Mariana Simao – 20th November 2011
What is nonsense to you?
It’s a really funny and interesting exercise looking closer at adverts in Europe if you’re not European. Since the style of communication and reaction of spectators are different if compared to the south american market, lots of things in the ad industry seem very, very strange to me. That’s brilliant since it gives me the ability to leave some judgements behind (not having emotional attachments to the brand, for example) and really try to understand what’s behind the ads – if there’s any strategy there at all to be understood.
The aspect I believe most markets around the world have in common is that most adverts and communication strategies have no innovative messages whatsoever, most of them talk about the same things – some more politely and beautifully than others, of course. At this point I could say that it’s probably nonsense to spend money on ads that aren’t new or brilliant… but what about if I ask: is it nonsense to spend money on nonsense?
What I mean by that is that even though some ads are obviously not brilliant, they may have some strategy behind them, a meaning, an objective to being nonsense.
Is a really annoying, “stupid”, or offensive ad worse than one that causes no effect at all on the target?
As an example, recently Nissan launched a campaign in Brazil called “dammed ponies”. The objective was to mock other cars that have lower horse power than Nissan’s ones and showed cartoon-like ponies inside the engine of the car with an extremely annoying but catchy song. For months this was all that Brazil’s ad market talked about and the campaign won several prizes.
This is just one example of the courage a brand has to have to communicate differently. How would Nissan or the agency know for sure what people’s reaction to the annoying ponies would be? They didn’t. There is always the risk that consumers will get irritated by it and associate the brand to this negative feeling. They gave it a shot.
Another thing to have in mind when planning a communication campaign is” how can you know if people will remember your ad just because something is strange about it or if they’ll remember which brand was in it? Even if you could catch their attention by doing something nonsense, do they remember and refer to the ad as “the ponies ad” or as “the Nissan ad”?
With this in mind I asked some people about what “bad” adverts they had seen recently and almost all the answers I got had no brand in them whatsoever… Not good, is it?
So as communication professionals we have to be extremely careful when it comes to producing something unusual. Even if the objective is to shock people in some way, generate awareness, make people talk…. you can’t forget the brand should be in the spotlight somehow.
