Don MacNeil is the former Marketing Director of Windsor Jewelers and long-time on-air radio professional.
Is it just me, or…
On Second Thought…
There’s a general misconception among those who don’t do it for a living that great ideas come in a flash, as if from on high. Yes, there may be that “Voila!” moment when it all comes together, but the truth is that significant work typically leads up to that kind of epiphany.
Fresh ideas themselves are the result of the mating of a known thing (“A”) with a distant entity (“B”) into something not seen or heard before. If your goal is to come to the public with an entirely new, attention-grabbing message, then that last, “not seen or heard before” is your Holy Grail. Think of this as a sort of do-it-yourself kit to help get you there.
I have to say that in driving around the CSRA these days, I’m fairly impressed with the local small business commercials I’m hearing. Someone is guiding these owners well at production time.
But as you might in the presence of colleagues in your line of work, I’m motoring along impulsively dwelling on how this sentence or that could have been written more effectively, or how a whole different approach to the same set of facts could have kicked the spot up a notch.
An easy one, but seldom employed, is changing the point of view of your commercial.
Especially if commercial writing isn’t something you do for a living, you quite naturally write copy that lines up the benefits of what you’re selling and counts them down, one by one. That’s little more than a list. “At Bow-Wow Heating and Air, we inspect your units, top off your coolant, and clean up after ourselves.” When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else, you’re saying, “What we do is like everyone else.”
Try this: climb behind the eyeballs of your listener – your prospective customer – and write it from their perspective. “Have you thought about your air conditioning today? At Bow-wow Heating and Air, we hope you haven’t because that’s our job. Your comfort this summer is our life’s work. It’s all we do. Your job is to decide where to take the family.”
Beyond flipping your commercial’s perspective to that of your customer, there’s something else you can do, and this actually comes in handy in all creative endeavors. Develop a hostility toward the first creative thought you have. Huh?
What feels like a great idea at the moment is often so intoxicating that we tend to believe that our creative solution has been delivered and we stop there. But consider: there’s a high probability that someone else facing the same challenge just had that same thought come to mind first.
An example is the phrase, “From our family to yours.” When the first half-dozen small businesses jumped on that line many decades ago, it might actually have had some charming, persuasive power, but today? A thousand uses later? Honestly, it comes off as a transparent attempt to falsely ingratiate, even if you’re sincere in saying it.
So by all means, celebrate that first creative thought. Write it down. And then assume someone else, someplace else, made that same mental connection and, instead, reached higher. Find the line the other guy didn’t push himself to find, that second winning thought.
