Why Advertising Should Be Like A Shish Kabob.

In the advertising business, we have a tendency to worship at the altar of consistency.

Consistency is good, in many aspects, but bad in others. I believe that the best campaigns have a big core idea, then move, morph and change as they roll out to various mediums, and more importantly, as they continue over the course of time.

I gave a speech a while ago with the theme, “Why It’s More Important To Be Surprising Than Consistent” and it ruffled a few feathers in the audience. But I stand behind it. One of the best ways to break through today is to be surprising. Our customers are completely time-starved. Attention spans have been reduced to nanoseconds – not because people are getting dumber – but the opposite, because they are getting more savvy, and are doling out their attention in smaller, more precious parcels.

I was talking to a very smart, very creative ad person the other day named John, and we were saying that all the best writers in Hollywood are in TV these days – not movies, where they have historically been. There are so many great TV series out there now – Mad Men, Dexter, Californication, Entourage, Weeds, etc. John admitted he hadn’t see any of them. I said, “Really??” And he replied that he just didn’t have the time. He knows there is great programming out there, but he’s got a busy career, a mortgage, a marriage, young kids, and zero time. And he's a marketer.

So in order to have a sliver of a chance of breaking through to John, and the millions of people like him, advertising has to surprise. It has to be unexpected, not only in the basic idea, but in how and where it appears.

To me, a great advertising campaign usually has a broadcast element, a print element and an online element. Each of those media demands an execution that embraces the strengths of the medium. But if the same spots show up medium to medium, if the TV spot is just repeated in the cinema, if the print ads are also the billboards, if the TV audio is just stripped and run as radio, then consistency is the enemy. People quickly register that they’ve seen/heard the message already, and skip it. That’s bad, because advertising is a frequency game. We need people to be exposed to our campaign messages a number of times before it has a chance of sinking in. I know I say this over and over again, but persuasion takes time.

Yet so much of advertising is speed dating.

One way to reconcile this problem, I believe, is to make each advertising execution surprisingly different, within a single campaign.

Show up in all the strategic places in a customer’s life, but show up in a new outfit each time. That way you stand a greater chance of getting their attention, and ultimately, spending more time with them.

A lot of advertising is like a line of identical hamburgers being pumped out of an oven.

But smart, effective advertising should be more like a shish kabob.

A string of completely different and surprising treats, skewered with a consistent strategy.