Theater of the mind

The delightful Under the Influence podcast from the CBC is all about the history and background of great ad campaigns.  Its most recent episode is titled “Air Quotes: Creative Radio 2021,” and it focuses on brilliant radio campaigns.

Radio is a particularly challenging medium for copy writers. You don’t have visuals to fall back on, so the quality of your writing is very much exposed. But even in such a pared-down medium, ads can still break through.  Some examples from the podcast:

• A recent campaign from Vauxhall in Europe. The message was that back-up cameras are now standard in all Vauxhall vehicles. They dramatized that product attribute by telling famous fairy tales in reverse order, and closing with the line, “Things can end badly backwards.” This was also a highly campaignable idea, meaning you could tell that story in multiple ways over time without it getting old. (Here is a video version of one ad.)

• A classic campaign for Ragu called “A Long Day of Childhood.” The brand was trying to tell parents is that Ragu is comfort food for your kids and, presumably, that you should feel like a good parent for serving it. That could be a really boring or maudlin story – but the agency made it fun and, again, a campaignable idea.

• Greenpeace dramatized the amount of waste polluting our waters with ads that imitate the sound of beach waves, seagulls and whales, using nothing but plastic waste objects found in the ocean. It illustrated a key talking point in a memorable way and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in earned media.

Like most great campaigns, these examples illustrate the importance of not just a compelling story – but of telling that compelling story in a compelling way so that consumers will want to pay attention to it.