Should TV Advertising Focus On Promotion Or Entertainment?

The success and failure of an advertising campaign is often shaped by its goals.

In an age of multichannel sales funnels, social media virality and advertising that must be shaped for a wide variety of formats at once, these goals and a partner studio that understands them can be critical to producing a successful television advert.

However, choosing these goals can be somewhat difficult, as the most straightforward attempts to sell a product and convert viewers into customers can sometimes risk being figuratively and literally tuned out by a target market.

A growing number of advertisers have, over the past few decades, taken a very different approach, creating what can only be described as “entertainment events”.

Is this the right approach to take, or in an age with so many different genres of advertising, is it more effective to keep it simple?

The Early History Of Concept Advertising

The turning point for event advertising was the famous Gorilla campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, but to understand what changed, it is important to see the development of conceptual advertising as more than a simple vessel for showcasing a product or service.

The adverts produced and directed by Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame are far from the first, but they do exemplify how advertising was shifting away from presenting a product or service to selling a mood, a lifestyle and a set of values rather than just a product.

However, despite this, they were clearly still selling a product and using the language of advertising to do so. Boy on a Bike, for example, was selling a possibly prelapsarian pastoral ideal of early 20th century rural England to present the idea that Hovis was traditional and reliable.

Similarly, strip “Query” for Barclays Bank of its impressive Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk aesthetic, and it is clearly still an advert about customer service.

As well as this, even with the incredibly well-executed dystopian setting inspired in no small part by Fritz Lang, Apple’s infamously banned “1984” was explicitly an advert for the Macintosh computer.

Promotion Distanced From Products

By the late 1980s and 1990s, this began to change, and advertising executives were more willing to use innovative ways to sell a brand whilst only referring obliquely to its brand values.

Alongside the unusual trend of episodic advertising best epitomised by the highly popular Nescafe Gold Blend Couple, advertising was more willing to be more conceptual, taking a fundamental component, idea or value and taking it somewhere far broader.

One of the most famous and influential examples of this was Surfer, a 90-second black-and-white short film that, until the final shot of a pint glass of Guinness stout beer, could be mistaken as an ode to patience or a small arthouse film.

Even here, however, Surfer was following the concept of patience, something core to the goals of the company to turn the drought beer’s biggest weakness into a virtue.

Instead of bar staff and customers getting frustrated at the fact that it takes around 80 seconds to pull a pint correctly, Diageo effectively changed consumer habits, first with Swimblack and later Surfer, making their beer feel more special and refined whilst barely mentioning it.

However, at some point, a production company was going to take the final step and remove the product almost entirely from the advert.

The Post-Gorilla World

The concept behind Gorilla was simultaneously extremely simple to define but remarkably effective in execution.

Following a salmonella outbreak, an advertising campaign for Trident Gum that was criticised by the Advertising Standards Agency, according to a BBC article and contamination of Easter eggs with nut allergens had significantly hurt the Cadbury brand.

This may have influenced the decision to barely use it outside of the “Glass and A Half Productions” introduction bumper, the use of purple in the set design and showing the product at the end.

Gorilla changed everything when it came to advertising, as despite fears that it could be too abstract, given that it has even less to do with chocolate as Surfer did to beer, it became a viral hit, improved sales by nine percent and brand favourability by a fifth, according to an article by Media Week.

This has shaped a lot of advertising in the years since, as brands and marketing agencies feel more comfortable opting for abstract marketing that presents the ideas of a product or service in an unusual way.

However, this influx means that entertainment adverts have an even greater pressure to capture the eyes of consumers and maintain their attention to ensure an effective conversion.

Meanwhile, there has been a market for “anti-advertising”, where some brands make remarkably straightforward marketing materials that focus on basic copy, advertising and facts about the product in question.

Every choice matters, and working with a marketing company and production partner is the best way to get your vision onto the screen.