The Limitations of An Advertising Category Shouldn't Hold You Back.

A friend of mine was in India once, and marvelled at a huge elephant that was tethered to the tinest stake in the ground. When he asked the animal's trainer how such a small stake could hold such a powerful beast, the trainer said that when the elephant was a baby, it tried to pull the stake out of the ground, but couldn't. The elephant remembers that, and never tries again.

Every category in the advertising business has its own assumed limitations.

Beer advertising has its own 24-pack of mandatories, automotive advertising has its miles of guardrails, fast food advertising has its deep fried conventions.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that great advertising - truly great advertising – doesn’t respect category rules.

When VW needed to break through in the early 60s, with a sub-compact budget in a category of full-size-chrome-laden-tail-finned ones, they did it with car advertising that didn’t look or sound anything like traditional car advertising.

When Nike had aspirations to be the biggest brand in the world, they created ads that not only turned the sneaker world upside down, it threw a cold bucket of water on the entire industry.

When Apple wanted to launch the Macintosh, they looked at the state of the advertising IBM was doing, and took a left at Albuquerque.

Just this morning, I was giving a radio seminar to the marketing department of a very smart company, and one of my messages to them was to not be restrained by the limitations of their category.

Because those limitations are artificial.

I’m saying don’t create a great beer ad, create a great ad for beer. Don’t produce an automotive TV spot, create a great TV spot for cars. Don’t art-direct a classic hamburger print ad, art-direct a great print ad for a hamburger.

So many of this industry's limitations are merely mental no-fly zones. Not concrete rules.

Maybe the perfect place to start is to list all the accepted limitations of your category – then forbid the use of any of them in your next ad.

That way, you'll slip under those invisible fences.