Where Correct (Ad) Ideas Come From
Why lived experience beats brainstorms and dashboards every time
Like a Brazilian Jack Kerouac, this week I’m “Na Rua,” so this week’s edition is very truncated, but no less important!
In my undergrad, I was a communications student, but I took a couple of classes in the advertising department. I was always surprised that, for the number of ad students who acted like Don Draper, very few of them seemed to understand the things that actually made that character talented at advertising. Spoiler: It was not the functional alcoholism!
This week, I want to quickly outline one of what I have come to consider the most crucial lessons for modern marketers from the show Mad Men.
Do me a favor, don’t Google this week’s article’s namesake.
Praxis Makes Perfect
I’ve worked with a fair share of upper management in my time, and in that time I’ve noticed a kind of prion that infects the minds of people when they rise above middle management: They become seriously disconnected from the shop floor, bottom-of-the-totem-pole laborers, what the thing actually is that they are selling, and how that thing really fits into the lives of their customers outside of the official marketing material.
Very few of the C-suite executives I’ve met in my career had any hand in writing the marketing materials for the products or services sold by the companies they headed. They knew the talking points front to back, top to bottom, but many had very little first-hand experience with their flagship offers, or if they did, they didn’t show it.
We’re going philosophical early this week.
When you engage with something physically, you perceive nuances that could never be considered in a purely abstract, theoretical environment. I can sit with my team and brainstorm a million characteristics or uses a particular item may have, but the second I get my hands on it and try using it, I’ll immediately discover new ones that never would’ve occurred to me.
This is a byproduct of our evolutionary inheritance. Humans learned first with their hands, then their minds.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for reasoning and logical strategy, but that will only take you so far. In order to really get the frustrations, pleasures, confusions, rituals, and feelings of using a product or service, you need to experience it yourself.
Absent this, you will sound like an outsider doing “marketing,” not a person with a solution to a problem.
Phenomenological Stuff
A little more formal now so we can get a little less formal later.
Good marketing is phenomenological before it is statistical.
Phenomenology is a field of thought that is as deeply interesting as it is impenetrable. It is an early 20th-century philosophical movement that sought to develop insights into subjective, conscious experiences by investigating how that subjectivity manifests in objective elements around us.
More simply, it theorized that by studying certain nuances of the world around us, we could derive lessons and insights about ourselves because the world we see is always filtered through the mind.
That’s the C+ explanation at least. It’ll do for our purposes.
I’m bringing this up as a means to explain a mechanism for learning a very special kind of knowledge. I can sit and imagine an alarm clock for hours. I can even stare at one and document everything I can see: its dimensions, color, sounds, etc. It’s only when I actually use the thing that I discover deeper, ineffable kinds of qualitative knowledge about the alarm clock.
For example, the way its shape fits in with the various other items on my nightstand. The particular way in which its sounds might reverberate off the furnishings in my room, changing the sounds subtly and making me perceive it in a unique way. It could be the particular shade of green or red that the digits cast upon my wall in the middle of the night and the memories and dreams those shades summon.
Rather than being a collection of unrelated details, these are the only real truths about an item. A person can have all the facts and figures about an object, but that won’t tell them anything about how that object impacts their internal, qualitative life.
There’s no brainstorming session or electron microscope that can reveal these kinds of things. They only reveal themselves in close, intimate proximity that comes from having a particular thing at a particular time in your life.
A Mad Mad World
I liked Mad Men. It was a good show. But when I talk to marketers about it, it really does feel like we were watching different things. I’ll save deeper thoughts for a longer article another time, though.
Of what I consider to be the most important lessons modern marketers can take from the show, this is probably my favorite: Trying to be clever will only take you so far. You need to put a thing in your life and, critically, continue to live your life, to know how best to tell a person the value of that thing.
Real lived experience with something, when done from the perspective of a marketer, will reveal all kinds of creative ways in which that thing can be described beyond its physical characteristics.
In the season one episode titled “The Wheel,” Don and team are tasked with advertising Kodak’s new circular slide projector. The Kodak representatives call this new projector “The Wheel” because of its unusual shape. They tell Don about all kinds of new functionalities it has, but none of these strike him as particularly attractive marketing positions.
So he decides to sit with it. He takes his time and continues living his life, paying close attention to the nuances.
In one of his more melancholic and nostalgic moods, he reflects on memories themselves and how a projector transports people to other places and times in their lives. He is struck by a particular object very symbolic of childhood: the carousel. This is the name for the projector that some of you might recognize.
In his pitch, he uses his own family photos and waxes nostalgic about longing to return to a home we can never truly go back to.
The emotional impact is devastating, and the angle of the pitch was only revealed by the collision of product and lived experience.
We’re All Mad Down Here
Like solving a maze backwards, when you know where you’re going, it’s much easier to find the way there. For similar reasons, the show makes the process of arriving at “the perfect pitch” much smoother than it is in reality.
Most of us working in the industry don’t have time to sit, sipping whiskey for eight hours on a Tuesday, staring at a slide projector until we’re struck by brilliance. But I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from doing that on a Saturday.
The closer your contact with the thing you’re trying to describe, the better your ideas will be. You can’t trust abstract thought experiments or spreadsheet aggregations alone, you need to get your hands on a thing.
In my experience, most clients will be very willing to let a marketer walk in the shoes of their customers for free. If working for a bakery, drive there, park, order many different things from the menu, don’t take it to go, sit in the environment, digest, listen, go home and meditate on how the things you consumed made you feel even hours later. For e-commerce, try to have the same problem the product is trying to solve in your life, go through the entire customer funnel from landing page to delivery, use the thing, keep notes not just on what it did, but also how it made you feel. For a service, let’s say for plumbing, you might want to consider taking a hammer to the underside of your sink. Your next steps will be obvious after that.
Use the thing! Read the instructions. Notice the pleasures. Notice the frictions. Call the help desk. Invite your friends over, see what they think about it. Notice the things that only insiders would.
Keep a running log of your thoughts as you do this. It’s never been easier to be the “tape recorder guy” that used to be so popular in movies a couple of decades ago. Keep voice memos as you use the thing. Record every thought and feeling that comes into your head, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Use an LLM to transcribe and summarize.
When you sit down to outline your strategy, when you’re doing research, or writing headlines, having these nuances top of mind will help guide you.
Try to resist a cookie-cutter approach to ad strategy. Avoid that approach to life in general, actually.
The more you investigate a thing, the more you see how it integrates, connects, and resonates with your lived experience. Only then can you truly know what a thing is and what a thing means.
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey