ADS ARE A VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF A BRAND’S SOUL

Think of your favourite brand(s), if you had to boil it down to its most basic element, what makes it stand out?

Quality? Affordability/ Exclusivity? Practicality?

For most people, myself included, it is the ads used to keep these brands top of mind. Even as a teenager, I remember how I was drawn to the likes of Johnnie Walker, Red Bull and Nike, even though I was too young for the first two and definitely could not afford the third one.

Somehow, their ads spoke to me. Whether it was the animation style and humour employed by the team at Red Bull or the Striding Man inspiring me to keep on going, or Michael Jordan telling me to, “Just Do It”, still as a non-user of these brands, I could not shake their appeal and the lasting impression they made on me.

Despite having been somewhat young at the time, I can to this day recall the South African cult classic, “It’s not inside, it’s on top,” ad. Those of you old enough to have been around know exactly which brand those iconic lines belong to.

Great ads stay with us even when our relationship with the brand has changed.

If marketing is the act of communicating a brand’s identity to a selected audience, then adverts are the stories that tug at our hearts and mental strings.

In the age of virality and short-form content, it is easy to see why brands often choose to forgo crafting ads that will resonate with our emotions and often choose to simply cold sell you their products. After all, the whole point of an ad is to convince you to buy something.

However, ads that fail to connect the consumer to the brand are soon forgotten and have a lesser chance of converting eyeballs to buyers (i.e., no Return on Investment).

Humans are emotional creatures, most of the decisions we make are not based on calculated logic, but rather on how we feel at any given moment. This includes our buying behaviour [1]. You are more likely to remember and engage (emotionally and mentally) with something that made you feel something, whether that is rage, fear, love or even disappointment.

Ads are not simply a trick to get your potential and current users to mindlessly choose your brand over the competition. They are an opportunity for brands to showcase what it is they stand for, the quirkiness they have to offer and maybe even forge an emotional connection to audiences that will supersede even the passage of time.