How to Make Your Advertising 'Sticky'
Six ideas from the Heath brothers
It was a busy week for me as I was off producing new DRTV commercials in Kansas City with my good friends at Paddock Productions. Unfortunately, that means you get a little less this week. Sorry! I’ll try to make it as high-impact as possible.
DR Dynamite!💥
This is the part of my newsletter where I usually share wisdom from the ‘Masters of Marketing,’ specifically tried-and-true (T&T) techniques from the world of direct-response advertising. However, this week I’m going to share some wisdom from outside of the advertising world.
Chip and Dan Heath are two really smart brothers who have written four books together. Chip is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and Dan is a fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). Their first book is a favorite of mine. It’s titled, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. It was named the “Best Business Book of the Year” in 2007 and was on the BusinessWeek bestseller list for 24 months.
What do sticky ideas have to do with advertising? In my opinion: everything. That’s because advertising that sticks is self-perpetuating. It not only reaches people who watch it but also people who talk to people who watch it.
Last week, we learned that Ron Popeil asked six questions of all of his advertising, and that one of those questions was: Is there a theme line? A theme line is a memorable set of words, such as “set it and forget it,” that capture a key selling idea. Another way of saying that: A theme line is something sticky.
So how can we create stickiness? The Heath brothers’ had six ideas that spell out the word “success” with only one “s” (to make it more sticky, of course).
S - Simplicity. How do we find the essential core of our ideas? In DR advertising, simplicity is critical because confusion is a sales killer.™ The Heath brothers are going further here and saying that complex concepts not only don’t sell, they don’t stick, either.
U - Unexpectedness. How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? DRTV advertisers actually have a good answer for this one — visually compelling demonstrations. To use an example from my own work: It’s expected to see a flashlight light up a dark path at night. It’s unexpected to see it keep working even when frozen in a block of ice.
C - Concreteness. How do we make our ideas clear? What the Heath brothers had in mind here was avoiding phrases that were “ambiguous to the point of being meaningless,” such as the ones you typically find in company mission statements. Advertisers could take this to mean something along the lines of what John Caples was driving at when he said: Write selling copy, not style copy. In my early career, we experimented with ‘aspirational’ openings instead of everyday problem openings. We quickly learned why choosing the latter is a tried-and-true technique. Concrete problem-solving wins hands down.
C- Credibility. How do we make people believe our ideas? We covered this one when we talked about The Great Cialdini’s “social proof” concept and how a single word recently yielded a 300% improvement in response. Cialdini likes to focus on the power of peer effects for building credibility. The Heath brothers focused more on borrowing credibility from experts and organizations. Both techniques are quite familiar to DR advertisers.
E - Emotions. How do we get people to care about our ideas? Remember what Joseph Sugarman said: People buy on emotion and justify with logic. I tend to focus on the latter insight in order to close sales, but the Heath brothers’ principle suggests the former insight is the key to creating advertising that sticks. To my mind, that isn’t about tear-jerky scenes like the one Liberty Mutual recently parodied. It’s about creating relatable dramatizations of those everyday problems I mentioned earlier and also dialing up the “wow factor” of our ads, since amazement is a memorable feeling that gets people talking. Speaking of sticky, have you seen that commercial where Billy Mays pulls an entire tractor trailer with just a few strips of Mighty Putty? 😮
S - Stories. How do we get people to act on our ideas? John Caples’ most famous advertisement — the one that he is still remembered for nearly 100 years later (how’s that for sticky!) — is a story. It begins: “Arthur had just played ‘The Rosary.’ The room rang with applause. I decided that this would be a dramatic moment for me to make my debut. To the amazement of all my friends, I strode confidently over to the piano and sat down … The crowd laughed. They were all certain I couldn’t play a single note.”
You may have noticed that the last three questions of the SUCCES stickiness formula advise us to get people to believe, to care and to act. As it happens, that’s a great challenge for advertisers, too.
Chart Watch👁️
Another week, another #1 showing for Pocket Hose Copper Bullet on the DRMetrix. This is the campaign’s sixth week at #1. Chief competitor Hydro Steel Pro is at #8.
In other words, this week looks a lot like the last several weeks — with one notable exception. After a solid run in Q4 of last year, the campaign below has climbed back into the Top 50.
All-Pro Passer Robotic Quarterback
Pitch: “Throws a perfect spiral every time”
Offer: $49.99 for one with free sticker sheet
Marketer: NSI International
Producer: Hutton Miller (🏆 2022 True Top Producer)
This product is in an underrated DRTV category that produces hits from time to time. These include Hover Ball in 2015 and Swerve Ball in 2016, both of which were from IdeaVillage. In 2019, the team that produced the latter commercial tried the only other football project I’ve seen — The Grab — but it did not roll out.