The Secret to Making Good Commercial Ads

To us, this is no secret, we are really jus left bewildered at the amount of bad ads out there in the space. We do understand why though, especially in this political climate. You have to check certain boxes, and stay in those boxes. Companies are less willing to take a risk in these days. Hell, a judge called our ad “too violent” and thought it wouldn’t sit well with audiences. MIND YOU, the audience for that particular ad, were people going to a movie theater more than likely to see a movie filled with violence, not to mention you don’t actually see the violence in our ad, we were mindful of that and had cuts to prevent seeing contact.

When watching ads, we constantly find ourselves shaking our heads and commentating on what we would do instead. Again, to us, this isn’t some kind of big secret, it’s common sense, but maybe it’s just because we have the magic.

The main thing about ads, is, they are stealing your time. Its something you didn’t ask for standing in between you and something you DID ask for.

So, with that in mind, you need to turn that “something they didn’t ask for” into “something they didn’t know they needed”.

There are 3 well proven routes you can take that when executed properly will give you an actual entertaining ad that people will enjoy when they see it. Now of course you can do a mixture of all these, only 2, or take entirely different routes, there’s always more than 3 ways to get somewhere. But to us, a commercial must as least utilize 1 of these elements to even be remotely memorable.

Comedy – Like the “too violent” comment, comedy is a matter of perspective, a company could test an ad in front of a focus group that found the ad to be funny, while the rest of audience could lean a different way. Like someone suddenly getting ran over when its not expected, funny to me(if its not real life)… others may look at me and ask “whats wrong with me?”. The mainstream shuns Tarantino’s brand of comedy, but the majority of people love it. So you just have to keep in mind, you’re not going to please everyone in this category, you just have to make sure the comedy is authentic and not dumb lol, it’s hard to explain, but we know you know what we mean, we’ve all seen these commercials.

Action – Now, action doesn’t always have to mean violence, but even if it does, forget what that judge said about our ad, people love action and violence, again, why do you think they put that stuff in the movies, and why do you think those movies make millions of dollars? Rhetorical question, I digress. Just know, people love action in any form, and it’s easy to see that. But again, as with everything on this list, it must be executed the right way.

Uniqueness – PATTERN INTERRUPT, the look, the sound, the message, everything about your ad grabs the eye because it doesn’t fall in line with millions of other adverts

Think of some of your favorite or most memorable commercials, they more than likely instilled one of these core elements into their commercial.

Lets talk about a commercial I always enjoyed, the LG commercials featuring Jason Statham. Now right off the bat they have uniqueness down, a celebrity counts as pattern interrupt every time, even though bigger celebrities on tv are becoming more and more common. They have comedy with all the different Jason stathams through out the commercial doing different funny stuff like fighting and dancing, thus also including action, they hit the trifecta, and this commercial is a dam good one. Plus Jason Statham is just so charming.

Think back to commercials you like to see, and what you wanna see, thats all it is.

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