What if I told you that almost all of the ads you’ve ever seen, and all the ones you’ll ever see 一 online and offline, outdoors and indoors, on any platform you can think of 一 are all variations on a few themes?
That’s the audacious idea of ad archetypes.
Interesting but irrelevant? Nope 一 this is important to you as a business owner. Here’s why. It’s long been assumed that:
- To make sales, you need great marketing
- To get great marketing, you need to be super creative
- To tap into super creative, you need to spend big bucks on a fancy ad agency
When I say “fancy ad agency,” you know what I mean, right? Highly-paid, eccentric “creatives” who can somehow conceive of wild concepts and perspectives that no normal person would dream of. Like the famous “Luckies” scene from Mad Men:
Here’s the thing: it’s not true. If most marketing is just derivative, then even normal people (and you are probably in that group) can create effective promotions. If you know the classic ad archetypes, then you can guide your own marketing with a much better chance of success 一 even if you don’t have an amazing and expensive agency behind you.
The source of these archetypes is an Israeli study by Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky, and Sorin Solomon titled The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads. This study was published in the Marketing Science journal in 1999, and I learned about it in the fantastic book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. This study reviewed 200 award-winning ads and discovered that 89% of them could be lumped into just six categories.
So here we go: the 6 ad archetypes and my explanations of each, plus some examples to bring these to life.
1) Extreme Consequences – you exaggerate the positive or negative outcome of using (or not using) your product..
Example: this Chrome ad showing how bad it is not to use their password saver feature.
2) Competition – you position your brand against an “enemy”
One example that comes to mind are the famous “billboard wars” between Audi and BMW. This memorable back-and-forth battle between car makers spanned billboards and drew some impressive insults. Read about it here: Billboard Wars.
3) Extreme Situations – you show your product or service in a crazy scenario.
Example: this Faber-Castell ad. Yes, most of us will not become Rembrandt when we draw. But you could create a masterpiece without ever lifting your pen!
3) Pictorial Analogy – you use a metaphor to show the benefit of your company
Example: I am quite fond of this Berlitz “under the table football” ad. The inability to communicate in English is a terrible handicap in the “game” of business. Metaphors are a beautiful thing…. Maybe one day I will do an article on the utility and elegance of metaphors. But back to our example:
5) Interactive Experiments – the reader/viewer has to do something to interact with your ad, like bending a page, tasting or smelling something, clicking/uploading something, or using your app.
This is hard to show in a blog. Burger King created an app that allows their users (eaters?) to burn the ads of competitors. BK “Burn the competition” campaign.
6) Dimensionality Alteration – shifts the viewer’s vantage point on your company, cause, or product to stop and make them take a closer look. This could be looking at your product from underneath, sideways, or from the inside; I’m going to use an example that is about changing the viewer’s perspective of your company.
Example: GM just makes cars, right? Well, this Super Bowl ad promises that they aren’t just a manufacturer — they are the EV champions of the world, or something like that. (It hasn’t quite panned out that way, but in any case…)
So there you have it. Six archetypes that are applicable to every media available: print, direct mail, outdoor, TV, radio, and social media.
Now it’s your turn.
What is the amazing benefit of buying our product? What is the terrible consequence of not using our service? Who is the “enemy”? How can we present an unusual or unexpected perspective on what we provide? How can we engage our customers and have them do something with our brand? What metaphor would work for the value that we deliver?
Don’t view these archetypes as fixed, rigid rules for what marketing ought to look like. Instead, use them as the starting point for your own creativity. Sit down with your team and use them as a brainstorming tool. Think about the archetypes and play around with ideas until you have a few with enough merit to flesh them out.
Have fun, and see what you come up with. Take these archetypes and run with them, using them to springboard your own creative marketing 一 without the fancy ad agency.
