Advertising Risks and Responsibilities

All great advertising requires a degree of bold, imaginative risk-taking to break through the daily clutter of product information and brand messages.

The adage that the greatest risk a marketer can take, is to take no risk at all, has never been truer.

The challenge of course is to create brand advertising that has a high recall value for all the right and not the wrong reasons, which brings one to the issue of risk and responsibility in marketing and creative decision-making.

Calling the shots incorrectly can usually be attributed to an irresponsible lack of human insight. As has been said so often, without insight there is actually no idea. The lifeblood of creative intuition is the thorough understanding of the hopes, aspirations and cultural sensitivities of consumers and their daily realities and to not think of them as mere demographics.

Engaging or Enraging?

The Xbox ‘Champagne’ commercial of 2002 went viral a month before being screened on television, but was banned shortly thereafter by the UK Independent Television Commission.

The satire and underlying metaphorical humour of the message was completely lost on some viewers who complained that the commercial was ‘offensive, shocking and in bad taste.

They clearly did not understand the playful mindset of 2 billion active ‘gamers’ globally for whom the tongue-in-message was meant and overwhelmingly well received.

Whether the bold message delivery of the commercial was a responsible or irresponsible creative decision is maybe debatable. However, on the plus side of any debate is the extraordinary and lasting aspect of this commercial that more than a decade later, is still viewed weekly on YouTube. For me the satirical message is as insightfully relevant today as it was back then.

The challenge facing Joaquin Cubria and Ignacio Ferioli, executive creative directors at David was that getting women over 25 to check their cell phones every 5 minutes was easy, but to get them to examine their breasts regularly required showing women a step-by-step technique of self-examination on naked breasts, real breasts, but that was being denied to them.

They decided to risk circumventing the censors by substituting ‘man boobs’ for naked female breasts in their commercial and made advertising history.

Directed by 1985 at Landia with Nicolas Hardy as Director of Photography, the campaign won a Cannes Gold Lion for Film and the 2016 Cannes Health Lions Grand Prix for Good.

48 million views were motivated in the first week and shared 700,000 times, becoming the most shared and viewed breast self-examination campaign ever.

This time they took the calculated risk of getting around the censors by replacing the forbidden nipples with singing mouths. It was a responsible risk that paid off handsomely.

The commercial, directed by 1985 at Landia, is surreal and decidedly bizarre. Some viewers thought it to be grotesque, but it is undeniably a hugely memorable commercial that made headlines across the world for all the right reasons, and broke through many of the social barriers concerning Breast Cancer Awareness.

The general consensus was that to foolishly suggest that a Pepsi can singlehandedly solve racially motivated police brutality, even for a second, was insulting in the extreme.

The commercial was conceived and produced by Pepsi’s in-house content creation team in their ‘Creators League Studio’.

Many advertising industry professional regard that decision as irresponsible and one that was always going to be fraught with high risk as ‘content’ per se seldom equates to persuasive communication.

Bob Hoffman, the famous Ad Contrarian, in his typical forthright manner describes ‘content creation’ as an activity masquerading as an Idea.

To Pepsi’s laudable credit, they bravely accepted full responsibility for the ‘Live For Now’ project failure, withdrew the commercial and issued a public apology:

“Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologise”.

“We also apologise for putting Kendall Jenner in an unenviable position”.

In mitigation of Pepsi’s debacle, I’m reminded of the adage that the only person or persons who never made a mistake are those who never made anything at all.

Dove Denmark, The Image Hack

The Unilever Company pledged its support to Danish Advertising Agency Mindshare’s activst initiative to stamp out female stereotypes in brand advertising.

A Unilever press statement expained the motivation for their committed support as follows:

“As a global marketer Unilever plays a important part in how ‘genders’ are presented in the media”.

“Images that are not a true reflection of society and sexist portrayals of women, promote ideas that are demeaning and alienating instead of being uplifting”.

“68% of all women can’t relate to the imagery they see in advertising and we need to change that if we want consumers to have a positive feeling about our brands and foster brand kinship”.

“This is not only an issue of corporate responsibility and morality about making an actual difference to society, it’s also an economic issue”.

“We will create better advertising if we create brand communication that’s more progressive, relevant and resonant by challenging gender stereotypes”.

Donate Life went from 149 to 1,022 registrations per day, an increase of 586 percent. Also noteworthy is that being a nonprofit organisation, Donate Life had no production, nor media budget. The services of the Martin Agency and everyone involved in the production were done free of charge.

Directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon with Will Arnett providing the voice-over, the campaign went on to win 10 Cannes Lions.