Ad Critique

How to Deconstruct Ads in Order to Build Better Advertising

Nancy R. Tag

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781506319513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ad Critique teaches advertising, marketing, and management students--both the "suits" and the "creatives"--how to effectively judge and critique creativity in advertising. This textbook is an instruction manual; a facilitator of dialogue; a companion piece to classroom content. Its lessons result in actual skills that enable students to look at the creative product and embolden them to say something constructive and worthwhile.

P A R T 1

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The Language of Critique

C H A P T E R 1

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The Case for Critique

Why We Need Constructive Criticism to Make Great Ads

Befriending the Beast

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As a professor of advertising, I begin each semester with the same statement: “Most advertising stinks.” That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of terrific brand building, perception shaping, and hard-selling stuff on the airwaves and in the award books. But the vast majority of advertising is as invisible as wallpaper. Or as annoyingly offensive as gum on your shoe. At its worst, advertising can seem like a big, stinky beast that forces itself down our throats and leaves an ugly taste in our mouths. Consumers are inundated. Promoters become more beastly aggressive. We begin to lose sight of what we’re looking at. This is bad. By definition, bad advertising is advertising that’s ineffective. And ineffective means that it hasn’t met its strategic objectives. By that measure, most would agree that there’s more bad stuff out there than good. In other words, most advertising stinks.

This point must be made right upfront. Otherwise, you will be destined to mimic the advertising that we all experience in the real world and add to the pile of dreck that already exists. Of course, we’re bound to do that to some degree anyway. Nobody’s perfect. But if we can acknowledge this framework right upfront, it will begin to reshape our thinking.

Actually, most people are pretty relieved when an expert tells them that most advertising stinks because it pretty much confirms their own suspicions as everyday consumers. But it also begs the question: If bad advertising isn’t effective, why is there so much of it? The answer is almost too obvious. The reason most advertising is bad is because it’s really, really hard to create advertising that’s good.

That’s the simple truth. Good advertising is really hard to do. It relies on smart collaboration. Fresh strategic insight. And lots of creativity. Advertising can falter anywhere along the way. But the biggest wild card of all is the creativity part. It’s unpredictable. Elusive. Difficult to evaluate. And yet creativity is so essential that campaigns can’t survive without it. Without an ability to grab your attention and hold it, the message is just pen on paper. Therefore, creativity really must be a beast. Not a stinky beast, mind you. That would be bad. But a smart, feisty beast that roars.

This is what we call the “creative imperative.” Creativity is not a discretionary component of advertising but part and parcel of it. But not everyone’s ecstatic about this. Certainly the marketer’s life would be so much easier if this weren’t the case. This would make it easier to measure. Easier to predict. Easier to formulate. That’s why business-minded people sometimes espouse reasons to dismiss the importance or even the need for creativity. Marketing textbooks warn management students to be wary of creativity. Many client meetings end with admonitions such as, “Don’t let your creative people run amok!” Or, “We’re not trying to win awards—we’re here to sell the product!” Clients who say these sorts of things (you’ll rarely hear these kinds of statements from Creative Directors) are usually less concerned about the particular weaknesses of any work than about a general fear of creativity itself. Wouldn’t we all just be better off if we found some highly scientific, quantifiable way to execute advertising so all this “loosey goosey” stuff could just go away? Well, no. Anyone who truly feels this way has never understood the reasons behind the creative imperative. And unless you fully appreciate the creative imperative, you won’t find the value in developing the skills of critique. So let’s be unambiguous here. Advertising really does need creativity in order to work effectively. Bill Bernbach, a founder of the legendary ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, said it best himself:

The truth isn’t the truth
until people believe you,

and they can’t believe you
if they don’t know what you’re saying,

and they can’t know what you’re saying
if they don’t listen to you,

and they won’t listen to you
if you’re not interesting,

and you won’t be interesting
unless you say things
imaginatively,
originally,
freshly.

This is irrefutable logic, don’t you think? Bill Bernbach was a genius. An amazingly creative, astutely logical genius. As father of advertising’s “Creative Revolution” back in the sixties, it’s not surprising that he could make such an eloquent case for creativity; he came up from the creative side of the business, starting his career as a Copywriter. What’s surprising is that the ironclad logic of this quote embodies another great truth about advertising: The best creative minds are astutely logical—which may seem counterintuitive to some people. Indeed, some think the hallmark of creativity is illogic. Not true, not in advertising. Logic may not always be immediately evident in the work, but ultimately there must be some explainable reason for why anything is verbalized, visualized, or experienced in advertising. Meaningful creativity should never be explained by “whatever.” Or “it’s subjective.” That’s a copout. Hearing such arbitrary comments over the years has justifiably filled business-minded people with fear whenever creative people enter the room. They fear that creativity has no boundaries. And worse: that creativity has no meaning. But when that’s the case, the work shouldn’t be defined as “creative”; it should be defined as bad. Creativity just tends to take the rap for it. That’s not only unfair but also a huge reason for the vast management/creative divide.

So now we’ve got two main, truly fundamental points on the table. First: In advertising, creativity is imperative. Second: Being creative doesn’t equal total freedom. Art Directors are not fine artists designing ads to express their inner angst. Copywriters are not toiling away to create the next great American novel. They should be a disciplined lot beholden to their client, the consumer, and their fresh imaginations—all at the same time. This means that both sides of the divide need to recalibrate their expectations to some extent. Businesspeople need to embrace creativity, not dismiss it. Creative people need to know, quite definitively, that they can’t be arbitrary; there is no “whatever” in advertising. Asking the two sides to shake hands and agree on these fundamental points may be asking too much, too early in the book. It would require an enormous leap of faith. And why leap when the chasm still seems so wide? However, if both sides had a shared skill—or shared language—perhaps they could more easily reach their shared goals. Perhaps they could bridge the chasm. Then these fundamental points could not only be agreed upon but also truly believed in.

That skill is called critique.

What Exactly Is Critique?

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Critique is basically a discussion-based evaluation of work. Most people, however, don’t know exactly what that means. Unless you’ve done a stint in art college where “crits” are a fundamental element of your studio classes, you may have never experienced a facilitated or formal critique in school. Instead, when most students write a term paper, it’s submitted directly to the teacher. That’s a private act. And the feedback is more or less private through comments directly on the work, in the form of an evaluation rubric, or perhaps during a face-to-face meeting. Throughout your life as a student, it’s rare to publicly discuss work in progress alongside its creator. The very thought of that can be mortifying, which this book will explore in great detail. But before tackling all that, the first hurdle to overcome is understanding what critique is. Nearly everyone gets it all wrong. Most think that critiquing is synonymous with being negative. And in the context of advertising, that sounds pretty appropriate. Everyone’s a critic of advertising, right? That’s very true. However, it’s not what we’re talking about here.

There’s an enormous difference between “critique,” in which one deconstructs an ad in order to understand it and construct something better, and “criticism,” in which one complains about a commercial that’s just interrupted his or her favorite TV show. Critiquing an ad or campaign concept is to talk about it meaningfully. Critique pulls the work apart, examines it, and determines if the elements make sense and if the whole comes together. It’s about discussing whether strategic goals have been creatively and appropriately translated into engaging content. Critique enables constructive dialogue. It’s key to the collaboration that defines the Art Director–Copywriter relationship. It’s what happens when work is presented up and down the line within the Creative Department. It’s what all those creative types do while they’re drinking a beer after work and paying more attention to the ads on the TV set over the bartender’s head. Critique is, quite simply, how work gets better.

Being good at critique doesn’t just make the work better, it’s also the reason why seasoned Art Directors and Copywriters have so much to say during creative presentations. They’re used to talking about the work and what makes it effective. They may not even know that what they’re doing is called critique, but it is. Indeed, it’s so organic to them that they can’t quite figure out why everyone else isn’t as good at it. On the other side of the table, clients can be literally speechless after a creative presentation. They’re not used to talking about creative work in a public forum. It’s a skill that they’ve never really been taught, much less practiced. Imagine how disconcerting it must be for a high-level businessperson, who is used to being in command at business meetings, to suddenly lack fluency in a marketing matter of such importance. This is damaging not just to the psyche but also to the work. Without an ability to critique the work, there can be no real dialogue. It’s as though both sides of the table are suddenly speaking different languages. The process becomes less productive. Relationships strain. The work suffers.

Anyone who’s been to his or her share of presentations has seen this sort of management/creative interaction play out again and again. Creatives speak fluently about the work. Management folks look decidedly less comfortable. The industry has accepted these roles as a given without questioning whether anything could or even should be different. Where does this institutional mind-set begin? In the classroom. At any given moment, advertising professors across the country are showing samples of ad campaigns to their students and asking a simple question: “What makes this campaign work?” Chances are the response to that question will be pretty much the same: crickets. Or maybe students forget the academic setting and suddenly volunteer personal opinions—“Oh! I love that ad!” or “That’s the worst!” The quality of the commentary usually degenerates from there as even the quietest students in the room start mimicking lines or goofy performances from their favorite commercials. From above the idle chatter, the professor tries to wrestle back control of the discussion by asking, “Why? Why do you think these commercials are effective?” Again, the response is crickets, only this time the silence is more deafening because the class had been so animated just seconds before. Frustrated, professors usually offer up their own critique or retreat to the safety of the textbook.

This scenario is common, yet it still leaves instructors peeved. In an age when so many students can recite the lines to their favorite commercials backwards and forwards, you’d assume that they’re also gleaning some meaning from them—especially if they’ve chosen advertising as their college major. Yet when students are asked some pointed questions in an academic set...