Take The Nuance Out of Advertising
If you work in advertising you’ve seen it. It’s usually when the senior level strategist in the room is talking. They’re making a U-shape with their thumb and index finger and slowly rotating it back and forth. It’s the hand motion we make when we’re talking about a “nuance.” We strategists should retire that from advertising: not just the hand motion, but nuance itself.
There are certain principles of advertising that virtually all of us who work in the industry agree on: that our work should be unique, that it should communicate a single idea, and that our idea should be quickly and easily understood. These are hard principles to adhere to and “nuance” is the way we convince ourselves we’re adhering to them when deep down we know we’re not.
The first thing we do when embarking on any new project is a competitive analysis of the strategy and creative that already exists in the market. And we usually find that all the work in the category is more-or-less the same. We put it all on a slide and call it a “sea-of-sameness.” Everyone is aware of the sea-of-sameness and sets out to be different yet most end up out in the middle of the sea with everyone else. The reason for that is because what’s familiar in the category always seems like the safe thing, and even the right thing, to do: it’s the thing that everyone with experience in the category says we should do, it’s the thing that research respondents say is their favorite, other things we try in research don’t resonate as strongly as the thing respondents are all already familiar with. Research respondents themselves will tell you that they hate the sea-of-sameness but inevitably say their favorite thing is…exactly what they’re already used to seeing. All of this makes it hard not to fall into the trap of doing the same thing everyone else is doing. And the way we convince ourselves that we aren’t doing the same thing everyone else is doing is by pointing to some very minor difference and calling it “nuance.” We might say something like, “we’re leveraging category cues with a nuance that makes us unique.” When we do the competitive analysis, we don’t much bother with other brands’ nuance, we rightly look at the overall idea their work communicates. And yet when we do the work ourselves, we’re obsessed with our own subtle, usually inconsequential, nuance.
Another common trap we fall into when doing creative, and especially strategy, is trying to communicate more than one idea. Think: ‘strong and safe,’ or ‘nutritious and delicious.’ We all know that we shouldn’t be doing this, that our markets are flooded with competitors who are also trying to say everything all at once, and that because everyone is trying to say everything all at once consumers can’t tell the difference between the promises of any brand in the category. And yet we do it anyway. The reasons why are similar to those for the sea of sameness: the team recognizes that two ideas are really motivating, research respondents are split 50/50 between two benefits, and some research respondents say they need both benefits to consider our brand. The seemingly safe thing to do is to include both, so we do. But because we know we shouldn’t and that it won’t work as well in market, we come up with a “unique nuanced strategy” that encompasses both ideas and we tell ourselves it’s a single idea when we know it’s not.
Even when we have a single, differentiated idea, we strategists still have a tendency to over-analyze it, overthink it, and make it more complicated. FCB used to use what it called the “6.5 Brief,” the meaning and theory behind which is that the audience of any creative work will only pay attention for 6.5 seconds before tuning it out so our work must communicate its idea in that very short time (that 6.5 seconds is actually based on an old study, it’s been shown to be even shorter than that now). We seem to forget this though and we allow ourselves to overcomplicate. In research we find that we can communicate this nuanced message — as we’ve paid people to spend way more than 6.5 seconds (usually an hour) studying our creative work or strategic stimuli — so we tell ourselves that it’s great strategy when in reality, our “nuanced message” is almost always lost on the audience in the real world.
It isn’t that we’re bad strategists or that we don’t know what good strategy looks like, it’s that doing good strategy is really hard. We fall into strategic traps and overthink our strategies and cover it all up with “nuance.” So let’s take “nuance” out of our collective lexicon, let’s be intellectually disciplined, and let’s have the courage to do what we know to be good strategy and good creative work — that which is truly unique, single-minded, and clear.