytime you're at the starting point of a job or projects. And in fact, you can use this for your life outside of creative advertising as well. It works for absolutely everything. Use it at the start of each creative job. And it will put you right on track from the get-go. 10. MODULE 2: THINK LIKE YOUR AUDIENCE: What we're gonna be covering in this module, we're gonna be looking at the personal filters that hamper our thinking as creatives. We're going to ask how and why reality is not real. And we're going to look at how our perceived pains and pleasures drive behavior. Because this is very important when it comes to consumer behavior and therefore how audiences interact with our advertising and our concepts. Finally, we'll look at why it's so important to stand outside vile biases and how we can actually do that more. How we can do it better and more often. Now, the most important thing about this module, as Mark Twain said, is all about questioning yourself. He said that it ain't what you don't know, that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure. That just ain't. So what does he mean by that? Well, he's basically saying, Don't believe everything that you think, don't believe all your assumptions, they may not actually be true. You can basically get into trouble if you just assume that all your beliefs and all your current knowledge is the way it is. And if you assume that what you think and how you see the world is how your audience are going to view the world and respond, then you can go into a little bit of trouble in terms of your results. Now, this is a really important part of advertising. It is optional in the process that we work too. But I'd highly recommend working on this part of yourself as a creative. Because our brains taken 11 million bits of information per second. I mean, that's a mind-blowing them out. But actually we only process around 40 bits per second because with so much sensory input coming in all the time, we just won't be able to handle it. We'd just heads would explode or would just turn to Jelly. Just to be able to function as a human being in this world, especially nowadays, so much stimuli around essentially our brains need to be like nightclub bouncers. They need to decide what gets in. So this means we only tend to see a version of events. And that version is our version because we actually don't see with our eyes. We actually see with our brains are, when you think of the eyes, they're actually like kind of windows. Not only Windows receiving information through them, but actually they're a bit like screens as well, like our brains are like projectors. They'll actually project a made-up version of reality are into the world. This means to inspire, convinced, and compel anyone to do anything. We have to see past version of the world is where you see it. We have to first know how our audience sees the world. We have our own personal biases, whether we like or not. Simply because our brains have to construct a model of the world. They have to construct something that they think, well this is true. This is what we know. In order to just go about our daily lives, we have to categorize things. We have to use past experiences to try and predict the future. But if we can get past these blink, because if we can actually see beyond ourselves, it puts us at an immediate advantage because first of all, everybody will be doing this. And second of all, it will allow us to see solutions that just weren't there before. So really this is relevant towards, in terms of our audience. We want to be able to put ourselves in the audience's shoes. And not just from a rational perspective, but from an emotional perspective to empathize and sympathize with their point of view and any challenges they're facing and any dreams they may have. We want to be able to see what they see and think what they think and feel what they feel. And ultimately know what's important to them. Because we can pretty much forget the rest. We can pretty much forget what we think they should think or feel what a client would like them to think or feel. That's basically irrelevant. People don't care what you have to sell. They only care how you can help them. So when we understand their emotional view of the world, their dreams, their desires, the doubts, the fears. We can then position our offer in a way that helps them meet the current emotional need. Essentially, we're tapping into pain and pleasure points in people's lives. How does this work? Well, every action we take in life is one of two things. It's either one, move away from pain, whether it's real or perceived, or to a move towards pleasure, real or perceived. We may just imagine the pain or pleasure a lot for the time and it's not the actual reality. It may also be an attempt to do both at once. In fact, it often is a move away from pain and towards pleasure. If you think about e-mail, you look in the mirror and think a bit of a belly on and I'm gonna eat correctly and everything else. So first of all, you will recognize in a point of perceived pain is undesirable in your eyes. But also you're imagining at the same time, the pleasure you are thinking of, the confidence you'll have, your thinking of getting back into those genes you use to get into five years ago. It's often a combination of both. It's the push and pull of the two. Often are the most powerful and get you really moving in life towards certain goals, whatever they are and certain behavior changes. Now, advertising is not far from a matter of life and death, but when it comes to the decisions of our audience, when it comes to compelling them to act, them to invest time and money and energy. What we want them to do, it is actually a matter of life and death. Let me explain. The brain cell task is actually to keep us alive, safe and well, it's to keep the body alive long enough to procreate and raise children and everything else. In essence, it's very much a primitive brain. And this is not the part of the brain that's concerned with politics or art house movies or anything like that. There are no shades of gray to this brain, quite simply paying equals death and pleasure equals life. So obviously, it's going to try and steer you away from pain and towards pleasure at every point in time. Now, depending on what you link pain and pleasure to, it's not always the best way of working, but it's the way we work. For instance, if you've ever procrastinated, if you've ever thought, I know I need to go to the gym. I know I should eat healthier, unknown should tidy or whatever it is. If you know, you should do it and you want to do it, well, why don't you is because you associate more pain with the task, then you do pleasure with the results. And it can work the other way round as well. You can have something that in theory is pleasurable, but you secretly attach pain to it. This explains why people self-sabotage. They think consciously, okay, I want this in my life. Let's say they want a relationship, but subconsciously, they associate pain with being in a relationship. Therefore, the subconscious mind will do everything it can through the brain in order to sabotage the results. So we need to understand what role our author is playing in this life and death equation because it's usually powerful. We need to know, will it help our audience move away from pain, also known as death? Or will it help them move towards pleasure? The brain, this is life, this is expansion in evolution, or will it help them to do both? In most cases, it probably will away from pain and towards pleasure. But what role does R offer fulfill in this life and death matrix? In order to understand this, we need to stand outside of our own pain pleasure equation. We all have our own equation that we take his reality, we take us true, but other people see things differently. We need to know how they think and feel in order to understand what's going to motivate them away from pain and towards pleasure, and how our offer can help them do that. This will tell us the message we need to convey and how to bring it to life through words and images in our concepts. So this really is usually powerful and very, very important. 11. Remove Your Blinkers: Okay, Well, if you want evidence of this, of how we see with our minds and our brains are not RIs. You only need to take a look at these two images we're gonna show you here. Look at this first image and ask yourself, what do you see? Do you see a skull like most people initially do? Or do you see a young woman looking in a mirror? Like traditional dress? The both there. But one is maybe a little bit trickier to see then another, depending how you look at things is as simple as that. I myself see your score when I first looked at it and I have to adjust in order to see the woman in the mirror. I have to pay more conscious attention and consciously look for that woman. And if I didn't know she was there consciously, I might not see her at all. Fact, I probably wouldn't. So I'm almost seeing with my mind through the kind of machine that is the brain, if you will. Now take a look at this next one. What do you see this time? Because there are actually two images here. Depending on how your mind works. You may see a young woman with a feather hat, or you may see an old woman with a shore over a head. In fact, the artist who created this, it was all about he wanted to show his, I think it was his wife and his mother-in-law in the same image. Depending on how you look at things or rather than how your mind works at the world, you will see something different. Then it will again, if you pay conscious attention, you can then hopefully see the other side of the image that you didn't see before. Even though the both they're in the same image, our brains must categorize as one thing or another. And they do that in order to assess what the image means. Essentially, because we must make immediate sense out of the world in order for us to navigate and survive it. So the brain will do this by looking to what's in our mind. It will look to our self-image and the world around us is then seen in relation to our identity and what's important to us. Because that's ultimately at the brain, needs to know what's important. So it can keep us alive and help us thrive. And essentially, all the beliefs and viewpoints the subconscious mind is programmed with will determine how the brain is wired and therefore, what information it lets in through the door because it's deeming the information, is it necessary or is it unnecessary? Is it important or is it not? Is it part of who we are and our life as we see all these kind of things, running all these calculations all the time. And it's emitting most things because it's simply needs to, in pretty much every case it's deciding what things mean. So you may recall the relatively recent phenomenon of the blue and black dress. It went viral all over the world on social media and it was hotly debated by everyone from Taylor Swift to Kanye West to Justin Bieber. The reason was that the dress featured the horizontal striped pattern that people either said was white and gold or blue and black, dependent on who you spoke to. Remember at the time, we were all looking at the same image, yet we're all seeing something different. I think I was freelancing in an agency at the time and an account executive swatter me that the dress was blue and black while I swore that it was white and gold. Now, obviously it was a copywriter and I had a basic understanding of the nature of how we view the world. So I suggested it was different. I suggested that it was our brains interpreting it differently. And at the time she swore I was making it up. She thought was invented in ROS theory, but it is true. The reason Taylor Swift's or blue and black and Canada, US are white and gold is that we don't see with our eyes. We see wherever we're primed to see, depending on how our brains are wired. Now, don't worry, we're not going to go any deeper into the complexities are mysteries of human psychology. Only to realize that example, just like the woman in the skull, shows us that our brains will see things subjectively and that's the important part. This means that we can never fully trust our view of the world. We may think we're objective because after all, we, we think we analyze, we rationalize, we consider the facts. And the facts are there in front of those in blue and black or white and gold? Versus when we the audience and working with a consumer, that's okay, we get to see things however we want. That's fine. We can choose blue or black and white or gold. But as creators, we have to take conscious control over our own minds and we have to use our imaginations to price ourselves out of our own molds and into the mantle maps of our audience. How they see things. That's all that matters. Because who they are as people are audience that will tell us what they see and therefore what it takes for them to engage with, invest in and take action on our advert or offer. And that's what's important to us. 12. Think Backwards: One way to look at all this is in terms of, I'm sure you've heard the analogy of good cop, bad cop. Just as consumers are loyal to certain brands, those of us working behind the scenes to promote them. We can be loyal to that. We can develop these loyalties and there's nothing wrong with that, especially if it's your brand, if it's your business, for instance, or you work for the company that owns it. And of course, if you know the client and the business well, as a creative, of course, you're going to be more loyal to their clients, especially love their brands. And of course, stands to reason, they'll think the best of them is the brand is our baby. Of course, we're gonna think favorably of it even passionately so. But even if a brand product or service or an offer has its admires, it doesn't mean all members of our audience think like that much less care. Like some people will be super fans of say, Apple. But other people may not care. They need some convinced him to be an effective creative. You always want to be pitching your offer or idea review will the most cynical person on the planet or in the room, Let's say if you're in a pitch situation and your potential customers sitting right there in front of you, you want to look for the most cynical person in that room. That's certainly what I used to do. I didn't just use to look for the person nodding along, kind of go on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Used to look for the person who has given me it was one of my old CD said the shark eyes. Somebody who wasn't convinced and I'll be thinking, okay, this is going to work if they're convinced. A lot of the times it pays to be a bit cynical yourself. Even though you're the one singing a brand's praises for a living through the campaign ideas that you come up with. Essentially what we're saying is to assume this role of good cop, bad cop with the self, and also with your work with the brand and if necessary with a boss, client, or colleague, you need to play this role. Sometimes it's kind of a really interesting dichotomy actually because on the one hand, you have to be the most passionate exponent of the brand in order to tell that story in his most effective way. And tell of all the ways it will improve the audience's life. Yet on the other hand, you need to retain as like their steely detachment from the hype and you need to be the coldest thinker in the room. 1.5, good cop will actually give you the passion to create new ideas with the gusto in the first place. But also being 1.5 backup will ground you in the reality, ensuring you stay as objective as possible. So you're actually looking at the way things are rather than the ideal brand perspective, if you will. This is where thinking almost exclusively from the audience's point of view really comes into play. Because instead of care and passionately about the successes of the product or service, you are now carrying passionately about the audiences own predicament. As much as if it were their own, is if you were the audience and it was your life, and it was your money and your time and your energy, stake, your results at stake. One of the best examples of this kind of thinking is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. He's known for saying these words, start with the customer and work backwards. But actually Steve Jobs said it before that. Jobs was asked by an audience member many years ago why their competitors software had more features than theirs. And to give you an idea of how long ago it was, he had a full head of long hair. The audience member was having a bit of digger, him getting some moves and ours from the audience. He asked him what he'd personally been up to for the last seven years. Now, Steve Jobs sits down on stool and thinks about it for a while. He's there and his jeans and his iconic jumper. And he thinks about it for awhile and he says, well, you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with a technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I've got the scar tissue approve it. And I know that it's the case. As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple. It started with, what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not, not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that? That's essentially what he did. He just spent all this time looking at that, looking at the costumer. And how can we work backwards from that, and how can I lead this? And that's why Apple or where they are today. Jeff Bezos, he repeats the same mantra and he built Amazon on the back of it. Besides the Amazon, everything that Amazon starts with the customer and then they worked backwards from there. They're prepared to take five to seven years developing a new service. The competition's two or three. Basically it's not in the process or the method. It's just in the end result for the customer. The working backwards process, optional. It sounds great, but it seems like a lot of work. Oh boy. How do we begin? Well, the working backwards process should not be optional unless you know a better way. You shouldn't know a better way until you've tried to working backwards process several times. The working backwards process really does work. And this particular thing here, it sounds great, but it seems like a lot of work done correctly. The working backwards process is a huge amount of work, but it saves you even more work later. The working backwards process is not designed to be easy. It's designed to save huge amounts of work on the backend and to make sure that we're actually building the right thing. But so many companies do is they build them. They build the right to software. That's a lot of work. They get it all working. And then they throw it over the wall to the marketing department and say, Okay, here's what we built, right? Depressor leaves for it. That process is the one that's actually backwards. Just as jobs and Bezos embody this principle of starting with the customer and working backwards. Once we've identified our goal, we should really start the conceptual process, meeting that goal through our creative ideas with the specific desires of the audience, and then work backwards from there, London goes at the feet of the ideal spoke creative solution. Now, assuming we've already done the work of developing the end goal for ourselves. As in what do we want to achieve for our brand or business? We then have to put that to one side. And then we have to say right, okay, if we're gonna develop a solution that delivers this goal or gets over this challenge, we need to work backwards from what the customer wants and what's important to them. But really we should be talking about audience rather than customer because there's creative thinkers, we might not always be talking to customers. We could be talking to voters, donors, students and employees, the public in general, all kinds of people. And in fact, potential customers aren't customers until they buy, let's face, it may be okay. The advert may have a link and you may click on M by. But a lot of the time we're kind of planting a seed so that when they hit the store, awesome, whatever it is, data and see the products and decided to buy it. But let's repeat the philosophy as a phrase to remember for ourselves. So we'll replace costumer audience, and this will be our philosophy as advertising creative. Start with the audience and work it backwards. If you make this your mantra, you will probably come into contact with others who don't think or work this way. They're actually trying to do the opposite probably even without realizing. In some cases, you may have to be diplomatic until the line. If someone else's running the creative show book, you can at least apply this to your work initially and stick to this mantra whenever you can because it will guarantee better concepts, certainly more effective concepts. And actually, I think Chris is of the same mind that you'll have an easier time coming up with them in the first place. I mean, me and Chris have walked away from a number of clients and well-paying jobs as well and opportunities because we felt like we couldn't really help them because they were thinking the opposite way round or our process just didn't fit with theirs for that reason. Now, we'd attracted more than enough clients already, precisely because we just stuck to our guns and thought in this audience backwards order. I mean, Chris has his own examples as well, but I'll give you a personal incidence of how this sometimes can play out. I was hired by an agency that specialized in pharmaceutical advertising to help them with their products. On one occasion, they had the whole creative department plus me as a freelancer working on a campaign for a new drug that dramatically reduce the symptoms of psoriasis, of which stiff hands and joints are one of the symptoms. But anyway, a young creative, literally a first ever job. Pretty much. She shyly presented their concepts, talking it down as she did so in front of the group. I thought it was great. So did everyone else and we all said that including their in-house copywriter, he had psoriasis. We found out in that meeting he had psoriasis and he was the target market. Yet in spite of in saying that the concept would get his attention and would move him to action, the creative director through the concept out on the grounds that she'd know the answer when she saw and this wasn't it. Apart from the fact that we should've been sitting down with the copyright or our target audience and working out the creative strategy from his perspective, what have you never see the answer, whatever you have the mind of, I'll know when I see it in, blah, blah, blah. Well, you only have so long to come up with a creative solution in this game. And it's not very long. A lot of the time in this particular job, I decided I couldn't work the agency again because for me waiting for lightning to strike it is not a strategy. Starting with the audience and working backwards. Most definitely is. And no one's come up with a better one. So far as we know. Just to wrap this up, think of it like this. As creatives, we want to shift our thinking. We want to shift it away from I know what I like and I like what I know. And we want to shift it to we know what they like and we liked what they know. In other words, we know what the audience like. We like whatever they know. Because at the end of the day, what they know and what they like is the key towards engaging with them and therefore moving them to the result we want them to have. And obviously that's going to pay off for the brand, for the business, for us as creative thinkers. Because there's a big, big difference between what it does and what it does for me. In other words, here's a product, this is what it does. And here's product and here's what it does for you. Just going back to the Steve Jobs example, he and his team, apple didn't just create products that did something. And then say here is something that does something they focused on, what does it do for the customer, and then they presented it in that way as well. Now if we stay on the side of what it does for me and what they like and what they know. That side of the equation. And we make it a habit, will be out in front of us creatives. Creative advertisers will also be on track to deliver effective creative ideas. 13. Get Out of Your Head: It's all about getting out of our own heads at the end of the day. In order to Sao Paulo do this, we have two very, very simple exercises. Now, many times we may get a brief word. Detailed research has not been done. We need to do the best we can in order to pass cells in the minds of the audience and get ourselves out of our own version of life. For instance, let's say you're selling super hyperosmotic mega broadband, whatever it is nowadays, you're marketing to families. Now your, the way you consume the entire may be totally different to the way a teenager consumes the Internet. How a mother or a father dose or a grandparent, or we may need to know each and every take on that. So that weak position our product in a way that meets all of their needs. So we have two simple exercises here. The first one is called Gandy technique, and it's named after Mahatma Gandhi, who was an expert negotiator because he was able to see other points of view. It's very simple. There's only a few steps to this. The first step is on one sheet of paper to write down your business or brands goal or a problem. That's the first thing. Now, before I talk through the other points, the way this technique works is it's actually mimicking the way Gandhi used to think. As you probably know, he successfully and peacefully negotiated India's independence from the British Empire. Now, he had the ability to stand outside of himself. What he would do is he would first of all think about what he wanted, what his people wanted, what is country wanted, then he would reverse his point of view. He would look at things from the opposition's point of view. So I've been in the British Empire and he say, well what do they want? Then finally, he would stand outside both points of view. Imagine he was a neutral observer. He just walked into the room, no bias. And then he would look and say, Well, how can these two opposing views and opposing desires be Matt somewhere in the middle to come to a satisfying conclusion. So we're just going to mirror this in order to be able to look at, rather than just look at what you want as a business or what the client may want or whoever we're marketing and creating concepts on behalf of even whether it's ourselves. We need to be able to look at both what we want, of course, because we're doing this for commercial reasons we wanted to result. But also from the audience's point of view because we're here to essentially improve their lives in some way and help them navigate these pain and pleasure equations as we've been talking about, we need to be able to strike a balance between the two. So on one sheet of paper we've written down our business or brand scholar problem. Step two is to take a second sheet of paper and write down the audiences, situation or problem, What's happening then their world right now. And more to the point, What's happening that's of relevance to what we're proposing. Then number three, from the neutral observers Pi view, right down your take on the situation. Assume you weren't, you didn't have a concept to come up with a shoe. Meade didn't have anything to sell. What does the audience want? Not from? What all do we like them to want? What do we hope that they want? What do they genuinely want? Then? How can the brand, the business, the product, or the service, help meet that need and desire. And this will provide you with a bit of leverage on yourself really, it will just make sure that you come in at the problem from a more objective point of view. It's not saying we really want this to be the case because it means that we can sell them this product. It means we're actually thinking about what they think and feel right now. Whether it's about us and our product, whether it's just about their lives. But it's a more objective opinion because sometimes there's a temptation to insist on that the audience will love this product and love this and love that. And this is what they want because they need to want this for us to sell it. We don't really want to get into all that. We want to keep ourselves almost as neutral observers so that we can better understand our audience. Moving on, once we've, is still this neutral view down to a sentence or paragraph, we can then position the offer. We can then say, Okay, what is the best way we can present our offer so that it helps them meet their needs as we've already covered. Now, the full-size technique is a really simple technique and it can be a lot of fun actually, but basically involves taking four blank sheets of paper. Now you want to position one on each side or end of a table. Then step to take another blank sheets of paper, write down the problem, the goal on the sheet, and then place it in the middle of the table. What's the thing you're trying to sell? What's the goal? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Once you've done that, It's all about choosing for people other than yourself, whose perspective you're going to adopt. Now, they could be anyone, they could be the audience. As we mentioned before, when that internet example, let's say you're selling broadband and you have four different people. You have Mommy, I have Dad, you have son and daughter. They all have different needs. For instance, dad wants to stream live sport of the Internet. Mom wants to do her unique course. The young boy wants to do gaming. That's what he's bothered about. Then for the daughter, she wants to chat with their friends on video chat. You just start to look from their perspective. Then you can write down everything that's important to them, which allows you to then start to think, how can we express what's important to them through our products or services? But you don't have to limit this to audiences. You can extend it to anybody. You can write down a colleague, friend, or family member of famous person that can be living, they can be dad to other. Because what you'll do is you'll get a different perspective other than your own. And it will help you to get out of your own head. So even if you're not doing this on a live job, you can actually just try it as an exercise in flexing your thinking a little bit more. Now, it's very simple. You just write down whatever comes to your mind. Then you do it for each person. And as you do it for each person, you move around the table and physical space, which helps you even more to get out of your own mind. Then you look through your answers and you pick out anything useful or new hadn't considered before. But this is just a good exercise to get you thinking in a different way. Essentially, I've used this a number of times and I actually did it with Steven Spielberg and Walt Disney and people like that. And it's amazing what comes out. You come out with things that you would just never in a million years think of or say yourself. And you also find that you come up with all kinds of new ideas as well and new ways of thinking. And it's really fascinating how the mind works for them, but definitely give it a go and see how it works for you. In module takeaways, What did we learn here? We learned that we all have filters to obstruct new ideas, whether we like it or we don't. Our audience may see the world very differently towards they think they feel and they act depending on what are they feeling, pain and pleasure to not what we do. We have to understand that. In fact, to think clearly and effectively, we need to adopt our audience's point of view. Not just sometimes, but at all times. We need to be thinking from their perspective, right the way through the creative process. And if we're working with anybody or for anybody who's not doing this, we need to either buy that in mind. All we need to be able to try and tell them, Look, it's not about what we want to believe, what we want to happen. It's about what the audience cares about and how they act. Next, we're going to build on this. We're gonna take what we've learned so far in terms of identifying our goal, in terms of seeing beyond our own biases. And we're going to actually move this into benefits now. So in the next module, we're gonna be using our fresh perspective, our audience's perspective, to position the benefits of our offer. 14. MODULE 3: MAGNIFY THE BENEFITS: What you're going to learn in this module. Well, first of all, we're going to talk about the difference between benefits and features and how important it is, and how they often get confused in the advertising process. We're also going to cover as part of this why we actually need to communicate differently with different parts of the mind. And essentially why emotion is king when it comes to advertising, certainly in creative advertising. Finally, we'll look at the importance of a USP. But what to do if you haven't go on? All human decision-making is emotional before it's rational. You probably know this, but if you didn't, and it's news to you, It's news to a lot of people. Most people don't realize was such emotional creatures. They think that all of their thoughts are purely rational and that there are originated in the conscious mind. Well, unfortunately, this isn't true. In fact, we're most often on the tail end of pretty much every decision we ever make. So if that's the case, why would anyone to persuade anyone else with rational arguments? Most of the time when people are focused on the rational side of things, it's really because they're confusing benefits with features and it's actually quite easy to do. It's not that they are intelligent, is not that they don't know what the doing necessarily. It's just the benefits and features. It's not obvious what to do and if nobody teaches you, you're not going to know. So how do we tell features from benefits and how do we do so easily at a glance? Well, there's one important difference between the two. Benefits are emotional, they're essentially experiential as well. The feeling the audience gets when they interact with whatever it is you're promoting. Meanwhile, features are rational. They really mechanical in nature. They're essentially the component parts that allow the audience to have that experience with the brand, with the product or with the service. For instance, what separates a Rolls Royce from an average family car is essentially superior components put together in a better way. Yet, no one ever looks at a Rolls Royce and things. I'd love to be able to drive that collection of superior component parts. They think. I'd love to be able to know what it feels like to sit behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce until ONE, a Rolls-Royce, to have people see me in a Rolls-Royce. The desire comes from the experience rather than the actual thing that leads to that experience. So that end whenever we're actually selling features, role only ever selling benefits. While features are important as we'll find out later, really benefits should take up the majority of our focus. Basically, benefits always come before features. That's one way to think of it. Benefits come first, features come second. Why is this? Well, because there are two minds in need of convincing and as we'll find out, one mind in particular is actually more important. First of all, we have the subconscious mind, and then secondly, we have the conscious mind. Now, the conscious mind as we touched on earlier, is the mind that we think we are thinking with. It's the voice in our heads, if you like. But a lot of, in fact, most of the action is going on under the surface, unbeknownst to us. And this goes on into the subconscious mind. This essentially is where all motivation and action begins. It's 100% emotional. 100% of the time. It's not a rational being. And because of diet can actually tell the difference between fantasy and reality. For instance, if you've ever watched a scary movie that's made the jump and that's made you want to hide behind the sofa. Or if you've ever been watching a thriller, someone's hanging onto the rooftop while the bad guy tries to stomp on the fingers than the person could fall to the doom. Well, you feel like you're in that situation, even though you're just watching it on screen, sat in a nice comfortable chair. You feel like you're there and there's a reason for that. And that's because the subconscious mind can't tell the difference. Whatever you tell it. It assumes that it's true that externally can't tell the truth from Ally. And in fact, it doesn't care about logic. It only cares about how something will make it feel. It will just think, Is this gonna be painful? Is it gonna be pleasurable? And to what extent and how all these feelings and all these emotions and all these pains and pleasures, they all fit into a larger sense of identity that's made up of dreams, of desires, that beliefs, and self-image. This is what the subconscious mind is concerned about. How does this support my identity? How is this consistent with my identity? And how does it all fit together? And how does all this get me what I want to get and how does it get me away from what I want to get away from? The conscious mind is completely different. It's actually nowhere near as powerful as the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is so much faster and so much more powerful. That's why a dominates because it can do so much more than we can just through conscious effort alone. So desire is essentially ignited the subconscious mind. If you think about it like a child, the subconscious mind is essentially like a child. And it's very, very, very good at convincing the conscious mind and very, very persistent when it decides at once something. So where the child is trying to convince the parent of something you didn't know, it will go to every extent possible to get what it wants. It will moan and whine and complain and scream, and argue and debate all day long until it gets what it wants and it will use all kind of emotional blackmail together thing it wants because the thing it wants might be really trivial and small towards the consciously minded. But to the subconscious mind, it's huge, it's everything. Once desire is ignited, it's passed up the chain of command, UV light to the conscious mind for approval. And the conscious mind is essentially like the parents in this context. It doesn't govern the instincts, the reactions, the emotional desires. That's all down to the subconscious mind. But it does have final say over decisions. So even though it's not as quick or as powerful or as persuasive as the subconscious mind. It does have the seat of power is essentially like the CEO. Now, if you look at a big company, everything that gets done is essentially with the workers or the employees and the stuff. That's where the power of a company lies. The CEO themselves don't have the power to make anything happen. But they get to decide what happens and they get to give the final instruction to all the employees on what to do. That's like the conscious mind. It deals and fax, it deals with figures, and it deals in cold hard logic. This means that it requires sound logical argument before it's gonna sign off any new action. When we talk into the conscious mind, we're not talking in terms of emotions or feelings, were actually talking in terms of, you might call them final convinces. If 90% of our work is creative, advertisers is going to be aimed at the subconscious mind. It wouldn't go and get people 19% of the way through appealing to their emotions. But the last five to 10% is gonna be getting them over the line if you want with final convinces, with rational arguments to persuade the parent or the CEO that this is the right action to take so that it gets signed off. Now, both parts of the mind require motivating. Yeah, as we've just touched on, they both require motivating an entirely different ways. Benefits are emotional payoffs that spark desire in the subconscious mind. Triggering the motivation and action. Benefits needs to be emotional, completely emotional. And that's why they need to come first. Because we need to spark that desire in the first place to get the conscious mind to them pay attention. And it pays attention when it gets a certain feeling. Features meanwhile, are the rational arguments that convinced the conscious mind. The plan is sound so that it will give It's consent to the action. This means because emotional desire is the driving force. Benefits are king. They are absolutely king. And while we shouldn't be ignoring the importance of focusing on the features as well. The majority of our focus should be on benefits and benefits first, benefits versus features. I want you to try this quick exercise. This is going to help you tell them apart really quickly. And also when we know how to separate benefits and features, it's much easier to be able to put them in the right place if you like, as we'll get to in a moment. First of all, grab a piece of paper, then list out numbers one to five. Then I want you to separate the following fictional list into features and benefits. And I'm gonna show you that in a moment. Pause this video if you need to and grab a piece of paper and make the list. Assuming you've got your piece of paper on your list. I want you to write B for benefit or F, the feature next to the relevant number. So let's say we have number one will either write B or we'll write f. And then we'll continue that through one-to-five. For this exercise, we will use a hypothetical phone plant now, we'd call them mobiles in the UK, you call them cell phones. If you're in the US, we're gonna call it a coal plant here. It's actually nowadays it's broadband data. This, that and the other is separate thing, but we'll stick to your plan which is going to carbon date me, I'm sure in the terminology, but let's say, okay, we've got core planets. Number one, no loss of signal regardless of location. Write down B for benefit, or F for feature alongside number one, which do you think it is? Number two, faster browsing speeds and no cap on data usage means you're gonna be able to browse the Internet faster as much as you want. You're not going to cut you off and say, Okay, you've spent all your data, write down B or F for that be for benefit or after feature. Number three on limited texts, minutes that speaks for itself. Right down B or F. Number for the commitment free contract. You don't have to sign up for 12 months or 18 months or whenever you sign a contract, but if you want to cancel it, it's fine. You're not going to get charged that a benefit or is that feature be right at. Finally, number five, choose from a wide range of handsets. Is that a benefit or is it a feature? You write down B or write down F and pause this video now if you need a little bit more time, otherwise, let's look at the answers. Which of these features on which of these will benefits could you actually tell the difference filled you? They're all features. Sorry, I'm gonna just made you do something which was a bit of a complete waste of time in one way. But actually, it was intended to show you how it's not necessarily easy to tell at a glance. Because the truth is, any product, service or offering is made up of 100% features. It's up towards his creative thinkers to turn those features into benefits. No benefit is born as a benefit essentially is born as a feature. And then it's our job to nurture it into a benefit. 15. Turn Features Into Benefits: It, Let's look at an example of this. How does this work? How do we do this? Let's say a man approaches a woman in a bar. This features as she sees them. Oh, he's handsome. He seems laid back, is pretty funny and easily over six foot. But these are all kind of logical things. They're all quite statistical in a way, if you like. His answer was laid back is funny, is six-foot. But so far there are features of who he is as benefits, they convert into emotions really, this is what we want to do. We want to turn these into emotional payoffs, as we mentioned earlier. The benefits are she feels relaxed in his presence. He makes a laugh until a ribs hurt, and she can wear heels without being taller than him. So let's review those. I mean, left-hand sum off here because it speaks for itself. Obviously, that doesn't need to be emotionally, if you like. But he's laid back so she feels relaxed in his presence, instant benefit. He's funny. He makes a laugh until the ribs are again, focusing on the emotion behind that feature. Because he's six foot plus she can wear heels without being taller than him. And emotional payoff. Now actually, the man approach in the woman and a bar is a good analogy for this. As you are picking up a stranger in a bar, You never start out by saying, Well, first of all, allow me to introduce myself and my various qualities. No. You'd open with a funny joke and astute observation or align that shocks them a little. Even a smile and eye contact as you say hello. Anything that moves the emotional needle, because it is only when the needle jumps in the subconscious mind and as a result of body that people get interested in things and start to want things. Even if the stranger got slightly annoyed with you, said something mildly offensive, it will be better than making a sound and logical argument is still going to get you further because you're dealing with the subconscious mind first and foremost, and the subconscious mind doesn't speak. Rational 0s, the only thing that understands this feeling, because friction is feeling. It often comes with a spark. That's why you'll never logically argue someone into giving you their phone number unless you want the number for a local taxi for them. The only time you get into the realms of reliability and punctuality will be later in the conversation. Or maybe the second or third date perhaps. But first, if you want to actually ignite the desire, you have to get that needle jumping. We have to spark some sort of desire within their subconscious mind, after which they'll start to convince themselves on our behalf and fan that initial flame. Let's take one of the features from the previous list so we can show it in action if you like, actually in an advertising situation, and we'll use the first feature off that list. The feature was a normal interrupted signal regardless of location. What does that mean in terms of the benefit? Well, it means you can actually stay connected to the people and the things that matter to you, no matter what. Connection is a powerful thing. Disconnection to the primitive brain means death because way back when, when everybody lived in tribes. If you were disconnected from the tribe, you'd probably get eaten by something. They are strengthened numbers, but you're not going to survive very long on your own. Basically, connection then becomes a powerful emotional self. And see how we just took something that's fairly bland, really is an uninterrupted signal. Wow, how exciting we can turn it into a really powerful cell, either as a pain or as pleasure or a combination, both just by focusing on the benefit of that feature. Because benefits create desire. This means we can turn any feature into a compelling and urgent call to the emotional mind if we know how to do it, if we understand the theory behind all this and this is what a lot of these lessons in this course are all about. Understanding the fundamentals of why we're doing what we're doing rather than a technique. Because then we can apply it to anything. And we know what we're doing is right now sometimes a product or person hazards. Hello. If you've ever watched Jerry Maguire, I think from that movie, for instance, a Ferrari that has, as, you know, it doesn't really need to sell itself when a gleaming rub Ferrari rolls down the street. But sometimes the audience will also have an urgent problem in their lives or offer. Canon we'll fix. Now that's kind of a no-brainer. Really just lie that Ferrari, if you have a problem and you want it fixed urgently, and this products or services for the best one to do it, we still need to sell that product and set it apart from the competition. But a lot of our job is done in terms of creating the benefit. But many times we may actually need to manufacture the urgent need or desire so that we can position our product as the only way to urgently address it. Let's turn all those coal plant next features into benefits. Let's do this. Let's create this desire because it's not a Ferrari and it's not an obvious solve this now, solve this back pain. Now with this feature, one was no loss of signal. Regardless of location. Benefit one, stay connected to friends, family, and the things you love. No matter what happens, we just refine the line a little bit. You can do that with benefits. You can continue to refine them and improve them the more you work on it. Feature two is faster Internet speeds and no limits on data usage already pretty good cell, but how can we make it more emotional and more powerful? Well, how about bingeing on all your favorite shows, songs, videos, movies with buffer free browsing and unlimited streaming. You no longer put in cross a factual statement. You're actually conjuring images and sounds and feelings in people's minds. Now, they can imagine themselves being bingeing on all the favorite shows, listening to the favorite songs. And also they can imagine the feeling they get when they don't have this buffering can drive you insane, whether you're at home or on the move. Feature three, Unlimited Tax and minutes. But it's pretty bland, put that way. There's a benefit though, never run out of credit again with limitless calls and texting. Again, this goes back to avoiding a pain point and then as a result becomes a pleasure. Feature for commitment free contract, enjoy ultimate freedom with are no strings monthly contracts. Again, so you're talking about using words like freedom, no strings, people can feel it a little bit more. Feature five, choose from a wide range of latest model handsets. Be the envy of your friends with our next-gen smart phones, again, we're introducing the emotion. They can imagine themselves, the friends gathering around. There's a little bit more warmth to it if you like, we can use words like NVivo, far more powerful and resonant with people. Features 65 G WiFi Internet, bit of a snore fast. When you put it like that. Turn your hands into a Wi-Fi hotspot and connect all your devices. So even this one, which is fairly, it's not the most evocative benefit, but you can still picture the scene in your mind of connecting all your devices to it. And it just becomes a little bit more visceral team. We've covered how to turn features and benefits. What about the unique selling point? Because this is really important. This is what all businesses are essentially looking for and this is why they spend millions developing products that offer one. It's also known as the USP. Now, a powerful USP. The reason they're spending all this money and all his time searching for the unique selling point is because it's the difference between a must-have products, cut half product. And it makes the world of difference when it comes to the amount of products or services you can sell, the amount of value you can attach to your brand and therefore the value of your company. In fact, a lot of companies, the brand is worth more than the actual business. And also the unique selling point, the must, must have a severe like the product or service finds its way into the price tag and create desire just based on it being, people want the must-have things. So if you think of Apple, iPhones, iPads, the Range Rover, the dice, and you could go on forever thinking about these must have products and they don't have to be a Ferrari. They can just be the best in class because they have unique selling points to the others. Can't copy. 16. No USP, No Problem: If we don't have a must-have product already, or maybe if we don't have an obvious unique selling point already established, then we've got a couple of options. We can either tease a USP out of the brief and make something must have by identifying the USP that's already there and that's either not being recognized or not being exploited. Because not all businesses or clients may understand the USP and they may not realize they've got one. Well, they may not be putting the focus on it as they should. And you might as a creative thinker ago, That's a USP, that's a unique selling point. This is a must-have thing and we're not selling it as that. Alternatively, in position a cutoff product or service in a much more compelling way than the competition that gets around the fact that you haven't got a unique selling point already established. Maybe you haven't go on at all, but you can compensate for that. But what it does is no selling points at all. You're looking at a brief or you're looking at your business and thinking, why would people buy this? Why people invest in this? I don't know how to position it. Well, don't worry, all is not lost even over your product or service looks the same as everybody else's. And even if you're not sure how to distinguish it in terms of being able to position it better than everybody else. There's still plenty we can do to turn cutoff feature into our really want that benefit. Type beer. For an example, there's very little difference other than the price and a little bit of taste in bears. Traditionally, this is an area in which one beer and the other beer and more or less the same. Yet, because of this, beer companies have invented all kinds of other perceived benefits to persuade customers to choose their brand and they become powerful and popular. As a result, really, it's about creating brand value. Let's take a few examples. Per only for instance, it's an Italian beer is a premium product within the marketplace. So unsurprisingly, pepperoni aligns itself with an aspirational lifestyle telling a story of how it's drunk by dashing man in tailored suits with beautiful models on their arms. Therefore, the natural leap that you make as a consumer is whether you think this consciously or not. And again, this is where it works on a subconscious level. Her only makes you more attractive. So you might be thinking, No, it doesn't, I know it doesn't put to the subconscious mind unless you think that to yourself while you're watching the adverb, which most people won't do it. The subconscious mind can't tell truth from Ally. It can't tell fantasy from reality. And it will accept it as truth because it can't reject an idea unless it's rejected by the conscious mind. Carling, meanwhile, it equates itself with belonging. It's consumed by ordinary guys hanging out with our ordinary maize in ordinary pubs and bars. Now, belonging is a powerful pleasure center, essentially for the mind. Because belonging equals connection, which equals survival. Again, life and death equation. Suddenly, Carling has a significance on an emotional level. And it's not about what it looks like, what it tastes like, what it smells like, anything like that. They don't focus on that. They don't say this is how much it costs or anything. It's just literally belonging. If you drink this with your mates, you're all going to have a good time together. You're gonna belong, You're going to be connected and you're gonna be safe, and you're going to survive on a subconscious level. That's what's happening. On a conscious level. You're probably saying Carling is a decent price. It costs this much and it tastes okay, I'll drink it. But on a subconscious level, there's more happening. You're attaching more value to the brand. Now, miller coined the phrase, it's military. So every time you hear the phrase, you think of relaxing. Again, whether you know it or not. Most specifically relaxing with a miller. Now, there are just as many ways to relax without a miller that are just as effective but Miller other ones attaching their product to that feeling. And if it's done enough times, again, your subconscious mind will go, Oh, if I want to relax, I need to have a mower than it will pass it over the chain of command, the conscious mind will go, okay, we liked the taste is this price. I'm happy with that. Let's have a Miller. The subconscious mind is very, very good. It has got all kinds of tricks and it knows how to convince you of things. It knows how to convince you that the idea is yours essentially in your conscious mind, then you will have a Miller thinking you've just decided to do that. Guinness meanwhile, plays up the fact that a paint, it takes a long time to pour. These actually turns what might be seen as a drawback into a benefit that's unique to the brand. Now it's not unique to the brand that a pint of stout needs to be poured into goals and needs to take longer to settle before we can get full benefit of drinking it. But they've turned the negative into a positive that they own. Now, just mentioned other brands of style. It's exactly the same, but Guinness are the ones who've owned it. They've looked at this. It's essentially it's a feature, whether it starts off as negative or positive. It's a feature of Guinness. And it's a feature of style that it takes a long time to pull the pine they've owned that. They've said. This is a point of difference and we're gonna turn this into perceived benefit, the mind of the consumer. Now, what do all these brands have in common, apart from the fact that they're all forms of beer. Well, they all understand the power of identifying the unique character trait of a brand, even in the absence of a USP. They understand that these unique essences, if you'd like, these unique brand essences, create desire. So they've all found their own unique essence in place of a USP. Essentially, the unique essence replaces the unique selling point. The unique selling point is a point of differentiation and perceived value. The unique essence of a brand can do exactly the same thing. But just to recap what we've covered, it really is about focusing on the benefit, but don't lose sight of features either. They're both important. When we can combine powerful emotions with convincing rational arguments, we can provide emotional value and rational value. And the combination of both very, very powerful. 17. The Energy Equation: Let's look at something we call energy in and energy out. Every time we buy something, to sign up for something, commit to something we're making what is essentially an energetic decision. In other words, we're asking ourselves two fundamental questions. How much energy do I have to put in to get the result I want? And will I end up getting more energy out of the transaction in terms of benefits and results than the energy I will have to put in in terms of whatever it might be, whether it's money, whether it's time, whether it's commitment. I'm sure that when you were thinking of investing in this course, you are probably weighing up at some point these two questions, even if you're not consciously aware of that job in marketing this course was to persuade you that you would end up getting more out of the course than you would actually have to put in, in the form of time, in the form of money and then also in the form of the energy it takes to study the material. And hopefully you still have the opinion that it was worth the money so far, at least you will be by the time you finish. Likewise, as creative thinkers, we need be aware of the energy in and energy out balance. We need to work with it to either help the audience make up their mind in favor of our offer, or to convince them that it's what they want in the first place. And actually there's a subtle difference here because some people will just need a little nudge to make the decision. There were a warm audience. They may not even be convinced to begin with, there may even be the opposite. We need to make sure that we've got this covered by putting a compelling case across. It's a bit like you have a jury member who is rooting for your client, and then you'll have the opposite jury member who's you can tell his dad against them. Well, the jury member who's on site is gonna take care of themselves pretty much. We need to be focused on the jury member who's hard to persuade. Remember, we're talking to the most cynical person in the world or the room. If they're taken care of, everybody else will be taken care of. Let's look at this energy equation in more depth. As a side note, if you checkout Jordan Belfort, book way of the wolf, he outlines this is part of a straight line system of cell and inputs it across very well. But anyway, we can apply the same basic equation here. There are two sides to the coin. There's the energy you put in as the audience. For customer, your time, your money, your energy, whether it's mental or physical. And then there's the energy on the other side of that equation that you get out of the transaction. It's the time saved is the money saved, is the money made is the alleviation of pain or problem or some kind of improvement on your current situation. The energy equation essentially is, what will I have to put in to get this? And it's going to have to be equal or less than the energy we get out. So the energy you put in will have to be no more than, ideally less than what you're going to get out. On the other side of the equation. The benefit needs to be at least equal to or greater than the energy you're gonna spend on this. And let's just say it's money. That's when people say value for money. It means that it's at least breaking even and ideally getting you a return on investment. In most cases, if the products or services as any good, it will do that. But we don't need to stop there. By magnifying benefits, we can actually reverse this equation. We want people to focus on the energy they get out first and the energy they'll have to put in second. We won't do it the other way round. That would be crazy. Really. What we want is for people to look at the energy they're gonna get out, the benefits in time and money and improvement in circumstances, whatever it is as being much more than what they'll have to put in. So what we're looking to do is blow the benefit or the meantime, minimize the expenditure down. We've got more good energy coming in, less of the energy going out in terms of money and time and things like that. Job in creating ideas is to magnify the energy the audience perceives. They'll get out of the exchange while minimizing their perception of the energy they'll have to put in. And when possible, we can even turn the energy in that they're putting in into a positive, such as hassle-free and the words like rewarding, challenging experience, things like that. Just by choosing our words a bit more carefully. The way we magnify and minimize like this is by focusing on dialing up the emotional payoff. The benefit will bring if the audience chooses to commit and invest. So that's the benefit side of the equation. Then we deploy features as final convinces to evidence the proposition and where possible to minimize the perceived cost. If the benefits are what the product, service, or brand will do for the audience. The features are how it will be delivered and at what cost to them. To put it another way in the mind of the audience. The benefit is what will I get out of this? The feature is how will I get it and at what cost? While we're blowing up the getting out part through the benefit, we can minimize the putting in part by the feature. That means the dynamic is like a double-whammy and it works a bit like this. So let's use a few little examples of the dynamic going together. Let's say the proposition is enjoy ultimate freedom. That's a magnified benefit. With 0 contract deals, there's a minimized commitment. That might be all in one sentence. Get the VIP treatment, magnified benefit. Sign up in seconds. Minimize time. Wave, goodbye to money worries. Magnified benefit. Thanks. Small bite-size repayments. Minimize cost. So easy your dog could work it. Magnified benefit. No setup required, minimize effort. But every point we want to magnify the benefit, the emotional subconscious part of the mind. While Greece in the wheels of agreement in the rational conscious part of the mind. It works the other way too though, when the perceived energy in, when the perceived cost is small enough, it can make the perceived energy out, the perceived reward seeing huge by comparison. In fact, that's why otherwise same people go, they go crazy for Black Friday deals, and they end up having fistfights on the floor of the store over that discounted TV. They're not going to need. That perception of the benefits just mushroomed in the face of the deep, time-limited discount, the rush to the store is still driven by emotion, but it's the twin forces of the energy equation that work is the fear that they'll miss out. Coupled with the sense of perceived gain, it's kind of like the subconscious takes over at that point. Think about Black Friday deals with the subconscious cause only one at one o'clock. So cheap, maybe we can sell one of them or whatever, or do we need new TV anyway? Editor. And then the conscious mind goes up, Well, yeah, it's such a good deal, I can't argue it. It's this much money off it solo energy going in. Why wouldn't I it's a no-brainer. And then you get back home and you go, Why did it by three TVs? Because your subconscious mind understands how you tick and they add you on toast. 18. Magnify Even More: One of the best ways to magnify the benefit is to use the twin thrust of opposite emotional poles and to play the desire for the thing off against the problem or pain point it will solve. In fact, if the emotional payoff or emotional point of pain is big enough in the audience's eyes. The energy they have to then put in to this energy equation is going to see much smaller by comparison. They're gonna skirt over the potential costs in order to take action. But what do we mean by polarization? Well, in much the same way as the earth spins around its opposite, it spins around its opposite north and south poles. That's how it rotates around. Well, our audience, their world revolves around positive and negative poles or polarities. The push from the perceived pain, then the magnetic pole of the desire. As creative thinkers, we can ensure to harness the power of both. Now many times the contrast between positive and negative Remains on spoken with audiences creating their own cousins of perception between the two in order those, if something's really desirable in their currents, it doesn't seem good enough and painful. As human beings, it doesn't take much to tip us into a negative state. We stub your toe on a Monday morning that will do it. But then you could put a song on the radio or two minutes later and it lifts you up and suddenly you back in a positive state. We're all in some version of a yo-yo state. We're human and we are emotional beings. What's more work conditioned to view the world in polarised terms, either good or bad. It's either positive or negative side the brilliant nor terrible, especially now we've got social media that kind of humbles unlike environment that we all spend time in. But just listen to some of the words you use to describe otherwise mild circumstances. It was a nightmare. It just made me sick. I hate it or I love it. It was unbelievable. It's epic, the best knight ever. And similarly, we put experiences, we put people when we put ourselves in these all or nothing brackets. I'm an idiot. She's a saint. It's a complete and utter fast. No one better turn in a teardrop into a world's fall in a human being. But one of the main reasons, the highest seem so high and the low, so low, the goods so good and the bad, so bad is that we can't look at one experience without comparing it to the opposite. Might comparison machines. The media is the same and the holes of society's self that way. For instance, being single for many people will probably feel like a bad thing or far worse on Valentine's Day, for instance, because what are they looking out? They'd been inundated with these images of love, DO couples and hearts and flowers and teddy bears and so on. Valentine's Day, kind of shines a spotlight on their lack of a partner, if that matters to them, making their situation feel far worse than it otherwise would. So when it comes to creative ideas, we can synthesize this same effect by using polar opposites to position the benefits are of our offer. Here is in really simple terms. This really simple diagram. Here in the top left. We've got the audiences desired outcome delivered by the benefits of our offer. It's positive and ensure the benefits may be a good cell, but they're not as powerful as the COPI. And conversely, in the bottom left, we've got a series of negatives presented to the audience by whatever the problem is that they're facing the already know the negatives are already aware of them, and the situation is unpleasant in some way. The audience knows this and they may well be motivated to a reasonable extent to engage with our offer in order to resolve the problem. However, we can use a direct contrast between the source of pain and desire in order to dial up the emotional power of each one in the mind of the audience. With it magnified the benefits of our offer. This is how it's done on the right of the diagram here. In the top right, we've got depolarized positive as opposed to the non-polarized positive on the left. The negative or the problem illuminates the positive or the desired outcome. Then underneath that, we've got the polarized negative, where the positive or the desired outcome highlights the negative in the same way, but obviously in the mirror image reverse. In an optical sense, It's just like shining a torch or flashlight in the daytime. When it's light outside, the light from the torch is relatively weak and it's not that easy to see if you've ever switched torch on, you'll know, you know, try and shine on a wall. You're not gonna see much. You're not gonna certainly not going to see far ahead. It's gonna be weak. Even though you can see it is just not that powerful. If you flip on the same torch or flashlight in the dark, however, it can be almost blinding. You can shine that torch and anything that's in the beam will stand out a mile from the background. On the flip side of it's cloudy outside of its cloudy day, overcast gray. You're not gonna see much of a shadow, if any at all. In fact, it's those clouds clear and the Sony is really bright in the sky, then the dark your shadow is gonna be an also perhaps even longer the shade as well, the darker the shadow in the shade. And that's because the dark intensifies the light and the light also intensifies the dark by contrast, in this case, creative advertising, the desired solution seems far brighter in the shadow of the problem. While the audiences problem appears far darker against the background of their desire, this glowing, bright, shiny thing that they could have or an improvement in their life. As you can probably guess, polarization is really powerful tool it fuels in it intensifies a lot of things in life. I mean, pretty much everything works on polarization, any form of conflict for sure. War, politics, society, social media, sports rivalries. Everything is positioned against something. It's all pushing against something. In fact, the power is rarely in the thing itself, but in the contrast to its polar opposite. For instance, someone who's always add everything they wanted, they may not appreciate it. So for them it doesn't actually hold much value because they've not seen the other side of that. They've not seen not having anything. This is kinda like the phrase, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. We've all heard that saying, or alternatively, you don't know what you're missing until you experience it. The ignorance is bliss saying this is what it's all about. Now because of this, some would say that polarizing is a bad thing. It's the last thing we need more of in the world right now. What we always need is balanced rather than extremes. In many cases are couldn't agree mobile. I think there's a difference between using it for Machiavellian means to intentionally manipulate people in situations where there'll be worse off than if they would otherwise, or to do something that is hazardous or dangerous to themselves or others. Compared with using the technique to help people navigate the way through life in a better way. We're actually offering an improvement on their current circumstance. It's all progress in one form or another. Essentially new solutions to problems. But circle back to the point. We could uninsured use this conceptual tool of polarization to magnify the benefits of our offer when appropriate, when the time is right, and ultimately to give added power to our campaigns, not simply by magnifying the emotional payoff of the offer, but contextualizing it against the backdrop of a magnified problem or pain against that dark background. Now, suddenly you've got another double-whammy to play with when you're looking at how you create word your benefits. Not just to make ideas more effective, but actually to create a lot more ideas a lot more easily as well. This is a really good technique for that. But by understanding all these dynamics at the benefit level, it just gives you the keys to the whole kingdom as far as making your ideas Lund, making them stick, making themselves and making them deliver. Which is why we're really going in depth here, showing you all these different ways you can magnify the benefits to your advantages are created. Takeaways from this module. Benefits are emotional and features are rational. All our communications as creatives should be benefit lead. Benefits lead the way they come first. Features comes second. But all of benefits come from features, and it's our job to develop them in many cases. Now, a unique selling point is preferable but not essential. You can find the unique essence of a brand and you can add value that way. Or you can find a way to position your product in a way that is unique, in a way that is different and better than the competition. This uniqueness is absolutely key. We must either communicate what is unique or we must communicate what is common in a unique way. So we must either make them most of our USP or our unique essence of a brand, or we must communicate what everybody else's communicating in a different way. And that's where our talents and our understanding is creative really comes in. That's where we really turned our salt, if you like. Next module, this really does build on the bucket, the benefits. This is going to help us develop those unique strategies, approaches, and angles that will make all the difference when it comes to positioning and differentiating the offer we have to promote. And that is the proposition. In the next module, we're gonna talk through what constitutes a powerful proposition and how to write one. 19. MODULE 4: POWERFUL PROPOSITIONS: What you're about to learn in this module. First of all, we're going to learn the value of a clear, compelling proposition, but also identifying what a proposition is and what it definitely isn't. We're also going to look at why propositions determine the success or failure of the rest of the creative process. And ultimately how to create a winning proposition, even if we have nothing to say. How do we develop a proposition? Well, first of all, we need to understand just how important they are. The strongly a proposition, the stronger your creative ideas will be. So, no matter how tempting it is, please don't skip over this process. This is absolutely key. This is the anchor from which all your creative ideas can be wedded to really make them really robust and really strong. Also, as well as being robust. It means that we can actually create really distinctive and bespoke campaigns. We can really produce something unique to a brand and an offer and really differentiate it from what is essentially always a crowded marketplace, no matter which area you're in. The proposition also can distill the essence of a business if you like. Capturing the culture, capturing the ethos, and also the traditions and all this stuff that's actually can be very, very valuable and we will be looking at that. But most importantly, proposition needs to strike an emotional chord with the audience. This is really what it's all about as we've been building up to so far, we've been talking about seeing things through the audience's point of view, identifying what the key emotional drivers are for them and then putting them forward in the best possible way. First of all, by identifying and magnifying the benefits, the emotional benefits of a product or a service or a brand. But then also almost like a funnel IV, like once we've got all those emotional benefits worked out, we can then start to, if one-on-one down into a proposition. Go propositions are essentially four things. First of all, that benefit driven. Always, always benefit driven, but they're also emotional in nature. Of course, we're not going to persuade anybody with a rational argument. Yet many propositions are trying to do just that. And that's why they don't work essentially. And it's why the very, very difficult to turn it into compelling and creative campaigns. Because this step hasn't been done. Simple as that. This step isn't always easy. If we don't automatically know how to do, we need to learn how to do it and master it. There are also basically the best possible version of the truth is probably the best way to put it. So you can present a truthful argument. But it doesn't mean it's the most compelling way of putting it forward. It just depends how you frame it and we'll be looking at that. There are also simple and brief. This is really important. No more than a short sentence once you get into two sentences or more. First of all, it's not very memorable. It's not very easy to pitch to other people, maybe to a client, to somebody else in your business, to another creative even. And they need to just be simple to understand. They need to be simple to translate into ideas and emotions and emotional cells. If we actually need to remember something here, we need to remember proposition at this stage, it's not strap line. It's more for back of house if you like. Whereas a strap line is front of house, it's what the customer will see. All the world will see. The proposition is very much a back-of-house messages to things you don't see going on behind the scenes. It's for our eyes only. So that we can build a campaign of a clear focused idea and we can actually build a strategy of it as well, off the back of it as well. But at this point, we're not trying to be too clever or creative with our words. The pixie dust will be sprinkled on later. Let's look at some examples though, just so we can clearly see the difference and see what we got proposition looks like. Now first of all, we've gone back to our beer examples here because bear is pretty much, as we mentioned earlier. It's like the worst-case scenario in many ways this there's no differentiators in the products itself a lot of the time. So that's why the beer companies have worked hard or the agencies on their behalf in order to come up with really compelling propositions that they can then build long-term creative campaigns of the back-off. We've essentially, for the purposes of this exercise, we're paraphrasing a little bit here and there. But just to give you a sense of what's going on, peroneus essentially, if you look at their campaigns, it's all about getting a taste of Italy really. It's more about the Italian lifestyle than it is actually the bear itself. And there's not really any mentioned made of what goes into the product, rather than talking about the heritage of the brand really. And that's told in a very cinematic way as well and very kind of hyperreal way. When we're talking about the best version of the truth, This is the best version of the truth. The idea behind it is that drinking pepperoni makes you more attractive in sophisticated. I like pepperoni personally, I don't think it's ever made me more attractive and sophisticated. But I like the brand done. I like the way the brand locks and I'm sure that's had an effect on me. But what it does, it just gives us something to anchor around, gives us a sense of direction, and we can use our creativity over the top of our garlic. The proposition here is that it brings you close together with your friends as we've already covered. And again, as we've covered, they're really building brand value into their messaging. What's happening here is the strategy as being identified, the benefits being identified in terms of the emotional payoff and the pain pleasure equation. Now the funneling it down into a proposition. So the message here is about belonging and drinking Carl and brings you closer together with your friends. So Miller, for instance, after a long day, it helps you relax and unwind. Again, a fictional example based on the advertising that we see all around us for this brand. Finally, goodness, having to wait makes every pint tastes better. They've turned a drawback or a negative into a positive. And now it can be condensed into a proposition. And now we can actually build a campaign off the back of that. 20. Create Propositions From Nothing: How do we create a proposition? Even from nothing just like these beer companies have? Well, we can focus on the feeling. B. We can adopt an ethos. See, we can use the founding purpose or mission. D, We can play on heritage and values. First of all, focus on a feeling. First question to ask is, who is our audience? How did they spend that time? One, who did they identify themselves with in society? And what did they want? There's lots of questions you can ask what it's all about trying to establish how they identify themselves within society in relation to other people. How do they rate themselves? What makes them feel important? What are their priorities? We do this by asking what basic human need are they seeking to fulfill? And how could our offer help them meet that need? Now this is the same, no matter what your approach is, what this is really, really important when folks on unfeeling, let's look at an example. Carling proposes the feeling of belonging, which means connection, which ultimately means survival to the subconscious mind. At the same time, it's an increase in social standing and self-esteem. So even though there's something going on in the subconscious mind that we're not aware of. There's something also added to this which we will be consciously aware of if this really resonates with those, this brand and this message, because we will feel more, we feel better about ourselves. So therefore, it will reinforce the consumers sense of identity. If you're a person who goes down to the pub and spends time with your mates and nuts really important to you, and that's how you see yourself and that's how you judge yourself in relation to this group of friends. That's gonna be really important. And it's also anything that chimes with the identity. Anything that agrees within supports subconscious mind is gonna love because in their brain doesn't want to do. And what the mind doesn't want to do is change. Because change means uncertainty. It means new things and new things spelled dangers. And it's work very, very hard to build this sense of identity. And all of a sudden it's being challenged and there's always changed. That's why people don't like change essentially. Because it's difficult. It takes a lot of energy. The brain evolved to be really efficient and really to focus on sparing and saving energy. We focused on feeling. How about we adopt an ethos instead? What do we mean by this? Well, an ethos is a way of living, thinking or doing. It's a personal motto or mantra that actually feeds into the identity. We can actually position ourselves round our own motto was an organization or a brand. So the ethos or motto may already exist within a business. It just might not be being usefully or fully capitalized on in its branding. They may just not be aware of it or not using it to its full potential. But at the same time, if one doesn't exist, we can actually create one. It could be an ethos that used to exist and doesn't anymore within the business that we can resurrect or it could just be brand new. We can even decide this is the ethos we want to adopt and that's what we're gonna do. There's nothing to stop. Was his greatest. When we do this, this ethos, whether it's old or new, the aim is for it to reflect the essence of the brand. Let's take Audi for example. You may have heard in, you probably have heard the famous slogan, Washburn dirge technique. And I'm sure my pronunciation is awful, but the basic meaning is progress through technology. It was actually adopted in the 1800s. Basically, John Haggerty of the advertising agency BPH, they were tasked with selling these German cars to a British audience. And Audi was kind of a new brand to the British market. And he was looking for a way to position the brand to create a proposition, if you like to build a campaign off, that would really make a big splash and make Audi desirable brand. Now, at the time he was visited in the factory In noticed kind of a bit of a tattered poster on the wall. And it said var sprung DOJ technique, what it meant and they explained what it meant and it was something they work too. Well. There wasn't something they were really pushing in the company. He took that and ran with it and he showed that you could actually even have a proposition that is also the strap line, that is in a different language and yet still can be turned into a compelling campaign. That now means something to everybody. Great piece of advertising and a great example of how so long as you have a clear meaning behind your message, you can build a great campaign of the back of it. This was used by John Haggerty, co-founder BPH to great success. Now, also funnily enough, the slogan of BPH is when the world zigs and zags, I think that's it. That's a really good way of thinking about creative word generally, whenever anyone else's digging, what can you do to zag? That's adopting an ethos. That's what John Haggerty did. The Ethos already existed. Let's look at an example of coaching and ethos out of thin air. Nyx just do it. This is an iconic strap line, is based on the ethos. That everyone is an athlete. Now, this ethos comes out of thought that was cultivated by Phil Knight. He was a former college athlete. And he started to import Japanese sneakers in order to add brand value and identity to just give the brands something to anchor itself around. He actually created this thought that everyone who is an athlete and now it's not like today where sports where is also fashion where on the street. But at the time it wasn't like that. So what Phil Knight did, and he brought in the thought that everyone is an athlete and this gave NYC an amazing platform to build on all their creative work, became about turning the ordinary person into an athlete or making them feel like they were making them feel more athletic as a result and feel more special as a result of wearing their sportswear. It's all about giving everybody access, telling everybody that they can do it. Just get out there and do it. There's nobody left out. 17 miles every morning. People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering and a winter time, I leave my locker. That's not all actually. We can also use the founding purpose or the mission. And it's kind of similar to the ethos, but it is a little bit different. It's a very powerful tool for telling your brand story. We can tell this story throughout a range of messaging. It also adds perceived value in the mind of the audience, which finds its way into the price tag ultimately, unsurprisingly. Now, there's a difference between real and perceived value. Real value is adding an extra, a new benefit and new feature or benefit. Perceived value is different. We're not actually adding anything to the product or the service or the brands so much. What we're doing is adding the value in the mind of the customer. Let's look at an example. Dove helps women establish a positive relationship with their bodies. This is essentially as their proposition. They use ordinary women as models in order to differentiate themselves as authentic and altruistic. This is just so potentially, even if it is of high-quality, That's not really talked about very much. It's really about positioning dove as going against the grain, zagging when the world zigs, if you like. A lot of other brands are out there making women feel bad about the bodies in order to sell them. Products. Do for doing the opposite. They're not using a brush models to sell products. They use an ordinary women. It's their thing and it informs every creative campaign for a greater, that's great because you know exactly what to do. So that will be their mission. They made it their mission to help women establish a positive relationship with their bodies. And now it's just a matter of telling that story through a range of creative messaging. It adds on toll perceived value in the mind of the audience. We can also apply on heritage and values because many businesses, brands, and founders have a storage, et al will have a unique history and stories to tell. And many do use their own story to create the brand essence. Because it's a great way to bind diverse communications together. You're not really going to be changing the style of your communications or the type of campaigns you put in now, year on year, you're going to be very, very consistent, always playing on the heritage in the values which allows you to tell a story over time and really build kudos for your brand. Now, the good thing about values is you don't need a 100 years of history behind you. They can be conceived anytime the brand story can be current and new, you can just decide tomorrow, we're gonna do this and we're going to start telling the story of it. There are a lot of successful businesses launched on Instagram. It might be a small business to start off with, but then not really be promoting the product so much on Instagram. There'll be just showing their own lives or a version of their own lives because it's social media is not, not real. People buy into the story as much as they do the product. The story is where the value is and that's why it becomes like a must-have. Let's look at a couple of examples, starting with authentic heritage. Jack Daniel's, for instance, is a great example of this. It plays heavily on the history of its products. Every communication you see, whether it's on TV, in the press, online, It's always about it's small town folks each arm. And the old ways by which it's products are still manufactured. Because that has cache, has value, people value authenticity and time-tested methods. And in a world where there are a lot of big, slick campaigns and products, people really value the small town charm if you like, the rustic charm that plays into the idea of the quality of the whiskey in the taste. You don't have to know about our secret ingredient. You don't have to know what sets our sugar maple. No. No. You don't even have to share our taste in music. Know what it takes to get real honey. You don't have to know who's been doing this for over a 150 years. You don't even have to know who this guy is. He's goose faraway. There's one thing I recognize. World is a big place and there's a lot of role for folks in it. You don't have to be from one place or another. You just need a freely introduction. How about manufactured values though? Manufactured values are kind of similar, but we're not really looking at how things have always been done. We can look at how things are being done now and create values around them. So obesity is a huge problem in the world, and there's a real shift now toward, in recent years towards healthy eating. So there's been a response to this. The global fast food brands, they've not only changed their product lines, they've changed their marketing messages. They've essentially done what we're preaching in this course if you liked, they've gone back to the root of the problem and look to what their strategy should be based on what their audiences are demanding and thinking, I don't know, worried about. And they've carried that through into a proposition through a new set of values. So the sourcing of food, the preparation, the dedication to healthier meals. They're now building out this story around their values and overtime it will change the perception of the brands. Of course, you'll never going to forget that the essentially a fast food place. But the thing is, they won't say, okay, we did this in the past. Now we're doing this. They'll just focus on what they're doing now they'll just say, Well, it's all made of a 100% this or that we source or allow food from these farmers and we offer these products, were dedicated to being sustainable and all this kind of stuff. Really, all that matters is now you can only work with what you can work within the present day. These fast-food giants that really re strategizing around that. 21. Propositions From Unique Sells: That, that we've just covered is basically we haven't really got anything cast-iron and rock solid. We haven't got a clear differentiator that we can base our advertising around. Well, we haven't really got, maybe we haven't got the strong benefits for that really set us apart. But if we have got a USP and we have got clear strong benefits, how do we create a proposition around those? Because sometimes many times we are going to have something called to work with. Well, we have three options here. We can either 0 in on the USP. If we have one, this is the best-case scenario. Alternatively, if we haven't got a USP, we can actually group are benefits together into a more compelling whole. And we'll get onto how we do that in a moment. Finally, we can actually identify one key benefit to magnify and we can build on the back of it. So let's take the USP first because let's face it is the easiest approach. In this case. All we need to really do is simply condensed the USP into a short sentence. And this will underpin all our creative thinking. But we need to do that first. We can't have one floating around there that we're aware of. We really need to nail it down because the USP, when we find it, it may be a paragraph long. It may have a lot of information in. We need to strip that out and really focus on the emotional message behind it, the emotional core, because at the end of the day it may be a USP worded in the form of a feature. Let's say you get a brief and the USP is detailed out. Well, that might just be in terms of the feature, what it does, what mechanically adores. As you'll remember from the last module, our job is to turn those features into emotional benefits. So that's what we're looking to do here. We're looking to identify what's the emotional core of this USP. And then summit or in a short compelling sentence, that will form our proposition. Let's take an example. Okay? Supercar acts fictional. The USP is that it goes from 0 to 60 in 2.1 seconds and has a top speed of 280 miles per hour, which makes it the fastest road car out there in the world today. The proposition is very simple because we've got this USP, the fastest road car in the world. It doesn't really need much explanation at the moment, people see the fastest car in the world. Anyone who wants the fastest car in the world who can afford it, will want it because they want the absolute best. Our audience here are not people who are concerned by price. They're just concerned by, I want to be the fastest on the road. Let's look at another example of laptop x. The USP is that it's a groundbreaking PC laptop with a new advanced form of artificial intelligence AI. Well, a proposition is, the world's smartest laptop, and by association, it makes you smarter. Now number three, again, we've made up another product, it's self-cleaning cloth. Whether one exists out there in the world somewhere. I don't know. This is what came to mind unless you're fine with this course, we've gone with the first things that have come into our head because at the end of the day you don't have weeks and months to work. These concepts that we're teaching here, these ideas should be able to work on the spot all the time. So we created this self cleaning cloth and the USP as the only dish cloth on the market with self-cleaning nanoparticles woven into the fibers. So what happens when you finish the dishes? An army of little nanobots essentially go to work on clean in the cloth. Now they do, I don't know. I don't understand how these nanoparticles and nanobots work, but let's just assume it does. The proposition is that it's the dish cloth that cleans itself. Very simple. Nothing else is doing it. But let's assume we haven't got a USP. Well, we've got a good option here. We can group all our benefits into a whole. Now benefit grouping creates a proposition that's actually more powerful than the sum of its parts. It's like a sports team who were all fairly average. But when they come together because of the way they play together, because of the culture, because the mentality they always perform above and beyond as a team. Or you may look at that in terms of like a music band. They're not the most technically gifted musicians, but when they come together as something special happens in the create great music together. Let's take an example of how this can work. Let's look at the benefits from coal plant x. Stay connected to friends, family, and the things you love. No matter what happens. Binge on all your favorite shows, songs, videos, and movies with buffer free browsing on unlimited streaming. Never run out of credit again with limitless calls and texting. Enjoy ultimate freedom with are no strings. Monthly contracts. Make friends green with envy, where our next-gen smartphones and turn your handset into a five g Wi-Fi hotspot and connect all your devices. Now, there's a lot going on here, lots to remember. And you're an audience trying to remember all that had glance. It's gonna be pretty tough for you to do. And there's creatives, great benefits, but a lot of sporadic cells going on. So even if we've got a lot of great benefits, we still need something to anchor them all to. We still need something short and sweet to work to as creatives, just as the audience is going to need something short and sweet to remember. What we can do here is actually combine them into a single proposition. Well, how about this? Connect to everything you love, whenever, wherever, and however you choose. Now that's quite a compelling proposition. We've got something to work with, with the Connecting to everything you love whenever, wherever and however. But how do we arrive at that proposition? Let's break it down and look at how we group these benefits together into a single compelling sentence. First of all, connect to everything. Here we use the benefit of stay connected to friends, family, and the things you love, no matter what happens. The words you love, binge on all your favorite shows, songs, videos, and movies with buffer free browsing and unlimited streaming. The Whenever part was covering the benefit of never run out of credit again with limitless calls and texting. Whenever you want to use your phone movie like you'll have the credit and you'll have all the data you need as well. The wherever side of things is, turn your handset into a five g Wi-Fi hotspot and connect all your devices. So no matter where you are in the world, you can do this however you choose. Here we grouped together a couple of benefits. First of all, be the envy of your friend with our next gen smartphones, but also enjoy the ultimate freedom of having a no strings monthly contract. As you can see, it's all about condensing the benefit into a word or two. If you've got a number of benefits, then connecting those words. Now, what it's not about is going into great detail about each of the benefits and how they can help the audience. Really, this is about just skimming over the surface of your light, really condensing it down the shows. What advertising is essentially all about in many ways. It's about doing more with less. It's actually about stripping back the information in order to make it more compelling and powerful. That's certainly what copywriting is about. In most cases, even if we've got all this information, you can still just keep boiling it down and it may take a few goals, took me several goals to get there with this one, a thought, how am I going to get all these benefits down this, love them. I've made a rod for my own back here in a few attempts. I got there and I just got there by being slightly more vague each time. Now that's not a problem because we still retain the emotional core. We have the connection. Whereas the things that you love and we have freedom all expressed within a single proposition. So what have we really condensed it down? Stay connected, stay current, stay flexible. Those three key tenants that I just touched on, connection, really powerful. Current, staying up to date in today's society. But you're not left behind, basically flexible. You've got freedom, but you're not tied into anything you don't want to be trapped in later. Now stay connected. Let's break this down. Here. We actually group more benefits together rather than using one word to express one benefit. For instance, we really did grouped them together and then express them in two words. So stay connected represents stay connected to friends, family, and the things you love. Binge on all your favorite shows, songs, videos and movies with buffer free browsing and unlimited streaming. And also never run out of credit again. With limitless calls and texting. Stay current, make friends green with envy with your next-gen smartphones there we've restricted down to one benefit. It doesn't matter how many benefits you have under one or two words long as that proposition works as a whole and covers all the benefits off, you're good to go. Finally, we have stay flexible. So turn your handset into a five g Wi-Fi hotspot and connect your devices. So as you can see, it's very short, it's very snappy, it's very proactive. And it's very, very strong proposition for craters because we know what's focus on, we know to focus on those three things. And in fact, I can imagine right now It campaign being built out where we can see those three things playing out, either in one advert, for instance, or across the trio. That's grouping together benefits. What if we want to build on the back of one key benefit? Well, if one stands out above all others, What have we ever hero benefit we really want to shine the spotlight on. Well, we can focus on this one key benefit. We can do it in this way, will take coal plant x again. The key benefit again is to stay connected, no matter what happens. Connection, very powerful. We can work with that proposition. Stay connected to everything you love, nice and simple. We can work on that as well. When we're talking about connection. Imagine if you're a husband and your wife is going into labor and you're struggling to stay connected to it because the signal is weak. Or if you're halfway up a mountain and you're trying to call Mountain Rescue. You're in the military halfway around the world and it's your daughter's birthday. And you're on a video call and it starts to buffer and cut out halfway through just as she's opening a present. How important his connection to you at that point. It's everything, isn't it? So as we can see, it's very easy to build a strong campaign when we have a clear proposition of what's at stake for the audience and what's important. You can see how we've distilled the message to its emotional core. We've also tightened up the wording. The more resonant it is for us as emotional human beings and creatives, the more we're gonna be able to get into it, the more we're going to be able to imagine the scenarios necessary to build campaigns off. Let's try another. The key benefit, binge on all your favorite shows, songs, videos and movies with buffer free browsing and unlimited streaming. Again, where we talked about staying in contact with your loved ones, where you could actually make it shine on this platform as well. The proposition binge and browse to your heart's content with unlimited streaming. In today's world where everything is now streamed on demand. And if you've ever had limits on your data or buffering, this is pretty powerful cell. So what we've done is zeroed in on the feeling of the cell. We've tightened the offer and we for now we've forgotten the details of how it works. We're not at the campaign stage that can come later, just as refundable it down. Then when we get to actually create and our ideas as we can kind of throw it back open and put the detail back in it. If we're focusing on one hero benefit, will then back it up later with more backup benefits, the supporting acts like for instance, Apple may focus on one benefit when they're selling an iPhone. And that might be the camera or a feature on the camera. Let's say the one in people taught grades to the latest model, they will focus on that feature, turning that into an emotional benefit for the audience and building the proposition on the back of maybe just one little thing. Even the point is when you get to, maybe when you get to the website to go and find out more about the phone or the iPad or whatever the product is. They'll then give you the other cells will be an all round offer. But the thing that gets you there is thinking are one, that camera is that kind of emotional touch point of view. Like it's that kind of experience that gets you hooked into the idea that plants the seed of you should really get this. And that's all about 0 and going on one benefit and making it the hero and building your proposition and therefore your campaign off the back of them. 22. The Proposition Map: Now obviously, there's been a lot to take in here. A lot of different ways you can skin the cat when it comes to the proposition. So rather than just leave you with a load of information, we thought we'd produce a proposition map that you can follow really easily whenever you need it. It might be that your Creighton proposition for your business and therefore, you need to go through this process of defining growth, which is the best for us. Or you may just maybe a creative and you're going to come across this fairly regularly. And therefore, you can use this map whenever you need one. The proposition map is very simple. It starts with the question, do you have a differentiator? If the answer is, is yes, then we go here to the left. And then we ask ourselves another question. Well, the next relevant question is do we have a USP unique selling point? If we do, then it's very, very simple. If the answer is yes. Well, therefore, we should bring our proposition around the USP. We should go with a USP proposition. If the answer is no, however, then we have to look at whether we have a hero benefit on it. So the next question to ask ourselves is, do we have a hero benefit, one benefit above all that stands out that we want to really promote? Well, if the answer is yes, then of course we have a hero benefit proposition. We form our proposition or around that one single benefit that we shine a spotlight on. Then all the other benefits support the campaign. Maybe they're on the website, something like that. The answer is no. However, then we go to our group benefits solution. We go to a group benefit proposition. Think of it like an umbrella proposition. We're, we're probably gonna be quite vague or concise on purpose in referencing the individual benefits are going to come up with a statement that's overarching and doesn't reference anyone benefits specifically. Now, if we ask the first question, do we have a differentiator and the answer is no. Then of course we've got four different approaches. It's up to you to kind of look through and see, okay, what do we feel is right for this product or service? So let's assume you want to go with a feeling, then it's not a yes, no option here, it's an either or. So. You can either focus on a proposition that talks about moving the audience away from a pane. You can focus on one that talks about moving the audience towards a pleasure. You wouldn't really talk about the pain, you just focus on the pleasure. This is a towards pleasure proposition as opposed to when away from pain proposition. Alternatively, the third option is that you can have the best of both worlds, from pain to pleasure propositions. So you put in both together, this is really feeling based itself, feeling they get when they interact with your brand or product or service. The rest of them are yes-no questions. So let's look at the first one. We've asked ourselves. If we have a differentiator, The answer is no, then we could go to an ethos. The next question, the next obvious question is to say, Well, do we have an existing ethos for this brand, for this business, for this product, for this service? If the answer is yes, then it's very simple. We adopt this ethos as a proposition. If the answer is no, however, then we need to cultivate an ethos proposition. So if you think back to when I was talking about NYC, Phil Knight cultivated an ethos of everyone's an athlete. That's their ethos. And then they of course built just do it on everything else on the top of that. But if we can put a little tweak on that, if we want to go for purpose or mission instead of ethos. So rather than a principle underlines the brand or the company or whatever it is, we think about an actual purpose that drives the business forward. Or emission, you can call it either or rarely. Do we have a founding, a personal mission within the business, within the brand? The answer is yes. Then of course we can do a founding purpose proposition or a founding mission proposition however you want to phrase it. Again, it's a lot simpler when you've got that because you've got that all in place and you can build on top of that, but that's not to say we can create one. So if the answer is no, we can create a new mission for ourselves as a business or a brand and build everything around that. Finally, we have heritage values. If we don't have a differentiated to play with, we can use an existing heritage and all values, either or both. The answer is yes to that. Then of course, we can play with an authentic heritage proposition and values will probably be part of that. However, if the answer is no, then what we can do, obviously, we don't have a heritage to play with and say, Okay, this is our heritage. Now we've no years of evidence. We've not got even ten years of heritage behind us. Well, what we can do there is, let's say we haven't even got values. Well, we can just manufacturer the values. Then. We have the manufactured values proposition. And we can go forward with unbuild a heritage on the back of that. There you go. That's the proposition map. Just to recap everything we've been covering here in terms of writing a powerful proposition. And anytime you need it, just take a look at it. 23. Proposition Curveballs: Even though we've covered all these different propositions, this might affect you if you're the one doing the creative advertising on the part of your business and writing the propositions and positioning your brand and your service. And we like to call this proposition curve balls is kind of two of them that might come up and they're like anomalies, if you will. And we've kept these separate because they don't come up all the time. So there are two things that are gonna come out you potentially. And the first is to do with the audience and the second is to do with message. So you may get thrown these curve balls from time to time. And the first one is what if the audience is different from the end-user? Suddenly we've got two different people to police. It might be two different businesses as well. It can vary. Now the second one is, what if there's more than one message to communicate? It's almost like we've got two propositions to communicate. Both different. We've not got one message to go within. Suddenly this complicates the process. We're going to look at these curved balls and how to back them back, if you will. The first one, we'll just call it the proxy cell. The proxy cell is where the audience is not the end-user, but they are the decision-maker and the action taker. Quite often. The proxy cell might be that there's a parent and child and there's an owner and Pat, there's a gift giver and a recipient. There's a lecturer and the students. So for instance, might be ordering books on behalf of our students. Maybe there's a CEO and business. The CEO goes, okay, well we've reinvested in this, it will be good for the business. But the end-user might be the person in the factory. The curveball. The problem here is that it's the end-user who ultimately benefits. Who do we aim our message out? And how do we position the benefit? Suddenly it's not quite so straightforward. So here's how to play it. First of all, we establish who we need to spark the emotional desiring for them to take the first step in the process of deciding an acting on our effort. Now this is really key, is the first step in the process, is not necessarily the action of buying or signing up or anything like that. We then target this person, whether it's the audience or whether it's the end-user. There are three different players we can use here in order to deal with the curveball play. One is the past. This is where the audience passes the message onto the end-user. Knowing that this end user is interested in this thing and they'll likely take action. So in this case, what we do, even though we're putting in something in front of an audience who's gonna pass it on. We still aim it at the end-user because at the end of the day, what we need to do is spark desire. In the end-user. They're the ones who are essentially going to take action. But what happens here is we will also be sparking desire in the audience because they will see the end-user is going like this. This is right or birth story. This is what I've been looking for. Therefore, even though a spark and desire in the end-user, they'll still take the first step in this case. Let's look at an example. For instance, let's say a parent sees a press advert or a page on a website, or they're handed a flyer. And maybe it's for a course or a scheme or something like that. Well, I likely to do is save it and pass it on to their child, let's say the child as a teenager or in the early 20th or whatever it is, the passing onto the child and the child done in quiet for the course or scheme. So the initial audience is the parent, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't spark the desire and the child did they pass it onto they're not going to inquire, apply anyway. We just need to make sure that we aim this message at the end-user and in this case, the audience, because of the relationship to the end-user or the parent to the child, they're gonna have an emotion spots in them as well. So there's still going to take the first step. So let's look at player number two, the domain. Here we'd write a proposition for end-users who don't have the power to decide or take action. But they can ask, they can ask another to help them. So again, we would aim at the end-user because we want to spark the desire and then, and get them to take the first step in the process in the chain. So what do we mean here? Well, let's say you've got a young child who sees an advert for a tie. Whether they're gonna do, you're gonna then plead, going to bag. They're gonna split the dummy until the parent buys the tie for them, and that's why we call it the dummy. So again, we need to aim it at the child because we need to motivate the child to go and ask for permission to have the style and the money and everything else. The child can't get in the car and drive down to the store. Even if they've got the pocket money, the parent is going to probably have to take them to get it. Then finally, play number three here. It's the given get. Here we would write a proposition for the audience who will see the benefit to the end-user. And then they will buy or take action on the end-users behalf. So here we aim it at the audience rather than the end-user. So let's say you've got a cat owner and you show an advert about fish snacks or something on account, enjoying fish snacks daily. Imagine how happy these fish snacks will make little turtles, their cat. And then also what they'll do is they'll imagine how much love they'll get from little tables and return this kind of a twin benefit going onto those is going to enjoy the fish snacks, book titles isn't really important for us. We can't sell this stuff. Digitals was selling it to the owner. Account owner because they're the ones who need to have the emotional reaction. Or let's take another example. If you're buying a gift for a loved one who Christmas and the advert comes on and it's marketed at you and it says, get this gift, give this wonderful gift at Christmas. And the implication is, the person who you get in it for will love it and maybe love you even more. That's how you get around that curve ball proxy sell. You. Simply establish who we need to spark emotional desiring for them to make the first step. Now the second curve ball is called 2's a crowd. Now, you know the same two is company three is a crowd. In the case of messaging is to use a crowd two or more. And you may find that you have more than two messages to get across. It may be three or even four, but you can apply the same logic to that. I would say though when you get into quite a few different messages, then you probably best treating them as benefits. And then using the group benefits solution, the umbrella solution which will find in the proposition map. But let's look at this problem to the crab, this curve ball. It's where there are two messages to be delivered in one piece of communication, for instance, help the environment and save money or hassle-free and earn points, loyalty points. The curveball element is that two different messages means diluting the idea and it also complicates the execution in terms of how it looks and how do you pull it off and all that. So it can cause all these problems really, having to messages EV can it's best to narrow down to a single proposition. But sometimes it's just going to be where the client is going to say, Okay, I want these two messages in. Horror as a business, you simply need to get these messages in. So how do we play it? How do we get around that? Well, we start by first trying to make a direct association between the two competing messages. Otherwise, we establish a clear hierarchy between the two, between the two messages. It looked at two players here. The first player is going to handle the direct association part. And if you can't do that, if all else fails, then we can use the second method where we use the hierarchy of messaging. Blame number one is combo. We make a direct association between the two messages. So you can combine them into one compelling message. Let's look at how we environment and save money. These are two messages that don't really fit together naturally. They're not the same thing. And the client may say, Well, the scheme helps people save money, but it's about helping the environment as well. So how do we fit those two things together because it doesn't seem like a natural fit well, but let's combine them in the proposition if we can. Proposition is save money on the planet. At the same time. Very straightforward. Obviously we won't go to market with that. We'd probably turn it into a campaign light. So save some green simple. So you can see how this could campaign out quite easily in one single image, in one single headline or strap line. May be you talking about saving money by showing a picture of the forest or something like that. So let's look at another example. For instance, hassle-free and earn points. Well, two different messages. Let's assume that both equally important, or at least on the surface of things, we need to combine them and can we do that? Well, what about this proposition? The extra points without the extra hassle? Quite simple, isn't it? Than they do actually go together when we explore it. String pool campaign line points for not trying. We've all heard well you didn't do that, but points for trying. Well, here we've got points for not trying because it's totally household free. You don't have to dry at all. Now let's look at number two, player number two, the rockstar. Let's assume we cannot make a direct association that's nice and clean and compelling and a single message. Well here what we can do is establish a clear hierarchy of messaging. In other words, we decide what is the biggest priority for our audience. We ask ourselves this question, what is the biggest priority for our audience? Is it message a message be the answer. The message we decide is the bigger priority. This will be the headline act. There'll be the star of the show and the one we're going to spotlight. While the remaining messages, the support act, think of it like a festival ticket. In order to sell a festival, they always have a headline act. And that's probably what's going to get most people go into the festival in the first place, but they still need to support that cell so people see greater value in the ticket. And the goal is not just the headline. I'm not sure getting one or two bands, I'm getting all these other bands as well. Well, we can follow the same principle. We use the headline act as the main cell for the support enact just adds extra value. So let's look at an example. Let's ask ourselves this question. What's the biggest priority for our audience? If it's helping the environment, if that's more important than our message might be, go green, unsaved, a little green tea. If on the other hand, the priority is saving money, then it will flip the other way. So if saving money is more important than it will be save a bit and do your bit. Suddenly the main thing is save a bit is saved them money. But the belly bonus is you get to do you're better at the same time. Because most people, if they can help the environment as well, Great. But maybe the more concerned with saving money. But then there are other people who, they're more into saving the environment and that's the most important thing for them. That's the most important consideration over money. But if it gets to save a little money too, then it's an added bonus once again. So again, there's the two are crowd one. If you've got two messages, rather than just dilute your ideas and crowbar these two things into the same execution. Just do the work at the proposition stage. Either make a direct association between the two, which you may find you can also do in the imagery as well with the idea. Or you can, let's say you've got a client says I want to say this and I want to say that take the client's wish out of the equation by focusing on the audience and then ask yourself, what's the biggest priority to them? What do you think is going to spark the emotion and desire in them for them to take action, What's going to have the biggest say? Then you just choose the star message and you use the other one in this polar. Now whether it's a support in element in the headline as we've shown here, campaign line, or whether it's just somewhere else on the advert or whatever it is, getting in there at some point will tick that box. But it just doesn't get in the way. It doesn't muddy the water when it comes to a compelling proposition. There you go. There's the curve balls, but it out for little home runs. And now you've got everything you need to write a powerful proposition. What did we learn here? We've learned that a proposition is a single message to the audience. Basically, if you have a strong proposition, it sets you up for a successful creative campaign and makes it so much easier to come up with creative ideas. And the great news is there are several ways we can originate a proposition. And if we know how to do this, it really does give us a great advantage is created because first of all, we'll come up with more ideas, will come up with better ideas, will be able to drop on it a lot faster. Identify what's important, right, a strong proposition, and get down to business of you like. And also, we are talking here about crafting a proposition, making it easier and more effective for us his greatest, but also it actually adds value to you as a creative. If you can write creative propositions for your clients, for your businesses, no matter what capacity are doing it, it makes you really valuable. First of all, you make every campaign better by default. But also you're offering something that not many people can do. You can group benefits together, build a brand story, create values and heritage and all these things. It's a lot of strings to your bot as a creative, I'll go out on the lemon, say 99% of people don't have that ability to do it. Based on my experience working in advertising. And Chris will tell you the same thing. 24. MODULE 5: ARM YOURSELF WITH THE FACTS: This is a nice, short and sweet module simply because there's not a lot of theory to it, There's not a lot required in terms of examples are exercises for you to get. It's really simple and it's quite a refreshing change after the last couple of heavyweight modules. But it's no less important, the creative process. And we'll show you exactly why that is NMOS. What you're about to learn in this very short module. First of all, why the smallest facts concern the biggest creative ideas, the kinds of facts and figures we should be looking for. And then we can use and how we can actually find the creative inspiration in so-called dole information. What seems like a banal little bit of statistical data, for instance, could actually lead to a really great idea that we wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Also, how we can find the emotional benefits in the rational details. Because at this stage we may actually still not have a clear proposition. The idea in having the fact gathering process at this stage in the course and in this stage in our order of thinking and order of working is that in most cases, by now we'll have the proposition. We'll have our strategy. We will know our, our audience. We'll have our benefits or lie down. And then it's about moving onto actually coming up with the concepts themselves. Now, the data and the facts and all the figures and little details around the brand story or around a product or a service. These are the little things that are going to help us. They're going to support our storytelling through creative ideas. And in many cases they're actually going to trigger new ideas on those. So while we've got those, we can also not only reinforce our propositions, but actually still come up with a proposition or a benefit if we're still working on that side of things. The important message here is to become a fact magnet as a creative. This will help me rise above the creative thinkers who actually don't do this. The process is very simple. It's all about gathering all available information that may be relevant to your creative message. Because at first glance it may seem quite innocuous, quite an incident lower fat, but actually when you start to think about it, you start to think, Oh, this is quite powerful. This is very beneficial for the audience and this can support our core message here. If not greater core message around. Now it's very tempting to skip this step. Listen, I'd probably skipped in the past, in the long distant past before I realized the true power of this part of the creative process. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run. If nothing else, it means that you're not leaving anything on the table, if you like, that you could have brought to the creative party, gives you a better look at the bigger picture. You get to see the whole picture if you like, because there can be all kinds of information lurking in all kinds of nooks and crannies that your client or anyone else involved in a creative project might not have thought to tell you, or they may not think it's important. And you might, you might spot something and say, Well, we can really make something out of this. It's definitely worth doing just to know that you've covered all your bases. It can also help to differentiate your offer. That's the key thing, is supporting your unique message. Whether that's a unique selling point, whether it's a unique brand essence, or whether it's a unique way of putting your story across. Simply pour the smallest details can inspire the biggest ideas. Now, the thing with putting this part of the course here, where it is, after we've written our propositions. The main thing really is that once you've written your proposition and you've really looked at your audience and you've developed your strategy. You're in a much better place when it comes to analyzing information and examining what's there in terms of whether it's an a brief, whether it's on the company website, whether it's in the company history, whether it's going for a tour of a factory or anything like that, you're on the lookout now for facts that are going to support your argument. Essentially, a bit like a lawyer will be when building a case before a juror, looking for any kind of little tiny detail that will support the bigger emotional south to the court. So you have in your brain something called the reticular activating system. This switch is on when it thinks something is important. Remember we talked about the brain filtering out most of the information that comes your way simply because it has to ask to make a decision. It has to be the nightclub bouncer that either let something in or turf something out onto the street and says, No, you're not coming in because you know are important. Well, once you've started to think about a proposition and start to think about strategy and everything In your brain will tell you that ain't nothing like this is important. This is the task at hand. I'm now going to look out for anything that might support what I'm doing. For instance, if you've ever thought about buying a particular car, you've just bought a car, you'll start to know is more types of that car on the road? Not that they weren't there before. It's just that they weren't important to you before. But now because they are, you start to notice them in your environment. So where can we go looking for these facts? Imagine yourself a little bit like you're on CSI Miami. You're a forensic expert. And you're looking at you go into the crime scene and you're examining the scene for a fact. So we want to be a little bit like that. We want to be a bit like Sherlock Holmes, if you like. But where can we go looking for these facts and figures and data? Because you may get provided with them. You may get a big, huge file on them, but you may not. And you may have to do this yourself. A lot of the time in the creative world, you have to use your own initiative. You can't rely on anybody else to do your homework for you. Well, there are a lot of places. I mean, these are just a few there are all kinds of places you can go looking book, let's say you're dealing with a physical product where you can look in the manufacturing process. For instance, there's something that happens in the process that sets your project part. For instance, I remember watching a documentary on McLaren cows, the actual racing cars, but the road cars. And they had a guy there who all he did was just in fact the paint work. And if it wasn't absolutely perfect, it all had to get done again. Basically, the car was not going out. If it had any tiny inconsistency on the body work whatsoever. It was so meticulous. Now that's potentially powerful. If you think about a selling point, it says a lot about the quality of that car. You could find facts and figures in the supply chain, especially if you work in business to business, you can really pull something out of these light. You know, how fast is the shipping, how sustainable is it? Then you've got testimonials and case studies. They speak for themselves really. What do current customers think? What do you current clients think? You've got your return on investment numbers for customers and clients, say your advertising agency for instance, it's all about return on investment. A lot of people see something like advertising and they say a cost. Well, if you can show them the actual return on the investment, they stopped seeing it as a cost and they can start seeing it as a way to make money, for instance, of disband or pound or a dollar bill GOT ten back. Well, that's certainly a good investment, isn't it? You no longer in the negative thoughts cycle of, Oh, what's this going to cost me? You're thinking, what's this gonna make me? So you've got historical facts and timelines as well. Let's say you've got a brand that's been around for a 100 years, it's proven it's trusted anything. This is a brand that's not going anywhere. People have been buying it for a 100 years. That means something. You've got global or local reach. If you've got a global reach of offices, of networks, of staff who were in a far better position to serve the customer. And you can deliver on bigger promises as well. You've got company policies and principles. Mean, let's say sustainability is important to you. Let's say, for instance, you're in procurement in a big company and you are looking for a supplier. Well, if you're a supplier in your marketing yourself business-to-business to that company. They're gonna be looking at what you do with a fine tooth comb and you can pull things out like that if you've got principles in place and policies in place that you follow that fit with their business, Then suddenly that becomes a selling point and it's a much easier decision for them to work with you and buy from me. Then you've got the people who work within the business, the experts that you've got, you've got the care that goes into the design and manufacturing process. Courtesy those people and courtesy of the procedures that you follow. As we've already mentioned, you've got Testing Standards that each product must pass if you've ever been to ikea and you see the little robot arm testing the chair, almost like simulating the bottom sitting down. And every time That's just demonstrating to you that every product has stress tested. And you can make something of that if you want, if you wanted to do a campaign or an advert, you could make something of that little fact. Then you've got social proof reviews. For instance, this is kind of more like social media stuff that you can highlight. You've got sales figures, for instance, 10 million sold or convincing, is that all right? I've already sold 10 million or maybe market position. Then you've got shipping, packaging and delivery times. You've got customer satisfaction, you've got all kinds of things you could go on doing this. And you're gonna find something that you can use. 25. Turn Small Facts into Big Ideas: Here we see how we can turn little things like facts into bigger emotional benefits that will fuel our new ideas. So let's look at the DNS tab to start with. We can use this little process to not only get hold of the facts, but turn them into something as well. So let's say you take a pint of Guinness, the new 15-second tap. It means that the person beyond the bark and now pour the paint a lot quicker because it's now a one part poor rather than a two-part poor, where they have to follow the pattern and leave it and then carry on again. There's no waiting. Basically. We've looked at our product, we've researched it, we've identified a fact. Now, the task is to magnify an emotional eyes it into a benefit. Well, what's the benefit? Well, it means faster service and smaller weight times. That means for customers, they're happier and the staff for happier in the bar owners happier because it's better for his staff, because there's smaller cubes is less stress. Ultimately, as a customer, you don't have to wait for ages for your paint. So everybody benefits, essentially, everybody's happier because it's just a faster experience. And of course it's gonna be better for business as well. Because if you, you know that you go to a pub or a bar and it's gonna be, it's always a long wait time. You're less likely to want to go there. You're going to want to go to the place where they can serve a pipe faster. The other thing is if people don't have to wait as long for the bar, they don't have to queue as long. First of all, they can probably get an extra drink a1, a2, which is obviously going to be better in terms of profits for the bar owner. And it's just gonna be better for the brand or around. And of course, if you can turn these things around faster, maybe a needle I stuff as well. It's gonna cut your overheads and maybe the staff aren't going to want to leave if it's too busy and things like that. So we can actually turn this now into a proposition. We can say, good things now come without the weight. So we can play on the establishing proposition by emotional ising it and promoting it in this way and turning it into a proposition. What we can do is it's actually support in the brand value. Now, it's turning into money for the client and that's what we're delivering for them. Or if it's our business, that's what we're delivering for our business. Essentially monetizing a fact in many ways because we're using it to add this perceived brand value, improved sales, improve experiences, and all this kind of stuff. It's very much a process, a little bit of a production line. Let's look at the BMW example now. Here you've got BMWs waiting principle outlines. So the product is the BMW three series. The fact that we've identified is the 5050 weight distribution is kind of a principle that they apply to their cars. Now, maybe it applies to all other cars, but in this instance it's relevant to the BMW three series which were promoting. Once you've identified the fox, we need to magnify an emotional eyes it into a benefit. What does this mean? Well, what does this 5050 distribution mean? It means superior handling and ride. What does that mean? Now, at the moment, superior handling rides still technically a feature. We've taken a fact and gone. This is a feature of this car, has got superior handling around, but it's not emotional eyes yet and it's not magnified rarely, we're not really getting, squeezing the most out of it. So how can we do this? How can we turn it into a benefit that then evidences proposition and our brand promise and all this stuff. Well, it means more fun for driver and passenger. That's essentially what it means. If you've got a nice arrived and better handling and everything like that, it's more comfortable for the passenger. It's better for the driver because they can enjoy the handling and throw it into a corner and it will handle easily. So basically this supports the proposition. Then the proposition supports the brands. So this supports their wider strap line that they use or they are currently The Ultimate Driving Machine. Why is it The Ultimate Driving Machine? Because it's more fun for driver and passenger because it's got superior handling ride, because it's got a 5050 weight distribution. Again, just going through this little chain. Once we got the fact it's not enough to just go, Oh, we've got a fact. We've got to, first of all go, how is this fact to feature houses, this leads to a benefit. It does this essentially what does it do for the customer? But then the benefit is, how does it make the customer feel the audience rather than the customer at this point, they have not bought one yet. Then ultimately, how does that benefit support the proposition and therefore art, brand value? As you can see, there are two important phases to the fact arming process, harming ourselves with the facts. First, what we need to do is adjust our scope to look out for those facts and figures that we can turn into creative gold. If we know what our proposition is, it can help us pick out the small data-driven details that will help us do this. It will almost like We'll see more inspiration in it because we can go, Oh, that's something we can use in your reticular activating system, as we mentioned, is on the lockout so you're more likely to spot them. But let's not forget, we can also turn fats into benefits and subsequent propositions which we're not wedded, even though this is a good system to work to God order in which to work too, because it will help you identify the facts we're not wedded to that. If we haven't got a clear proposition, let alone a strap line, we need one. Well, we can actually use the fact gathering process at the earliest stage, going arm ourselves with the facts early on in order to lead to a proposition. Second, we need to emotional eyes, the facts into benefits, and perhaps even a proposition itself in order to drive the creation of this rock solid, evidence-based idea that could be, it could be super wacky, but it's also going to be grounded. Now if you keep this transition in mind, this kind of a little bit of a conveyor belt system when you're working, it can help you spot the small facts with the potential and then obviously you still need to turn them into something. So that's the other part of the job. As we mentioned earlier, this may have already been done for you. And all you have to do is then focus on creating a campaign ideas Around a particularly unique factors being predetermined, say is the hub of the campaign. The products has got this feature which we've identified as a benefit. We want to build the proposition around that and this is what it is. But if it's out of these kind of Jason Bourne levels of creative trade craft, these all-round skills with we're gonna be this creative Swiss Army knife. We need to know how to do this ourselves, for ourselves, for our business and any colleagues or clients or anything like that, depending on what angle you're approaching this from, whether you're the business owner, whether you're an actual creative, whether your CD, whoever you are. Essentially we can spin these small scientific facts into bigger emotional benefits themselves. These can then form the platform for our creative thinking, or they can support what we're already doing in our concepts. The Guinness tap, for instance, means faster service for customer and business. While BMW is waiting, principle means more fun for driver and passenger alike. Just to give you another example, I was watching a documentary about the Boeing 747. They were onto model number eight and it was all about celebrating the 747 and telling the story of it is a plane that revolutionized air travel in many ways. Save Boing. Not only did it threatened to wipe the company out of it, but in the end it saved them. Now, the seventh floor seven, they sell them to outlines. The costumer. One of the features on the 747 was that the other brand new wing. Now this wing means it's far, far more fuel efficient. So what do you think it's really important to airlines? Its efficiency? Because the more efficient the plane is, either the greater the profit in each flight or the more they can bring down the price so that they can sell more flights to customers. And that's just one other way you can turn a fact into a cell. What did we learn here? Well, we'll learn that seemingly incent little facts can be your secret weapon has a greater thinker. In fact, the facts and figures behind the business helped to evidence your story as well. Just like convincing a juror, you can convince an audience using facts. But what's important here is you're still using an emotional story. You're not trying to sell on rational facts and figures. You're turning the facts and figures into the story, or you're supporting your story with so-called proof. Now there are all kinds of facts and figures you can use as we've looked at. And you'll probably think of far, far more and you may be supplied with far more sources of information as well. But the main thing is you can turn these rational details into emotional benefits that either make or support a proposition or indeed a campaign. 26. MODULE 6: CREATE THE RIGHT CAMPAIGN: Hello my friends. We're gonna be talking in this module about creating the right campaign. What do we mean by that? Well, we'll be looking at what constitutes an idea. And more importantly, what makes it effective and how these effective ideas can be turned into effective campaigns. Essentially, you can staff with a single thought or concept and turn into something much bigger. We'll also be looking at the importance of creating the right message with the right tone on the right medium. And ultimately, what a good strap line is and how to create one from a proposition, because this is gonna be key when it comes to creating campaigns and also enters when it comes to sparking new ideas. Without further ado. What is an effective idea? Basically, an effective idea is something that we can build a brand or campaign around. Sometimes the brand may already exist or the product or the service. You may even have had campaigns running for years for it. And so it's just a matter of a new campaign that either promotes it in a new way or promote something new about it. But we can also use ideas to build entire brands around because it might be that the brand doesn't launched yet. So we need to come up with an idea that's more about creating awareness that it exists and what it does and for whom. Each effective idea. And therefore, each campaign essentially has three ingredients. And they're always in this order no matter what they are, even if even if you know what media you want to advertise on, you would still start and continue with this order. The first will be to get your message right from the start. I mean, this is fairly obvious, clear proposition that fits the brand and communications and communicates an emotional benefit. This is where we always want to start. Then we want to make sure that we've got the right tone. Because a consistent look and feel will evoke a message. That is, you may have heard the term on-brand. On brand just means in keeping with the brand. If it's a new brand as we've just touched on, then we get to create that from scratch. It's even more important that we set the right tone because then everything else that we have are due for that brand, more or less, give or take, is going to have to follow that tone. Then we need the right medium or media. You may say, we need targeted media to suit the audience and message. Now you might think, well, hang on, Rob. This is a conceptual course. Why are we covering media? And why we covered in this stage before we've actually come up with any ideas. Well, there's a good reason for that. There's a good reason we're looking at this whole thing before we actually dive in to the anatomy of an idea of like actually building an idea as we'll do in the next module. That's essentially because we want a bulletproof are thinking. We want to build commercially viable, robust campaigns and we want to build them on solid ground, avoiding any conceptual quick son now, on earth am I talking about here? Well, this course is about the practical commercial side of creative thinking. That's what it's about greater advertising. Now, we're not treating it like an art form. We're not treating it and just as fun. It's to do with businesses, to do with building your career, building your business, doing this better. You can do it better for your clients or your business. And therefore half better results. So it's not just enough to have a building clever idea. We need good ideas that actually make an impact and get the audience to do what we want them to do. There's nothing sneaky in that. It's just putting our case across in the best possible way so they can make the best decision for themselves. And ultimately, if they make a good decision, it will be to buy our products so they can help themselves. If you think back to when we were talking very early on in this course, I was comparing the creative process a little bit like building a bridge over a chasm. And you're trying to get to the other side where you want the audience to think, what you want them to think. The creative ideas processes the bridge that gets us there. But if we build the bridge on shaky ground or on Sunday V, like it's just gonna fall apart and no time we need to put the foundations in place so that we know what we're doing is right? And what we're doing is gonna be effective and have the correct result. So think of it another way. I mean, down the road from me by walk along the river from where my apartment building is. There's a big building that's been there and it seems to be in there for ages under construction. And you'll find this, say you'll drive into town and you'll see them working behind these holdings. It seemingly forever on the foundations that seems taken forever and months and months for them to lay these foundations. And then months and months longer to actually work on the skeleton structure and everything like that. Then in no time, it seems to suddenly be finished and suddenly it's a shiny new building. You'll come back a month later and it's almost like magic and it's a bit like that with creative ideas, we spend a bit longer doing the construction work properly. And then it makes it so much easier to do the actual creative thinking as we'll be touching on in a moment. And it also makes it more fun as well. So this is not just going to be beneficial commercially for us. It's going to make the whole process a lot more fun to work on as well. Actually. Because it helps us identify the right ideas out of the gate. We're no longer scratching our heads thinking, is this the right thing? What are we doing? We can instantly see how we can develop them as well into a single execution. So we're no longer struggling to develop a campaign. This means we don't waste time on ineffective, irrelevant, or an actionable ideas. For instance, what we mean by an actual is, we may not have the budget to do it. We may not have the resources. We need to know that before we spend time messing with an idea that's not gonna go anywhere, it might not be relevant to the brand in some way. We need to think of these things. When we do this for me, getting this stage right, when we start to think of the right message and the right tone and the right media early on. This creates a bit of a focus when it comes to creating the right idea unless you drop on the right solution much faster. And it also means your ideas will withstand any scrutiny or potential assassination. The President of the USA doesn't drive around in an open top car anymore. There's a reason for that. Is vehicle is bulletproof, everything proof. So when you present to a client or a colleague or whoever, anything they throw at you, your idea is going to stand up to it, withstand the scrutiny, withstand the examination and the tough questions because you are already going to have ask those tough questions yourself and made sure the ideas right from the get-go. Now this adds real value to your brand as a creative. Whether your working within a business, in a marketing department, whether you're a freelancer, whether you work for an agency, whether you own an agency or run an agency no matter what it is, people will think awhile. It's not just that you're creative anymore. It's not just that you have lots of ideas. You have the right ideas. You have ideas that make money for other people. And if you're a company selling to your customers, you have ideas that add value to their lives in their minds. This is really good for adding to your brand. And there's a little example of this. I was in advertising agency for the first time, not my first time in an agency book at this particular one. Many years ago. There was already in all the copyrights are there. He was really experienced at really big reputation. The trouble is he came from a kind of consumer background and he was trying to apply that to what was essentially a job for business to business. And if you've ever tried to do that, It's not the same thing. Business to business is all about the bottom line. It's not about how will this improve my life. He'd done very nice campaign, but it was meant for consumers. It was very lifestyle and unfortunately fell flat. So I was then tasked with fixing the campaign to make it business to business because I pointed that out earlier, honest, this is not business to business is probably going to bump because of that and I bought some other concepts forward and then the client realize that and said, Suddenly I was in, I was the copyright are chosen to do all the ideas from there on it. Because they were looking at me going, Oh, well, he's thinking about what he's doing a bit more. It's tailoring things to the audience and the media and all these things that we teach in this course that added value to my brand and I got the worker. Essentially, this is really important stuff. So it's not just for the creative process, it's not just about making sure we come up with better ideas. It's also going to help you in your business or your career. 27. The Right Message: The first part of bullet proof in our thinking, if you like, is to make sure we've got the right message. First of all, we need to turn off propositions into a strap line. And this strap line is going to anchor everything into one message. So no matter how many pieces of media we're working across, no matter how many individual adverts we've got, the message is always the same essentially that ties everything together. We need to first translate the proposition we've been working on in the earliest stages into a memorable strap line. Because don't forget, we've already created the back of house proposition. That's very nice and solid and clear and lets us come up with good ideas. But in order to create an effective campaign, we need to translate that into one that's a bit more front of valves, that's a bit sexier and better for the audience. This usually means just making it shorter, snappier, catchier, and a little bit more emotive. We can dial it up a little bit. That really does help. Propositions are kind of like if you think of a proposition like your workloads, if you've ever worked in an office or in a uniform, the functional, and they're efficient. They're not particularly exciting. So we need to jazz them up a little bit before they're ready to run a campaign. Because strap lines are a bit like party outfits. The tighter in the word in the sexier in the language. I mean, they make a lot more colloquial as well. So there are actually more relaxed. So you can really do some crazy things with strap lines. I mean, if you think of a strap line like McDonald's, I'm loving it as a pretty least strap line. It's not saying do this, do that, I'll do the other. In fact, in addition to this course, you will find the copyright and faster Glass. There's a section about strap lines in there that I've written. And there's a lot of myths around strap lines. I'll just mention this briefly. I'd definitely recommend looking at the bonus because that will go into great detail and teach it how to do it more specifically. And it will give you different ideas on different kinds of strap lines. But there's something in the book I want to mention here and that's, there's a method that strap line has to be this. So it has to be that or there has to be the other, has to be, you know, it has to be a call to action or it has to cover everything. Well, no, it doesn't it doesn't have to explain everything because it's not floating around in splendid isolation on its own. It's always put at the end of a commercial, or it's always on poster. Boy, it's there. It exists within the idea you've created around that campaign. So with the other words in the other visuals and everything like that, It's just a little stamp at the end to sum up the message for the audience. But we first need to have that summary so that we know how to blow it up into a bigger idea if you like. Let's take a look at an example. Supercar acts. We worked on this proposition earlier. And the proposition was that it was the fastest rho car in the world. So easy picking this one. Whoever wants to be the best is going to want to be the fastest as well, are provided they've got the money. The strap line is simply faster by a distance. So it's saying exactly the same thing. It's saying it's the fastest, but it's just adding that extra little bit. First of all, it's catchier and shorter. But also it's added that extra little emotive pool to a little bit more because sent by a distance. The other day, we're not saying what distance. It could be like a four chord with the Ferrari beats the Porsche by far his belly anything. But it's not about that. It's just about being out ahead of everybody else. That's the appeal of them rarely. As you can see, we've just tied it up. We've made it snappier, we've made it catch here. We made it a little bit sexier as well. Let's look at another example. For something a bit more ordinary. We, if you remember, we had a few propositions for this one. So let's look at them one by 1. First of all, proposition one was connected to everything you love, whenever, wherever, and however you choose. In terms of a strap line, we simply condense it down whenever, wherever. However, that's our strap line every single time. As you can see, it doesn't explain absolutely everything. The connection to everything you love is gonna be in the advertising campaign if we were to do it. But the strap line just creates lucky a little bit of recall when people see it. They think, oh yeah, that campaign. And then whether they think consciously or not, subconsciously, it'll be all that information and all of what they've seen and experienced when they've interacted with that campaign, will be brought back to mine. So second proposition, stay connected, stay current, and stay flexible. The strap line is stay on it. What have we done there? Well, staying connected and staying current, both kind of similar and flexible a little bit as well. It's given you a bit of agility in your life, and it's also keeping your current and keeping you connected with what's going on with other people in your circle. So stay on. It is quite an appropriate strap line. It's also quite, it's very short, very punchy. And it does have the bonus of being a call to action as well. But as we've just talked about, it's not necessary. It's just a nice little hedonic, he can do it. Proposition three, just to show you another variation, stay connected to everything you love. The strap line is simple. Stay closer to what you love. Again, we just dialed up the emotion a little bit by talking about closeness. And it's just that little extra benefit in there. We've also got rid of the word everything and use the word walk. It just shortens it and makes it snappier and simpler to remember, but it's basically the same thing. In fact, we could actually work on that some more. We could just say. It's day closer. Or we could say closer to what you love. If we really spending time hone in that and that's what we probably do. Now proposition for binge and browse to your heart's content with unlimited streaming. That's quite a mouthful, isn't it? To remember? What about Benjamin browser heart out instead, again, we're just amping things up while we're tightening things down. There you go. There's a few examples for the coal plant and as you can see, whenever, wherever, however, stay on it, stay closer to what you love or binge and browser heart. Not only does the audience have a snappy, memorable line to recall, but you also have a real focus as a creative in terms of the ideas you come up with for that, Let's look at another example, the self cleaning cloth, the nanoclusters we invented earlier. The proposition, the dish cloth that cleans itself. Again, strap line one. We've just shortened it down, essentially cleans, then cleans itself. You've also got a bit of alliteration there with cleans and cleans, which just helps. The human mind loves alliteration and loves rhyming and things like that. So whenever you can add that, but rhythm, it really does build more rapport with the audience. And then strap line option two. The one thing you won't need to clean. This is very much just majoring on the benefit. If you notice it's actually snow shorter, then the proposition so we can, we don't necessarily need to shorten it down. So long as we're really summing things up for the audience in terms of the benefit. We're doing it in a colloquial way. I shouldn't use words like that. I'm setting myself up for a folio example of BMW three series. If you recall earlier, this was a real benefit for a real products. And the proposition was 5050. Balance means 100% fun. Now actually we didn't write that proposition earlier. This is one I wrote after done that module. But basically that was the message I wanted to condense the point. I was making that into a little message, so I did 5050 balance. What does that mean in terms of a benefit? Again, the feature into a benefit, well, it means 100% form. And that's just a nice way of thinking about it as a creative because the play on numbers helps it stick in our mind. But we can do better than that. We can reduce it down further. Strap line 5050, balance, 100% font. Sometimes that's what it's all about. It's just taken out those extraneous words, those kind of superfluous words that we don't need. Whenever we can do that, We should do it because it's just extra fat off the bone. We don't need it, throw it away. And advertising and copyright. And that's pretty much kind of a good thought process to work by. Finally example e, Guinness tap. Again, you'll remember this tap speeds up the pouring of goodness paint. The proposition was that the Guinness tap means faster service for customer and bar owner. Well, how can we put this across in a strap line? Well, they already have a very well-known strap line and it's good things come to those who wait. Well, we can play on that. Sometimes you can do this for the brand. If you've already got an existing strap line, whether it's known or not, it doesn't matter too much. You can use it and just give it a little twist. Good things now come without the weight. It's a double benefit. You get in the good thing of the goodness, but you're not having to wait as long as you used to. Actually, we've got another example here. I forgot all about. This is the laptop, the world's smartest laptop review, recall. And actually there's nothing we really need to say or do here is probably why I've forgotten about it. Because proposition and strap line can stay the same. The world's smartest laptop, really simple. I mean, there's nothing more to say than that is the perfectly formed already. There's no other laptop that can say that when it comes to computers, it's all about being the smartest, isn't it? Now it's rare that a proposition is fine as it is, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it is the message here. The other thing to take away from this in terms of strap lines and really honing them down from propositions is that in advertising, less is always more. The more fat you can cut off the bone, the better. That applies to actual creative executions as well. Turning propositions into strap lines is actually a lot like whittling log into a wooden sculpture. Small log can fill up a shelf or act as a paperweight. No problem. It can do the job, it can function. You can do the function of what it's intended to do, but it doesn't look or feel as good as a beautiful wooden carving. Let's face it. People aren't going to have an emotional response to a log. Therefore, they're unlikely to pay for one, but they will have that response and pay for a beautifully carved and polished ornament. That's why it pays to spend the time crafting our final message. Whittling it down to this perfectly weighted campaign strap line. Because in turning your proposition in something aesthetically pleasing and memorable as well, they can then form an emotional attachment to it. And that's absolutely key. 28. The Right Tone: We've covered the right message once we've got this, once we've developed our strap line, nice snappy strap line based on a really strong proposition, we need to make sure that the tone is right as well. And that means capturing the right look and feel. Again. You may think, well, why are you doing it at this stage? Well, because it just informs our creative process really. It stops the randomness of you like who are far more focused. So we actually said that blink has or blind is a bad for creatives. Yes, they are in terms of the early stages when it comes to your biases. But actually having a bit of focus is really good at this stage because you could come up with anything. Part of the problem is not knowing where to start. But if you know where to start and you know where you go in, it's a lot easier to come up with things because it just focuses your mind a lot more. So we need the right look and feel at this stage. And this is going to help us further in coming up with ideas. It's achieved with the TVs visually and verbally. But we must also obey the three Cs as well. Clear, consistent, and congruent, and we're going to talk more on that in a moment. Now think about how Apple work. Think about their advertising. He used these a few times just because they're really good at branding. First of all, less is definitely more with Apple. They never overdo it and neither do the other look or sound anything other than Apple. There's no change from one product to another, from one campaign to another. No matter where you are in the world. Apple is Apple, and that's just how it is. Because it's a very simplified brand, right down to the products in terms of the way they lock and all this stuff. Because it's very consistent, very clear who they are, that really adds to the power of the brand. Let's look at visual look. First of all, we must establish a definite look for our communications that's consistent with the brand. Now, this is just important to bear in mind at this stage when you're coming up with ideas. Because it's like a luxury brand is not going to do something that's gonna look cheap and wacky. And achieve brand isn't gonna do something that looks expensive because it's counterproductive in both cases. In each case they're gonna think of communications that are consistent with the brand. Whenever you create in the brand, again, you want to set a lock that you're gonna be able to maintain no matter what you're doing. Now, this means using or creating brand fonts, Broncos, logos on logo or more. Photography, cinematography, animation or graphic styles or filters. If you're on Instagram, because the visuals must be an extension of the proposition and the brand personality. The brand personality, the needn't necessarily be an extension of the proposition itself, but they certainly must reflect the brand personality. This also extends into verbal field as well. Body language and vocal tone actually communicate the vast majority of what we say, Believe it or not, I think it's only 7% of the words coming out of our mouths makeup for how a message is received. The words we're using actually account for a tiny amount in real life. But actually in print and online, There's no body language or vocal tone. So our choice of words is actually really crucial. And even on TV or in a video at the words need to fit the tone in which the being expressed. For instance, the words you give to a voice-over artist, the tone in which they're reading them and the words that have been red need to sync up. The copy needs to feel right as well to elicit the right feelings in the audience. And that's because congruence convinces audiences need to know who we are and what to expect from us. And a lot of this comes down to tone in both look and feel. Now let's say, I say yes, so funny versus you're so funny. It's exactly the same words, but it's a completely different feel. Whatever I say, I will look into someone's eyes and say, I love you. Alternatively, I'm starting at the TV. Lovey. Again, same words, different fields. Find someone up and say, I'm gonna Kelly versus if I say to them, I'm going to kill you. That's a different phone call and it won't involve the police and one doesn't. So the point here is, if you're not in tune, if everything's not in harmony, campaigns won't ring true for the audience. They'll look at Brandon and go, Well, they're looking like this, but sound in like this. The brand is supposed to be about this. But then the, say in this organic, supposed to be lock-free but big, massive headlines saying 50% off or it's a cheap kind of brand, cheap and cheerful. And then they've got really expensive look in production that looks like a perfume out or something. The only time a cheap brand would do that is if it's making a joke about it. And I've been a nod to itself that it's not actually like that. It's not quote unquote pretentious. But the point is you have to be in tune with what you're selling and who you saw in it too. Because we want to be clear on who we are and what the experience will be at every single point. We almost need like a through line from proposition to execution. And it doesn't deviate from that line. It's just a straight line. This is who we are, this is what we're offering and this is where you're going to get. And this is called congruence. And V naught being congruent. It kills everything it really does. Again, it's the ringing true element. I mean, it can kill everything. First impressions, your tone of voice and your body language doesn't match the words he's saying. Or let's say you're smiling but you're not smiling in the eyes. People will pick up on it, even if they don't consciously think that subconsciously, they'll think something's wrong. Can't trust this person. And it's the same adverse to can't trust the advert. So it can really affect human relationships a lot in all kinds of ways. You may have seen it in movies where you've seen the strap line or the tagline if you like, or the slogan is you may call it on the movie poster. Anything. Oh yeah, that sounds great. I'm in the mood for an action thriller. So you go and watch it. And then the films, something totally different. It's almost like more of like a drama. There's a problem with the movie where it's trying to be two or three things at once and it doesn't know what it is. And then the story falls down. And sometimes that's to do with the story itself. Sometimes that's to do with the fact that the direction is uneven. It's incongruent with what it's claiming to be or what do you think it's supposed to be? Looked at? Social media, for instance, the Instagram has been really successful. Understand congruence. They understand setting the right tone, especially through the look of it. They'll use the same filters. They'll often use the same colors. You will use the same photography style. It'll be the same type of content and it'll all be revolving around one key message or theme that they're putting across about their lives are about the products they're selling or whatever it is. If you look at a good Instagram account, it'll look like a wall of sameness for good reason. Whereas if you look at an Instagram account that isn't very effective, Everything looks different, it just looks like a mess. And you don't know who is this person or business, What's it all about? What am I supposed to take away from it? And in the end, in congruence kills sales. Because if you think about it a lot of the time, the reason you might buy something is because you, if you're not guaranteed to result in your mind, you're thinking, well, my expectation be met, what am I gonna get out of this? And that hesitancy kills sales, also creates buyer's remorse once the book, especially if the product doesn't meet the advertising. The point is, you've got to create the congruence to convince, first of all, to convince the subconscious mind that everything, that it wants this thing so that it will actually talk on the sleeve of the conscious mind and say, Hey, we want this thing. But then also to convince the conscious rational mind that everything matches up. There's no fault it can pick up on to say no, no, this isn't right. I'm not going for this. 29. The Right Medium: So when you've got the right tone and you've already established the message through a good strap line base campaign around, we need to have the right medium as well. Now, it's not our job necessarily as creatives to do all the targeted to book medium XYZ. But we do need to have media remind and we should be asking this question early on as well because it's no good to come on up with the TV out. If someone then turns around and goes, oh, well, this is for social media. You need to know what you're working with from the off if you can and if the brief that you're working on doesn't include that, try and find out early. Now if this i o is gonna be on everything, that's fine. But at least we know that. Again, there's no good doing something huge campaign with a huge budget. We'll do this, we'll get this director and we'll do this. We'll have things on fire and CGI, Indiegogo and everything. And then they say, Oh, well there's no budget for that and there's nine of budget. You need to know what you're working with because it creates those beneficial blinkers if you like this stage, time and place, as I'm sure you're aware, a key for creative communication. The audience needs to see or hear your message to interact with it. This means we need to communicate in the places they hang out. In many cases, we may actually get to choose the media as well. It's not only just thinking, can we actually do this idea in the right way, it's also thinking about how can we target them with our message. Because when we talked about where the hanging out, it might be where they work with live on the way to work, on the way home, where we can jump out on them with our advert. The choice of media, as I've mentioned, changes, how the campaign will work. Actually, it's not just a difference between doing, say, a printout and a TV ad. That's fairly basic. And I was gonna be a big difference was also things like social media. The way you advertise on social media is completely different. How you would advertise on the TV. It's a softer sell because people don't want to be hit by heart. So adverts on social media, for instance, take Facebook. They know that the primary objective for Facebook is to get as many people on there and keep them there. Because they know. The more people that are on Facebook, the more clients will come to them, you know, to spend money on advertising with them. We need to think about that as well because that will affect the kind of ideas that we have. And as we mentioned, budget is key as well. Because an idea needs to work within monetary constraints. And the more we can think about this as creatives, again, it makes us more valuable. We're not just thinking of coming up with clever ideas and form things and go look at this as wacky. And we're not just the people who can do that where the people who can actually grounded in reality, make sure that it works and not waste precious time and precious money on coming up with things that just aren't realistic. Ultimately, it's not about obsessing over things like tone, brand guidelines, budget, and media, but just being aware of any factors that are going to impact our ideas later on. So we can avoid wasting time and even use it as a way to focus our minds to new ideas. For instance, there is a line of thinking, very strong line of thinking out there that says, you shouldn't pay any attention to previous campaigns or recently rejected ideas like you're presenting to a client. They've rejected this type of idea before, or they've done the campaign before. Maybe even the campaigns bummed for whatever reason and the logic stands up in theory, you don't want to limit yourself creatively or put any blocks in the weights and new ideas before you even get started. You don't want to have the brake pedal on for sure. But in real-world, it actually pays to know what you're up against in a sense, especially if a similar idea as bummed, of course, why would you want to do the same thing again, if the audience doesn't responded to it. There's also nothing more deflating the working hard on an idea. Let's assume it's not your business and you do have a client and some ones and present to. If you present it to a colleague or a client or a boss, only to find out that it's actually been done before and even worse, it has been rejected before. You develop the idea only to find that it's not executable. You can't execute it properly. For this brand and agency involved do want to turn that technical or rainbow idea. You've got into 50 shades of brown. That has happened to me. Plus whoever you're present in the idea to be at the client or colleague or the audience. They're not going to thank you for coming up with the same thing they didn't like before. I'm gonna go Oh, great, more of the same stuff I didn't respond. I don't resonate with or don't understand or gatt or the bummed. Why leave yourself open to going down ruined, spending a lot of energy to find out that what you've done it doesn't work or isn't liked. The probably look at you and go, well, why have you just showed me something I've already seen again On top of that actually one of the biggest blocks to creative ideas is that people don't know where to start. I think that's one of the biggest problems. It's like we write in, okay, I'm a copywriter and one of the biggest problems I think, because I've experienced as well, is not knowing how to start a sentence. But if you know where to start, if you can just have those few words to get you go in, it's just a lot easier once you get on a roll. It's a bit like the snowball effect. An awareness of the practicalities can actually help you to focus on a specific strategy or maybe a way forward. And therefore, you can then start to think of creative solutions within the boundaries of what you're working with. What we're looking for essentially is to establish a Goldilocks zone to work within if there are no practical limitations and great, fantastic, but otherwise, and in most cases, it will make sure our creative solutions prime to sell as much as the art to inspire. Because that's all important. Not just selling to the audience, but also sell into a client and getting the green light and going through so we want a Goldilocks, the porridge essentially, when it comes to message, when it comes to tone and media. Here we've developed a simple test to make sure that you're not too hot, not too cold, but just right in the kind of ideas you're primed to come up with. 30. Goldilocks the Porridge: Now, if you'd rather just smash out some ideas fast and then apply this little test after you've got a wide variety of different concepts, of course, go ahead book. You can use this method to cut to the chase. Essentially, you can develop a more strategic approach from the off. And it just takes a little bit of the randomness in the guesswork out of the process. But let's have a look through how we just can't test our thinking from the get-go. So let's take an example to show you. Let's say we've got a universal travel card up. So this travel card works for boss, it works with training, works for whatever. So let's look at first at right message. What's the right message? Well, what we're setting for ourselves as parameters. So the core message needs to be on-brand and in tune with the audience. Let's say we're developing a proposition here. And we're going to develop it into a strap line. And then we're gonna think about what kind of campaign we can build around that strap line. First go at it. Is the product AX, this travel card Axe makes life easier. Well, okay, that's a benefit. Essentially, that's what it's set up to do, but it's vague, isn't it? What would you mean make life easier? In what way? What you're talking about? Then we can say product tax makes travelling easier, okay, so it's a bit more specific but it's really passive. It's like, okay, this travel card makes it easier. So what, how does that benefit me? Well, let's say product tax makes all your journeys easier. Alright, okay, suddenly it's about me. It's about my journeys at specific, probably just about right there. It's very clear. I know what to do with that. So let's say that's the right message, okay, then right tone. Again, it comes down to this whittling analogy. We want to whittle it into something better to work with. So it's more emotive and it's more memorable essentially. And we can connect to it a bit better. What's the parameter here? Well, the total needs to fit the brand and the audience while still moving the emotional needle. Nothing complicated about that. But remember, a moment ago I talked about creative focus. It gives us a bit more focusing. Well, what kind of straight line? Well, this is straight-line, needs to say travel with these, we say the proposition is product tax makes all your journeys easier. Essentially, we shorten it down. We get traveled with easement yet, but it's bit clunky. But on knows it's not very memorable, it's not very sexy. Whatever we turn it to travel smarter. That's the bit less on the nose. Connecting to an emotion and things like that. Travel smarter is probably the right kind of message, but it's just a bit boring again, it's not really vulnerable. It's harder to build a campaign around that. This is what we're talking about when it gives you a bit of focus when it comes to building a campaign by doing a little bit of message work in tone work at this stage, it can lead into a campaign, be easier as well when you come to do your thoughts. So what we'll do, we say when we travel in smarter, it's kind of like we've gotten this course, we've gotten injured tips. So travel like a ninja. I'd say that's tough, right? It's creative but people can get it. It's essentially saying travel smarter, but just in a more creative way. And then a nice short, memorable way as well. Let's go with that. We've got travel like an integer. Now we look at right media. Well, the idea must work within the confines of the relevant media, brand guidelines and budget. And you'll notice these are generic parameters, not saying most work in one thing or another. Note, just a generic parameter that makes us think, okay, what are we working with? So let's say we go, Okay, We'll work with pressing magazine ads. That's gonna be two traditional for this. It's an online app that's not really going to cut it and it's very limited. Well, what about posters, billboards, and point of sale is to local. We want to sell without nationwide. So we're gonna have to go TV, online ads, social media, and e-mail. Now that seems just about right. And also it gives us a clue as to what kind of budget we're gonna need. And if we've got to make our budget stretch, maybe we need to be a bit more inventive with how we work our creative messages through. Maybe we need to do more focus on social media. This is where knowing your budget comes in really handy because let's say, okay, we're going to get national coverage while we haven't gotten enough budget for TV out. Okay, well, we know we need to work with social media. We now need to do online ounce email, and maybe we need to do something viral as well. So we can now look at this and go, okay, well, we're looking at travel. I can injure a lot social media stuff, maybe some viral things. Maybe we can do a video online as opposed to TV. So we can still do the equivalent of a TV out, but we don't need to pay for all his TV stuff. It doesn't need to be quite as big budget. Maybe there's an opportunity for a flashmob thing where we can film that, then that can go viral and do a lot of the work for us, do a lot of the heavy lifting for us on a lower budget will travel like a ninja. Well, what about if it was a ninja flashmob in a train station? Not only do you get the local attention, but you get the national attention to. So you can imagine the campaign around travel like an injury of the ninja pops up and go ninja says, traveled, do this, do that, get the card, etc. You can now have a lot of fun with that. And you can not only do a scripted and filmed little advert for that, but you can have these flashmob moments as well and film audiences reaction, you've got a bit of variety with that. What you've also got then is it face for the campaign? You've got a memorable character. And it turns something that's fairly ordinary into something interested in. There's a fresh twist in there. You've got the familiar side of travel and travel cards and things like that. But then you've got the fresh twist on it. You've got the interesting thing on it that makes people pay attention. That's just one example of how we go the locks and porridge. And as you can see, we're powerful way of not all the way to an idea already with a strap line and a bit of a plan of attack of how we go about executing it as well. And all we were doing was just focusing on what we need to do with our creative ideas. That's all we were doing. And all of a sudden we've got a bit of an approach is just a good start of ten. We can build on that. We can do some more ideas. We can do some other strap lines, but by just focusing the mind, it just gives us subconscious something specific to do. It loves specific instructions. And that's what we're doing. We're given it some instructions of this is the kind of thing we need. And it will start to kick things back to us right away. So try it both ways. Try sit down and coming up with some ideas without this process. Try it before you sit down and come up with the ideas and see what works for you. But I think it really does help to just get you in the right frame of mind and on the right track. From the off. Just like this travel card, it makes the creative journey a bit a smoother and easier. So what have we learned in this module? Well, we've learned that effective ideas and campaigns carry the right message. They set the right tone and they appear in the right place at the right time. And it's very important for us to think of when we're in the early stages of the creative process. And effective idea basically must work within the confines of the brand as well. You may have to work with a set of brand guidelines and a set of messages that already exist and you need to work within those. Some of them can be quite constraining. So you just need to understand the limitations of your like it because it's easier to do that from scratch than it is to create an idea and then go OK, now we have to squeeze it into this brand guidelines, into this, we have to have this border and we have to have this font, and we have to have this line on everything in this logo and stuff like that. We have to say this and we have to say that there's nothing worse than having to dilute an idea that there was really pure and lovely into something that looks like some sort of mutated version is much better for your own sanity, understanding what the limitations are, and then you can kind of tailor it to that. And it's just a lot easier to work with. Think about the confines of the brand and think about the resources as well as in who's actually going to create this. Because If an idea can't be executed later on properly, it's going to affect the power of the idea itself. We also learned that propositions basically for our own use, while strap lines are for public consumption. So we need a really good, sexy, short, snappy strap line. There'll be memorable. And if we do that, we could create a strap line that could last years and could actually creep into common parlance if you like, into pop culture, for instance, just do it. And strap lines are generally sleeker, generally sexier. And in most cases, it's fairly easy to do if you've got a strong proposition.