If advertising is a promise, design is performance

If advertising is a promise, design is performance (Part 2)

Submitted by GlimmerGuy on 12/03/2009 – 11:30 amOne Comment

mini painted Continuing the thread from yesterday’s post about my upcoming Saatchi & Saatchi speech, if design really is the new advertising, this can be seen as good news for innovative companies. It means they can design their way into the public consciousness, even though they may lack big ad budgets.

A pioneering example of this was the launch of the Mini Cooper automobile in the U.S. market back in 2002. As I relate in Glimmer, there was no meaningful ad budget for the Mini, so instead agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky set to work creating games, paper cutouts, billboards that seemed to come alive, and cartoon books. The agency turned heads by using the Mini car as a prop in various live stunts, such as by attaching a Mini to the roof rack of an SUV (with a sign saying, what are you doing for fun this weekend?) and driving it around towns across America. At sports events, Mini car seats were installed in place of ripped-out stadium seats. Outside department stores, the agency replaced some of those quarter-a-ride mechanical ponies with miniature Minis. At airport terminals, oversized props designed to look like giant pay phones or garbage cans were installed alongside a poster of the Mini with the headline, “Makes everything else seem a little too big.” On the Web, the agency created humorous phony websites that quickly went viral—including one dedicated to disseminating rumors and blurry photographs that purportedly documented the existence of robots made from old Mini car parts.

The Mini campaign didn’t kill the 30-second commercial, but it showed a lot of marketers what life-after-the-30-second commercial might look like. It looked complex, diverse, multidimensional, experimental, experiential, and systematized. It looked like design. (For many more successful examples of this type of experiential marketing, check out Alex Bogusky’s new book Baked In.)

Here is the bottom line, according to Brian Collins: If advertising is a promise, design is performance. For much of the last century, the business world relied heavily on promises. But you can only promise so much, for so long, before the time comes to deliver.

Bruce Mau thinks it’s a wonder that advertising has lasted as long as it has. “If you think about the concept of advertising,” he says, “it comes down to: ‘Let me interrupt you, so I can tell you something that is probably irrelevant to you.’” That never made much sense, Mau says, but while advertisers controlled the media, they could do as they pleased. That’s all ending now, and the challenge for businesses is to find a new way to connect with the public. “We have to eliminate interruption and increase relevance,” he says.

One of the ways that companies can do that, according to Mau, is to change the way they behave. Mau’s thinking goes like this: If a company begins to do more things that are actually relevant and interesting to people, then that begins to take the place of advertising. And if you’re doing worthwhile things, then it’s okay to tell people about it. “Because if you’re telling me something that’s relevant and interesting to me, then it’s no longer an interruption.”

And how does a company ensure that the things it does are perceived as relevant, interesting, worthwhile? Simple, says Mau: You must design everything you do.