Experiment – Riffs on technology, marketing & culture

Quick Read: There are ads that try and communicate a message of ‘contrast’ and there are those that communicate ‘similarity’. While the former type of ads ride on a diverse set of story telling devices, there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices deployed by the latter set. It’s the ‘Split Screen’.

A lot of advertising is meant to tease out / explain / amplify an element of a brand that is supposedly in contrast w.r.t the competition. Think about it for a moment and think of the core narratives behind most of the ads that you see around.

A lot of advertising narratives tend to fall into this camp, where they try to land a message through a narrative that is designed to communicate a contrast – sometimes in a straightforward manner or sometimes in perhaps a tongue in cheek style.

A few share worthy ads of that kind below.

1. Jeep, Anti Manifesto

(Agency: Arnold Worldwide. H/T: Bhatnaturally)

And oh, btw just for fun, see this one and it’s hard to not think that the Jeep’s creative team didn’t have this in mind while conceptualizing the above work.

2. Fevicol, Ezee Spray

(Agency: Ogilvy)

3. Eko Kom, Flight Attendants / Garbage Collectors

(Agency: Havas, Prague. H/T: Bhatnaturally)

As you can see, ads that have ‘contrast’ as the core message, ride on a diverse set of story telling devices.

Interestingly, this is in contrast with ads where ‘similarity’ is the core message.

When similarity is the core message..

.. there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices that most of them seem to draw upon. Most of such narratives are rooted in a singular story telling device – the split screen.

Sample the following examples.

1. The Day Before

(Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)

2. McDonald’s

(Agency: Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)

3. John Lewis

(Agency: DDB Worldwide)

4. Coca Cola UK

(Agency: David The Agency, Buenos Aires)

For the record, the split screen as a story telling device has also been used in ads that seek to communicate a contrast.

Like this one from Apple.

In fact this entire campaign for iPhone (in May 2017) had creatives that all used the split screen.

What other story telling devices have caught your eye in the recent past?

(Featured Image: Split screen of Paris Vs New York)

Can a color represent a brand?

There are tons of resources out there on colors and how they influence brand identity, perception, subliminal messaging and even our day to day feelings that we experience in our lives. In fact sites like Color in Motion and Cymbolism take this theory to a whole new level of interactive experience on color communication and color symbolism. For example, Cymbolism has a battery of questions that it has administered to thousands of people around the world on colors and their associations. The following chart aggregates this research findings:

(Image Source: UsabilityPost)

Now, that begets the question – Can a brand stand out and speak for itself despite the absence of any color? Possibly yes – proves Andrew Miller through his 100 day project called Brand Spirit.

The thought about “capturing the essence of a subject rather than its appearance” has apparently inspired him to come up with the idea for this 100 day project. Essentially for each day for 100 days he had painted a branded object white, stripping off its visual branding elements and reducing the object to its ‘purest’ form. The 100 day project came to an end on June 19 2012 while successfully triggering waves of discussions and debates from the online community during its course.

Each of the white ‘branded artifact’ is a fascinating commentary on product design, marketing, branding and our corresponding perceptions as consumers/users. Some of these objects are very recognizable on account of their iconic shapes like the Tabasco and the Coke bottles here.

And there are some objects that apparently seem to be proving a point. For e.g., see the bottle below and it doesn’t take a genius to say that it is Corona.

The commentary here is obviously on this ‘branded ritual’ of sticking a wedge of lime to the bottle and how deeply it is embedded in the fabric of what Corona has come to mean to us. Mark Wilson says it the best when he says “Corona has clearly used the beer bottle to brand the lime”.

It also had an interesting reference to ‘branded commodities’ and how deeply some brand names are ingrained in our minds to refer to something as generic as fruits. Chiquita – being a major American producer and marketer of bananas, might come to be associated with this fruit for many Americans. And that’s precisely the point here.