Atomic Ideas - Helping You Sell More Stuff!

Atomic Idea: How to Fix Burger King.

Here's the idea for BK.

Deliver on the promise of your advertising and you'll blow people's minds!

Burger king has (yet another) new agency McGarryBowen and a new commercial. The creepy king has been replaced by glorious (though somewhat stock-footagy) shots of "fresh" ingredients being sliced, diced and prepared for the final image... an equally glorious shot of the new burger designed to elicit a pavlovian response from consumers and drive them into Burger King in droves. Here's what it looks like 

(view the commercial here):

We actually like the idea of focussing on the food. But McGarryBowen doesn't really have any control over whether or not Burger King delivers on the promise of the advertising.

So do they? Here's one consumer's opinion.

 

Great looking commercial, full of promise. Not so great looking burger, full of, er, lettuce. We're guessing there may be a lot of similar experiences accross the country as more people try the California Whopper. Bummer.

So again, here's the killer idea:

Deliver on the promise of your advertising and you'll blow people's minds!

Imagine this. People open the box and the burger actually looks almost as good as the one in the commercial and actually tastes as good as the commercial implies it will. Eureka! Now that would get people talking... all over the Internet, all over the world! "Tastes as good as it looks. Looks as good as it tastes - unbelievable!" 

No consumer in this day and age remotely expects the fast food burger they buy at the restaurant to look anything like the burger they saw in the advertising. So if you could make it actually happen (and advertise that), you'd be the first... the one and only... the Burger King! Imagine the buzz. Imagine the press.

Of course, your ad agency can't really help you make it happen. First you have to fix a very expensive list of operational problems and customer experience issues that continue to negatively affect your sales. Then you would have to train your employees to actually make the burgers look almost as good as they do in the commercials. Impossible? Well, nothing's really impossible. And as new owners, you have the benefit of a fresh perspective. Look what Tata has already done to help reinvigorate the Jaguar brand since they purchased it from Ford, "a case study of how a strong and committed management can make even a difficult acquisition work." 

Deliver on the promise of your advertising and you'll blow people's minds!

Honestly, this may seem like a way too simple idea; maybe even a crazy one. But man, if people opened that box and actually got what you told/showed them they were going to get, they'd all be saying, "I'm Loving It!" If that happened, McDonald's may actually start to worry, and we think Burger King's future would be a lot more, er, promising.

If you don't have an iPhone & marketable truth

You've seen the "If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have an iPhone" spots. They are classic exhibits of what we at Atomic Ideas call "marketable truths." Each talks about a real, valuable feature the iPhone offers (marketable truth).  Like this one for the Retina Display:

 

And becuase most of these "marketable truths" that Apple talks about are exclusive to the iPhone, they can take a leadership position. They can rub everyone's face in the fact that you can only get these real, valuable features (marketable truth) in an iPhone. 

Of course, everyone loves to attack whoever is the leader, the numer one, and whoever is rubbing someone's face in something, so parody ads have been popping up. Here is one of the funnier ones. Caution: It does use occasional foul language.

 

Stock Market Crash and truth in advertising.

Give the people what they want and they will flock to your door, whether it is a product, service, or in this case, a blog. By incorporating the "fad of the day" -- ie the Stock Market Crashing recently, into the headline, I can attract customers - in this case, readers to the blog. But like any advertising venture, if the product - in this case this blog, doesn't measure up to the expectations in the headline - ie info on the stock market - I not only lose the reader (customer). I probably alienate him or her from ever buying (in this case reading) my product ever again .

This is where truth in advertising comes in. Only by communicating a "marketable truth" (a real advantage or value) that the product possess, can you attract AND retain a customer. Communicate a "false, fabricated or over-blown" promise, and you will probably attract potential buyers, but once they check you out, and you don't deliver what they are expecting, they will be alienated from your product or service for life. 

At Atomic Ideas, we focus on finding and communicating your "marketable truths" so you can attract and retain more customers...AND sell more stuff!

 

 

 

The First Infomercials - Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps On Ticking!

We're all used to a variety of loudmouth pitchment on late night TV. But way back in time, there was a guy named John Cameron Swayze who pitched Timex watches. These weren't recorded, these were live demonstrations. Talk about pitching compelling marketable truths about a product. Better yet, they worked.

Take a look at some really good advertising in action. Dolphins, dishwashers and outboard motor propellers. It doesn't always go according to plan, but it's all still very effective stuff. Enjoy!

To learn more about Timex' history and commercials, click here.

 

 

 

How Much Has Working In an Ad Agency Changed for Creatives Over The Years?

                                                                                 OMG!

How much has life changed for creative folk working in ad agencies in the last twenty years, or so? Well, for one thing, we would have said, "Oh my god," not OMG. Because, well, people didn't talk or text that way back then... oh yeah, they didn't text at all.

Some of my good friends and I got into a discussion about how difficult it must be for art directors or designers getting into the business today, compared to when we got into it twenty or thirty years ago. The conversation was such a hoot, I thought I'd relay some of our observations here.

Have Things Really Changed That Much?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. In our day, apart from having to walk uphill to work through snow and ice in our bare feet, we frankly didn't have nearly as much to worry about to keep our jobs. What did we have to keep up with as young art directors and copywriters entering the business? Here are a few of the things we could remember:

• The latest Press Type fonts from Letraset. Yep, in those days we actually transferred type from a plastic sheets to our marker layouts on something called paper (Vellum, actually). 

• Speaking of Press Type, we also needed to keep up with the latest "burnishing" device; aka, a small plastic tool with a flat head which allowed us to get the letters off the plastic and on to our layouts. So tech talk was like, Hey Bob, check out the new poly-carbonate burnisher from Burnisher Pros (now out of business, I'm sure )... it's really smooth, man!" Then we would drink scotch to celebrate.

• Yes, in the high stress agency world, drinking was important. We had to keep up with all the single malt and blended Scotch upgrades available at the time (not nearly as many as are available in America today, so relatively easy. Thank god none of them, were made by Adobe).

• Figuring out how to manage the cash pool to keep the agency bar stocked.

• Of course, markers (previously mentioned -  little sticks with different colored nibs on the end we would use to draw our concepts on paper) were important, too. It was big news when Pantone came out with some new colors! Then we had to beg the CD to beg the agency owners to come up with the cash to get them for all of us so we be on the "cutting edge." Sniffing markers was a lot of fun, too. Side note: A good AD in the seventies and eighties could sniff a marker blindfolded, get high from the fumes, and still tell you what color it was.

• We also had to also be up on the latest formulations of rubber cement to make keylining easier. WTF (more new speak) is keylining? We actually had to paste everything on a board so it could be printed. Hell, I'm not explaining it. Look here if you care.

• For copywriters, there wasn't much. But they did get geeked up when a new model electric typewriter came out. Fodder for the water cooler, indeed. Their lives wouldn't really be revolutionized until word processing became the next big thing on dim Cathode Ray Tube displays with little green letters you could only access if you could figure out how to get past a thing called a DOS prompt. That was asking an awful lot from a copywriter, but they managed. Life was a bitch for all of us back then!

Heck, that's about it.

Compared to the youngsters coming up these days, we had it easy.

It's true and we know it. Don't be jealous, but we just had to focus on being good at what our job titles described us as. 

These days it's not enough to be simply a good art director or copywriter. Now you better know everything about everything; HTML, HTML 5, Flash, social media, SEO, video editing, and a million other techie things that weren't even on the horizon in the old days. And how about constantly having to figure out how to learn and use the constant upgrades to all the programs you new kids on the block have to deal with? That's a nightmare all its own. And what if you copy folk aren't up on Google's latest algorithm changes? Bummer! Now your latest brilliant search engine optimized copy is as worthless as the neighbor dog's droppings on your nicely manicured lawn. Holy crap. 

We admit it. Things were simpler back then. On the other hand, we're still here and we unfortunately have to be up to speed on everything you new guys and gals have to deal with and keep up with in these technologically manic times. So listen to your elders and take some advice that got us, and many "Mad Men," through their darkest days, and still does. Booze. It's the glue that's kept the industry together. Don Draper knew it, and so did we. Keep the bar stocked and you can't go wrong. You'll get through it all, and you just might get famous. Because hey, some things never change. And some things never should.

Cheers!