©2000 Robey Callahan
I’d like for you to imagine that you are all owners of relatively successful small businesses.
Some of you own beauty parlors, betting shops, clothing stores.
Some of you are butchers or lawyers or accountants in small firms.
Your successful businesses generate a cash surplus that you need to manage somehow.
One day you find in your mailbox a piece of junk mail, or “direct marketing”, from a bank that offers you a type of bank account to help you handle your cash flow surpluses.
Now a bank could just send you an application for this bank account along with the terms and conditions of the contract. But that would be a terribly unfriendly way of explaining to you about this particular account.
To tell you about it in a friendly and persuasive manner, the bank has hired an advertising agency to produce a nice letter and brochure explaining the benefits of the account in plain English.
So what you get in this piece of junk mail are two things: a legal contract in the form of an application with associated terms and conditions; and a bit of straightforward advertising.
This is part of the story of how this piece of junk mail got from the bank to you.
This story is organized around issues of “truth” in advertising and how it may be helpful to think about it.
The example that I’m going to talk about is one for which I was the copywriter, and much of what I say is a reconstruction of events from my perspective and the perspectives of those I spoke to about it.
The main point I’d like to make is that certain aspects of advertising tend to be held to standards of legal accuracy or truth, while other aspects are not. These other aspects tend to be held to standards unrelated to legal ideas of truth. They are instead held to standards that relate to ideas of brand-appropriateness.
This distinction will become clear, I trust, in the course of this talk.
The easiest way to talk about this distinction is to draw on a distinction made by all sorts of people interested in tropes like metaphor, metonym, irony, and so forth.
It’s the distinction between what has often been called the “literal” and the “figurative”.
I worked for a while in the creative department of a large direct-marketing advertising agency in London. I worked as a copywriter in concert with an art director—the usual situation.
A copywriter writes the text of an ad; and an art director is responsible for images and design. These two work as a team to create what are called advertising “concepts”.
They are given a brief that lays out the main “communication message” of the ad to be created. Such a message, called a “proposition”, is usually very simple and straightforward. It needs to be for the creative team to be able to produce a simple and straightforward and effective ad concept.
Before I talk about the example I’d like to run through, I’ll give you an overview of the types of people involved in the process of getting a piece of direct-marketing (or “junk mail”) into people’s mailboxes.
Since I was a “creative”, as they are called, I’ll start with “creatives”. As I said, these are people, copywriters and art directors, who come up with advertising “concepts” in response to briefs they are given.
The brief is a document laying out the key “proposition” for the ad, plus a whole lot of other things about the product on offer and the intended audience.
The brief is produced by the “client”, in this case a bank called Abbey National, and a group of people known as “account handlers”. The “client” in this case is the marketing division of the bank—a group of people responsible for organizing for the bank its various marketing endeavors.
The “client”, by the way, has recourse to a legal team who advises on questions of legal accuracy. All ads are submitted to this legal team, known collectively as “compliance”.
But it is usually the case that only the copy or text of proposed ads is submitted to this legal team for “sign-off”. This is a significant point, and I’ll return to it.
The “client” has products they would like to sell, so they come to advertising agencies and often work with “account handlers” in those agencies to devise the briefs that will eventually find their way onto the desks of creatives.
“Account handlers” are middlemen. They move between “clients” and “creatives” to make sure the job gets done to everyone’s satisfaction—and to keep the peace. Part of their job is to be diplomatic in their dealings with both groups—the “client” because they pay the bills and must be happy with what they get; and the “creatives” because they are perceived not to function well creatively if they are angered or frustrated by the demands of the “client”.
[Here is what this situation looks like.]
In order to talk about how this thing actually works, I’ll launch into the example of this talk.
This bank, Abbey National, created a new type of banking account—new for them at least. This particular type of account is geared to appeal the you… owners of small businesses who regularly run cash flow surpluses.
It gives you a convenient way to manage these cash reserves—to add to them and take away from them easily without penalty. And it gives you a chance to earn interest on these reserves.
I’ll tell you the original “proposition” for this ad in a moment, but first I’ll show the outer envelope of the piece that was actually produced now: <slide of outer>.
Here we have a bit of a tease and an introduction of office buildings as the theme that continues inside the pack.
The original “proposition” devised by the “client” and the “account handlers” was, thus,
This is the key message that was passed on to the “creatives” who were then charged with coming up with an interesting, appealing creative “concept”.
What is a “concept”?
A concept is
The two key points about this product, this bank account, were, given the proposition, that it offered “high interest” and “easy access”.
Keeping this in mind, and keeping in mind branding issues (which I’ll talk about in a minute), the creative team came up with this:
Here, the two product benefits are united visually with two metaphors. “High” as this elevator going up, and “easy access” as this revolving door.
The nice thing about this also is that these two metaphors are visually very close: both are half cylinders extending from the side of a nice modern office building shot at angles.
But here’s where the problems started happening. The “client” came back after receiving this original concept (I’ve only shown you the cover of the brochure here as the remainder of the piece was left intact and I’ll show you all of it in a minute).
They came back to the “account handlers” and asked them to ask the “creatives” to change the word “high” to “attractive”.
“Attractive interest”/“Easy access”
Well, if you think about it, this change severely tampers with the original concept, rendering it unworkable.
The “creatives” argued, via the “account handlers”, that this change would ruin the concept.
They also argued that there was no reason to change the word “high” as:
a. all other banks offering this type of product routinely used the word “high”
b. and, well, Abbey National’s interest rates were actually the HIGHEST!!!
The “client” returned, via the “account handlers”, that the change was essential—that their legal people wouldn’t allow the use of the word “high”—even given the apparent accuracy of the term.
This went on for several days, and other people higher up in the creative department became involved in the argument (all done through the “account handlers” as is usually the case in large agencies).
Finally, the truth of the matter was revealed: finally, an “account handler” told me—and this is as close to a direct quotation as I can give, if it’s not actually what she said:
She said: “The interest rates may not always be high.”
Right! So the word “high” is out, and there’s no time left to change the creative concept. Fearing that “attractive” would just look too awkward, I suggested “impressive”, and the “client” agreed to it.
You’ll note also here that reality intervened a little—giving us a box-shaped elevator instead of the half cylinder we’d hoped for.
I said I’d show the rest of the brochure, and here it is:
Pages 2 and 3
Here’s a doorman welcoming you to your new account as if he’s welcoming you to your office in the city.
Pages 4 and 5
Again, an equation of, in this case, “rewarding” interest with height. And over on the right, another shot of movement and “access”.
Pages 6 and 7
So what’s up? Well, it seems that Abbey National intended to launch the product with a high interest rate, but that this rate may not always be high.
The product brochure, the most expensive piece in this mailing pack, makes no mention of “high”, preferring instead “impressive” and “rewarding” to refer to the interest. This extends the life of the brochure.
What I mean is, if the interest goes down, the brochure can still be used. They can just keep reproducing it as is.
The interest rate flyer I showed was a separate piece and can more cost-effectively be altered as the need arises.
THAT is the reason we couldn’t say “high”. Abbey National was trying on the one hand to save money on future uses of the brochure by ensuring that it wouldn’t need altering even if their interest rates went down. And they in all fairness do not want to give the impression that they are not “trustworthy”—that they are seeking to mislead people about their products.
Now let me quickly return to the distinction I made at the beginning between “literal” and “figurative” text and images in advertising (and of course elsewhere).
Text and images that are deemed to be “literal” tend to be scrutinized in regard to their “legal truthfulness”. Here, we see the word “high” as not (potentially in the future) being “truthful”, and so it was changed. We can also think, for example, of the photographs of food in fast-food restaurants—pictures of very large hamburgers that do not compare favorably with the real thing.
Text and images that are deemed to be “figurative” escape such legal scrutiny.
The elevator may serve as a metaphor for “high” (especially photographed the way it was—from a steep angle), but it isn’t a “literal” claim—one that can be held to standards of legal accuracy.
The shiny modern buildings used in the ad I’ve shown you here—the various images of business success—help metonymically to create a nice and appealing atmosphere, but the fact is, the majority of people who will go for this particular bank account do not do business under such circumstances.
Remember, most of you are small-business owners. And most of you live in less urban settings where such skyscrapers are non-existent.
Nothing particularly fancy, but it certainly helps me think about these distinctions in a straightforward-and no doubt too simplistic-manner.
Here we have four cells. Columns are “literal” and “figurative”. Rows are “text” and “images”.
“Literal” text and images seem to call forth legal scrutiny. Of course, lawyers do use “figurative” means to make their arguments—what we’re talking about here is the kind of language that goes into legal contracts.
Hence, we have “high” here as in “high interest”. Below it we might have “a house for sale”.
“Figurative” text and images seem to escape legal scrutiny. Or at least in most cases. The Camel cigarette ads with the cartoon camel provide a rare example: but even here it is not on the grounds of misrepresentation in a contractual sense.
Pictures of a camel smoking cigarettes are not amenable to legal scrutiny in this sense: it doesn’t make sense to question the truth or falsity of such an image.
“Figurative” text and images almost never, however, escape the scrutiny of those concerned with brand image. Abbey National, for instance, would find “Send your interest into orbit” a bit too playful or frivolous for a product as “serious” as the Business Reserve Account.
But the images of business success, like the “photo of the skyscraper”, are perfectly “on brand”.
(A key point to make: the power of advertising, what it is that “clients” pay for, is really mostly located in its ability to tap into the “figurative”. Most of what is in fact communicated in advertising, therefore, falls outside the realm of legal scrutiny.)
So, when is it okay to say “high”? Well, if it’s not taken “literally” and subject to legal scrutiny, you can say it whenever you like—as long as it’s appropriate to the brand…
While we couldn’t say “high” in the example presented, it may be that we could have gone into figurative mode and said it some other way… for instance, in hyperbole.
We certainly did “say” “high” with the figurative images—the metaphors for “high”.
At the end of the day, this talk may have been better off not with the title “WHEN is it okay to say ‘high’?”, but rather “HOW is it okay to say ‘high’?” Instead of saying it (LITERALLY) with words, we’ve said it (FIGURATIVELY) with skyscrapers.