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Get in touch with your insensitive side
By D.J. O’Neil
Founder and Creative Director of Hub Strategy. |
I once had a girlfriend who told me that the only thing sensitive about me was my skin. And I’m pretty sure I get more and more insensitive every day. To a degree, I think, that’s true for all of us.
Try this experiment: Turn your TV on, and write down what you see. MSNBC reports that 45 Iraqi’s are killed by an IED. Larry King interviews a 16-year-old-boy that slept with his high school teacher. A CSI specialist cuts into the body of a dead guy.
Everyone knows how bombarded we are by media. But consider for a moment how dramatic the content of all these messages is and how insensitive to this drama we’ve all become.
Remember the first time a hostage was beheaded in Iraq? It was the lead story on every news source globally. After a few more beheadings, however, the subject received second-tier coverage. Today, as a write this, the Taliban beheaded an Afghan officer, and the story is buried below the fold on CNN.com (way below the story about the armed beauty queen who thwarted some thieves).
We’re talking about some serious shit here. Yet the more we see of it, the less sensitive to it we become. Who knows? It’s probably a defense mechanism so we don’t all go nuts simultaneously.
At this point, you are probably asking yourself what this has to do with advertising. Or my sensitive skin.
Well, as advertisers we seem to be overly worried about offending the consumer. Plainly put, we fear that we will piss people off and they won’t buy our stuff.
I’m here to argue that offending the consumer is, in fact, a lot more difficult to do than we think. Because of the content they are served every day, consumers have developed a very thick skin. This “increased insensitivity” makes it extremely difficult to emotionally connect with them at all. As advertisers, our biggest fears shouldn’t have anything to do with offending these people. They should have everything to do with being ignored by them.
We once ran a half-page ad for a client, the Slingbox, in USA Today. The headline boasted that the Slingbox was, “The best thing to happen to the business traveler since pay-per-view porn.” 2.3 million people would see this ad, and we all expected an onslaught of complaints. But they never came. Not one.
Another time, we developed outdoor for a local radio station, Energy 92.7. We jokingly presented one concept with a headline that said, “Clubbing is no longer just for seals.” (Energy plays club music). The CEO of the station said, “Why don’t we just run it and see what happens?”
This frightened even me. An ad like that in (of all places) San Francisco? I feared the PETA people would track us down and burn our houses to the ground.
After a lot of discussion, we decided to run it. We agreed that we’d put the people who called to complain on the air, have an on-air discussion, a vote and ultimately let the people decide whether the billboard stayed up or came down.
We put the board up--a big one--in a high traffic location. Three days later, the CEO of the station called me. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “We’ve gotten no complaints. Not one!” He sounded pissed off. “You told me we’d get a ton of complaints.”
Finally, someone did complain. But the ensuing on-air discussion ultimately ended up with the vast majority of the callers saying, “Oh, who cares? Lighten-up, it’s just a joke.”
My point isn’t that we should try to make our advertising more offensive. It’s just that as advertisers, we hold ourselves to a stricter and more conservative definition of offensive than what today’s audience would hold us to. If we hamstring ourselves with an overblown fear of offending the consumer, we’re truly screwed. The consumer, unlike my skin, is not nearly as sensitive as we think.
Great creative needs to be unexpected to connect emotionally with the consumer. And if we can’t push to the edges, we’ll be stuck in the middle. And that’s not very unexpected.
D.J. O’Neil is the Founder and Creative Director of San Francisco–based Hub Strategy.
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