You can’t cry, laugh, get startled, be afraid, angry, sad, or otherwise without feeling it in your body. I’d like to suggest that every creative brief has a section on it that asks, “how do we want the audience to feel?”.
Part of the Creative Director’s job is to act as filter, a piece of the creative machinery that eliminates impurities. Ideas that aren’t on brief, not original, aimed at the wrong audience, overly complex – and a bunch of other factors that we can save for another day. The more important job is to find and nourish the great idea. When I see a concept that hits me in a physical way, that’s pretty much always the one.
I suggest you do the same. You see that idea and it hits you. You laugh out loud – not because you’re told it’s funny but because your body laughed before your mind made the decision to do so. You got a lump in your throat, you jumped involuntarily in shock, your back went up in anger. You didn’t think, you felt. Powerful stuff. Now all you must do is put that idea into the public space. And therein lies the problem. As a client, you are under pressure to be rational. It’s scary. You are faced with creating a rational argument to get consensus, approval, and a budget on the irrational idea.
Most advertising creative just isn’t effective for one simple reason. It’s logical. It got approved because it hit all the arguments put forward in the brief. Everyone on the team agreed! The folks in accounting liked it too. But nobody ever talked about it later. Rational makes most people in any given organization
You might say “but manipulating people’s feelings in the name of commerce is bad” I suggest that boring people in the name of commerce is worse.
So far this sounds a lot like an opinion framed as an argument in favour of letting us creatives run wild. It is. But I come armed with a perfectly common-sense argument that you are welcome to use any time you like. Most purchase decisions are emotional…according to Gallup, September 30, 2022. 70% in fact. Gallup Article