When it comes to advertising, every single client wants great advertising. The problem often is, great advertising ideas often scare the pants off clients. “Has that been done before?” or “Can we test it?” are usually the first lines of defense. If you are asking questions like these it should make you wonder why you hired the agency you did in the first place.
There are “hot agencies” in the business where desperate clients line up trying to make up for their other failings with a hail Mary ad campaign that will push them back into profitability. Often times, the old adage that nothing will put a bad company out of business faster than great advertising comes to mind. The reason Burger King can’t compete with McDonald’s has more to do with how clean the parking lot and bathrooms are, and not the quality of the food. Remember, flame broiling beats frying? Burger King’s burgers may taste better, but the rest of the delivery is lacking. Burger King has also been through more ad agencies than any other fast food feeder, other than a 7 year stint with Crispin Porter + Bogusky, it’s been a revolving door.
There are also some people in advertising who are idolized in the industry for doing ground breaking award winning work. We’re lucky enough to know quite a few of them at the Next Wave. We’ve done work for Sally Hogshead, Luke Sullivan, Ernie Schenck, and have open connections with some other big hot shot names. But, there’s one guy who we don’t know, but we know his work. He’s broken all kinds of rules in advertising and made music videos that were unforgettable, his name is Mark Fenske, and he’s been teaching advertising at VCU Brandcenter in Richmond VA (much like our friend and client Luke Sullivan was at SCAD for over a decade). On the front page of his personal site, he has an ad he did for a stock image library, Ibid, around 2004. Its headline, “How to know when you’ve done a good ad.”
And, well, we couldn’t leave it alone, because “good is the enemy of great.” So you can flip between how to do a good ad, and “how to know when an ad is great” seems a lot more important to folks like you who may be searching for the holy grail of advertising genius.
We strongly believe that the best advertising isn’t accidental. It depends on both the agency and the client, being able to work together, to trust each other, it’s more like a marriage than just a transactional one-night stand. When Bob Knight hired two guys and an office manager in Portland to do work for his budding shoe brand, Nike, he’d already been working with an agency in Seattle (John Brown and Partners) that had done an epic ad in 1977 that changed his business - “There is no finish line” but decided to make a switch.
It took W+K all the way until 1999 to come up with “Just do it.” And the rest they say is history.
In your search for great advertising, just remember, almost every amazing campaign wasn’t done by committee, just two people sitting in a room spitballing ideas until they hit the motherlode. The guys who came up with “The Most Interesting Man in The World” for Dos Equis hit the jackpot 20 minutes before the presentation. That the client was willing to run a campaign that begins with “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis” is that squirm/cultural tension that propelled the campaign into the stratosphere. (For the whole fascinating story of how this campaign came to life, we highly recommend listening to the “Tagline” podcast about this campaign)
If you are looking for an agency that can give you great advertising, and you’ve read this far, maybe you should take the next step and schedule a call with The Next Wave Marketing • Innovation. We’re the agency that understands our job is to make you more money than you pay us- and create lust • evoke trust, and we were also smart enough not to name our agency after our founder.
Thanks for reading. Really.