Book Summary: Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads

Short Summary: The nuts and bolts of the ad creation process from ideation to execution and the art of client servicing. An inside view of how the advertising world functions with great examples of advertising peppered throughout the book. While this book is about advertising, business owners and marketing folks will find it useful.

My Rating: 3/5

Author: Luke Sullivan and Sam Bennett

Note: This post is a combination of my highlights from the book and paraphrased notes.

5 Key Takeaways

Tension and conflict are essential parts of storytelling.
Ideas don’t magically happen, it’s a disciplined process
When you focus on the brand’s truth and core emotion, you have a chance of creating a platform, not just an ad campaign
The goal of creativity in this context is to create a positive impact on the brand, not to simply appear clever
Taking a contrarian view compared to everyone else in the category or industry gets you attention.

Managing and servicing clients

Ideas for helping your client find that differentiating point of view:

Important to remember that a brand’s potential customer has only room for perhaps only 3 brand names for every category
When researching competitors, find the truth they are exploiting in their marketing campaigns that you are not
Maintain an outsiders perspective while speaking to your client in their familiar language
“Find the emotion” of the brand’s customers by eavesdropping on their conversations
Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and ask “what would make me want to buy this product”
Visualize a day in the life of the customer and how your brand fits into it. Generous brands are empathetic to their customers and pay more attention to the calendars of their customers than their own
Study the contact points between the brand and the customer

Marketing Ideas from the book

Inadequacy marketing – where the product is the hero and the customers are the losers if they don’t buy it.
Empowerment marketing – where the marketing appeals to the human desire for personal growth.
Authentic marketing tactics – Being transparent, under-promising and over-delivering, self-deprecating and embracing the worst things about your product. In contrast, vanity, puffery, insincerity and gimmickry come off as inauthentic.

Client Strategy

Developing a client strategy is about going into a customer’s brain and spot welding one specific adjective to the client’s brand

Questions to ask when you are done with your work for the client – “Oh yeah? So What?”

The answer to the first question – “Oh Yeah?”, should be a claim that’s incontestable and the answer to the 2nd question – “So What?” is that it should matter someone.

Tight Strategy is a strategy that should be evident in the campaign but the campaign should not be evident in the strategy
Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple

The ideation and creativity process

When you are paid to be creative it is fair to say it comes with a lot of pressure. The pressure to deliver something good. The process of creativity, the author says, is like a controlled daydream.

It is a lonely vigil interrupted infrequently by great thoughts whose origins are almost always a mystery
Mike Lescarbeau

Ideation starter: “How might we?” used by IDEO

“How” assumes solutions exist giving you the creative confidence to identify and solve unmet needs
“Might” gives us permission to try out ideas that may or may not work
“We” signals collaboration and building creative solutions together

We often associate creativity with inspiration and moments of magic. But many folks in the industry including the author in this book suggest it is in fact a result of a disciplined approach.

Yesterday, I talked about "idea sex" in a workshop with @david_perell

Today, I wrote an article to expand on it:

• Many still believe in an elusive muse
• But inspiration is unreliable
• Idea sex is a sustainable way to drive combinational creativityhttps://t.co/4VfMFzHLXI
— Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@neuranne) June 24, 2020

An idea can stem from the truest thing you can about your product or brand. For example, Crocs are extremely comfortable, but most people would agree that they are ugly. That’s the truth. If you acknowledge it and then turn that into a positive, you have a great idea for a campaign.

“Our goal is not to make the haters love the brand,” Rees recently told Business Insider. “It’s to exploit that extrinsic tension because it creates opportunity, it creates PR, it creates media, it creates interest. It creates a whole lot that would cost you a fortune to buy in other ways.”
Andrew Rees, CEO Crocs

While we can design and develop a brand, it ultimately exists in the mind of a customer which we can’t control. We don’t control the universal truths either.

Another example of this approach was the legendary “Think Small” campaign by Volkwagen ranked as the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century. After World War II, the United States had grown rapidly and people were looking to buy big muscle cars. Car companies at that time would provide as much information as possible. Also, the Beetle was manufactured in a plant built by the Nazis which would have created a negative perception of the car.

Taking the polar opposite view of the competition and what the market believes makes for an attention-grabbing idea.

Another example of an iconic campaign that is now part of pop culture – What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Great stories and movies revolve around conflicts. The tension arising out of a conflict of ideas, views, and opinions. Rich vs poor, trust vs deceit, spending vs saving, money vs love. In all of this, you will find a villain, and if you can paint an oversized or overpriced competitor indirectly as the villain, you have an opportunity for making your brand stand out.

For a story to be interesting, it needs positive and negative forces in play to create the tension

Identify the central conflicts in the company or the category and list them down.

Truth + Conflict = Platform

A campaign is only a series of ads with similar messaging and art direction. A platform is larger and embodies the truest thing about the brand. Nike’s Just Do It is a great example of this.

Here are some tips from the book worth keeping in mind during the ideation process:

Write down your ideas first, make them memorable later.
Don’t be clever to the point that makes you shine instead of the product.
Stare at a group of pictures that have the emotion of the ad you want to create.
Gather data and then let your subconscious connect the dots.
List down all the words from your product’s category.
Address the obvious shortcoming of your brand directly and really own it.
Come up with terrible ideas.
Don’t cancel out ideas from your partner or team member.
Put the best ideas on the wall and look for patterns (CSI style).
Come up with lots of ideas. Don’t stop at a hundred.
Set up the picture and the words so that the difference between them is breathtaking.
Whenever you can go for the absolute all claims in the middle are forgettable.
Use metaphors. An idea that happens in the mind stays in the mind.
Funny is a subset of interesting. Be interesting first.
Find one great image and build story into or out of it.
Don’t show what you’re saying, or say what you’re showing. Make visuals and words supply slightly different pieces and let the users mind do the 1 + 1 = 3 for impact.
First 2 seconds of ad should be visually unusual to create the curiosity gap.
Last 5 seconds resolves, summarizes, explains the preceding 25 seconds

“Audiences will forgive almost anything in the first half of a movie and almost nothing in the second”

Types of ideas

“Age” ideas – Order a drink that takes nine years to get.

“History of brand” ideas

Geolocation based ideas – Whisky from Scotland, Darjeeling tea, Mysore Sandal Soap.

“How to use” ideas

Headline drive ideas

Visually driven ideas

Emotional benefits ideas

Headline suggestions:

Save the punch for the end of the headline
Don’t use fake names or product numbers in the headline
If the visual is doing the communication don’t let the headline take away the attention

Body copy rules:

Write like you would talk if you were the brand with a personality
Write like it is a conversation with one person
Get straight to the point in the first line of your copy with your most persuasive interesting and surprising point
Use transitions to flow seamlessly from one benefit to the next

Simplicity

“Speed of the get” – the time taken for the customer to “get” the ad should be like the length of the fuse of a dynamite
- It has the power to sometimes ask the reader to finish it in their heads
- It can break through the clutter and easier to remember
Reductionism – the art of omitting
- Every item you add to the layout reduces the importance of all other elements. Vice versa.
“outdoor board should have no more than 7 words”, but start with three as a goal
- logos add to word count
- outdoor requires you to be spectacular

Attention business & the digital customer

The author says the question a creative professional needs to ask is “What idea will make the client famous?“. It forces you to think bigger than just the immediate campaign.

Is my idea cool enough that the press will write about it?

Suggestions for ideas that will get your brand the attention:

Do something provocative, disobedient, wayward, eccentric, subversive, bold, frank, funny, unusual or recalcitrant
Figure out how to do something “perfectly rong”. He uses the misspelled word to further emphasize the point that ideas that are in direct opposition to all prevailing wisdom can get you attention

The highest form of “rong” is stupid
- Eg: Happydent ads
- Not right for expensive products, products with no real difference or serious purchases

Question the accepted norms of the product category
Use a medium “incorrectly”
Execution can become content. How you say something can become much more important than what you say (Visual > headline)

We cannot use logic to get our way into customers hearts. Sort out the feelings you have about the brand and then articulate them in the most memorable way you can. #Positioning

Digital Advertising and the digital customer

Two kinds of digital advertising:
- Work that is digital
- Work that gets digital

Offline to digital shift
- Audience > Community
- Message > Content or experience
- Target > Invite
- Media plan > Interest plan (content segmentation grid)
- Penetrate > Collaborate
Questions to ask for your digital advertising brief

Digital brief questions
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- What do we want to happen
- With whom are we trying to connect, influence or engage
- What can we do for them: solve a problem, provide service, entertain, inform
- What is the context for engaging them
- What cultural trends or media trends are our customers already following that makes sense for us to align with? #Worldviews
- Is it consistent with the brand’s position and purpose
- What digital platforms are most relevant
- Could customers and prospects be potential cocreators or sharers
- What will inspire them to participate
- Does greater participation make the experience more appealing
- Are we making something temporary or enduring
- Can we create something of social value

These questions aren’t any different because it’s a digital medium. Fundamental behaviours and human emotions still remain the same.

Tactics and stunts can get you attention, but they need to add up to something greater.

Digital requires storytellers and system thinkers to come together. The latter can help stitch together an experience on a digital medium making use of all the latest developments in technology and digital channels.

Ideas for digital that can earn you attention:

Create experiences that’ll generate shareable content
Make your content into a utility
A brand isn’t what it says. A brand is what it does.
- Do something interesting
- Invite people to participate
- Document it
- Share it

Spend 50% of your time on the idea and 50% on its distribution
Jonah Peretti

People join social media to stay in touch with other people, not large corps. What can you as a brand do for these people
- Listen.
- Talk like a person
- Be transparent
- 1/3 of content your audience finds interesting, 1/3 that celebrates your community’s content, 1/3 can be your brand’s content

Brands are becoming content creators
- People tend to be self-directed
- Brands can tell richer stories with their own content
- Develop content on channels and sites they own

Lot of clients can produce their own content but haven’t figured out the creative side

Content that has lasting value (stock) and content that is fast, simple and temporary (flow)
- Agencies are good at creating stock content, but need to do better on flow
- Ways to improve flow content
  - factor it into the editorial calendar
  - take the lead from existing conversations
  - curate and share useful resources for your audience

“Think like a marketer. Behave like an entertainer. Move like a tech start-up”
P. J. Pereira

Book References from Hey Whipple:

A lot of books and authors referenced in Hey Whipple as you can from the list below.