How to write one ad (part 1)

When I started at Deutsch in 2015, someone shared a ~15-page deck called “How to do a Volkswagen ad.” The title was suitably off-beat and in fitting simplicity, it assembled elements like tone, style, DNA, and POV into a 3-D model of a classic Volkswagen ad. (I wish I’d kept the deck, but alas it’s a mere memory.)

That was the exception. I’ve found most brands have some combination of 175-page brand guidelines with entire sections on how much buffer room the logo must be given, and a few tonal words like “optimistic” and “inspiring,” plus one that’s a category pun. For a strategist, it’s a start but not one that really nudges you into inspiring new work.

And client briefs are predictably straight and dry. I’ve now spent enough time on ~the other side~ to start to understand why: the number and diversity of stakeholders is immense. Plus, most client orgs also have a bias toward product and category research (and bless them, because I don’t want to be the one to go find out how many bags of chips the Average American dad buys every month). Client briefs have to not be wrong. The embrace of risk is meant to come from other parts of the system.

So we, people tasked with starting things, need to come up with our own system.

A few weeks ago, I picked up a book called “How to Write One Song” by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy at my local bookstore, Timbre. Despite what my age, beard, and Subaru would indicate, I’m not really a Wilco fan. But the book is a fantastic read with gems like this: “To me, showing up with a reliably open heart and a will to share whatever spirit you can muster is what resonates and transcends technical perfection.”

He also gives away the three things he consistently does to feed his songwriting machine:

Stockpiling Words, Language, and Lyrics — doing exercises like freewriting, writing poems, refining, and revising, all of which I’ll talk about in the next
section

Stockpiling Music, Songs, and Parts of Songs — making demo recordings, practicing, learning other people’s songs, and writing parts for songs in progress

Pairing Words and Music- writing lyrics to a melody and searching for matches between stockpiled demos and lyric sets, poems, and freewriting — 42

I’m going to share something that has proven really useful to me when I need to ask creative people to make ads: a simple form of a creative brief. It’s cobbled together from listening to a bunch of smart people do strategy work — from mentors to internet strangers.

A brief’s power comes from the questions it forces us to ask ourselves and the discipline with which we meet them. We can be satisfied with targeting millennial moms and the tropes that come with that label, or we can look extra hard for our own understanding and advantage.

Everyone has their own brief. Here’s mine (in Google Docs form):

Background: Why we’re here, why we’re doing this, why now.

Challenge: The most interesting, ambitious thing marketing can solve.

Audience: A factual, insightful description of who we’re trying to reach, what they care about, how they spend their time, and where they do it.

Cultural context: The slice of the audience’s lives we can occupy and add to.

Strategy: A distilled, directional provocation for how we win with them.

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How to use this:

• Write down what your gut tells you
• Resist the urge to copy and paste from other slides or client briefs
• The background and challenge determine where you go, so spend more time there than you think you need
• Write top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side
• When you love it too much to leave it in word form, delete the section names and read it aloud
• Fix any awkward bends in your story or fill in logical gaps with new or existing research
• Share your out-loud version with a trusted creative person
• If you’re sure you need another section, break the brief. The template is just here to tell your story about how you win.

Have fun with it. Next time I’ll share a comms plan framework.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben