What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Those of us who’ve been in advertising a while were raised to appreciate that nobody actually wants to look at ads. Because an ad is selling you something, and unless you specifically want that thing, or want to be reminded that you want that thing, then an ad is just one more assault on your eyeballs. So our job, as ad people, used to be to create messages that people enjoyed receiving. Gifts. Things that made people smile. Or think. Or just made them glad to encounter.

Nowadays, of course, the world of advertising has changed. Now it’s all about highly targeted, measurable offer-driven selling. We know who you are, where you are, what you want, when you want it, and how you want to hear about it. There’s no longer a need to entertain you or beguile and seduce you. We can just feed you specific information with a high likelihood that it’ll be relevant — and that you’ll bite.

But here’s what’s abandoned in the race to the bottom for those thin-sliced leads: The power of a brand. Famously, brands are what make products and services meaningful to the folk who seek relationships with them. It’s why we’re willing to sacrifice more when we choose between two almost-identical products . . . one simply holds more value in our hearts, regardless of facts and information. And it’s a value we’re happy to pay for.

Which brings us back to those ads that make people happy. See, great brand advertising tells stories. Great ads provoke us, tease us, intrigue us, cajole us, urge us to engage with them for longer. To appreciate them for their wit or their insight or their gut-punching ability to stop us in our tracks. Their power to evoke a reaction is the gift we alluded to earlier. By moving us, by stirring our hearts, they’re giving us something special. A reward. A small thank you for letting them in.

These are the kind of ads we make at An Agency.

So sure, we do all the left-brained-data-drenched-information-rich-media-facing stuff our peers do, but we wrap it inside something magical — a brand’s power to enchant our clients’ customers.
We love creativity and passion and courage. We love working hard to mine the pictures and words that communicate a feeling, and we love clients who have the pride to stand up and — as importantly — the moxie to stand out.

If you’ve got something wonderful that you believe the world needs to hear about, and if you want the right people to not just hear about it but to tell all their friends about it too, think about summoning your brand’s power to electrify and attract people. Think about hitching your wagon to a place that’s still smitten with that ol’-fashioned notion about creative ideas and the most powerful ways to express them.

Let’s chat.