Try not to sound like an ad.

Don’t let your concept get in the way of the product.

Bernbach said,“Our job is to sell our clients’ merchandise ...not ourselves.To killthe cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product.”This canhappen,and when clients kill an ad for this reason they may be right.From more than one client,I’ve heard this dreaded phrase:“Yourconcept is a ‘Visual Vampire.’”What they mean is the concept’sexecution is so busy it sucks the life out of their commercial mes-sage.Be ready for this one.Sometimes clients use the phrase as abludgeon to kill something unusual they don’t like.But sometimes,a few of them are right.*This usually happens when the product bores you.Which meansyou haven’t dug deep enough to find the thing about it that’s excitingor interesting.You settle for doing some sort of conceptual gymnastics up front and tacking your boring old product on the backside,hoping the interest from the opening will somehow bleed overto your sales message.But the interesting part of an ad shouldn’t be adevice that points to the sales message,it should be the sales message.To understand what it means to make your whole ad or commer-cial be the sales message,consider the analogy of giving your dog apill.Dogs hate pills,right? So what do you do? You wrap the pill ina piece of baloney.Well,same thing with your commercial’s message. Customers hate sales pitches.So you wrap your pitch in an interesting bit,andthey’re more likely to bite.Unfortunately,most students take this to mean,“Oh,I see.All Ihave to do is show something interesting and funny for the first 25seconds and then cut to the product.”The answer is no.Because thecustomer will eat up the 25 seconds of interesting baloney and thenwalk away,leaving the pill in the dog dish.You gotta wrap that baby right into the middleof the baloney.The two have to be one.Your interesting device cannot just point tothe sales message;it must bethe sales message.Remember Bernbach’s advice:“The product,the product,theproduct.Stay with the product.”Don’t get tangled up in unrelatedideas,however fanciful.David Ogilvy used a classical reference to make this same point:“When Aeschines spoke,they said,‘How well he speaks.’ But whenDemosthenes spoke,they said,‘Let us march against Philip.’”