The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

With the obsession of marketing practice, our towns and cities are increasingly being wrapped in advertising that all looks the same – just in different colours.

Doesn’t matter if it’s an ad for a bank, a car, a holiday destination or a cold and flu medicine … everything feels interchangeable, which results in people – ironically – being able to ‘tune them out’ rather than being attracted to how they stand out.

It’s why the thing that is increasingly capturing the attention and creating some sort of differentiation are the ‘walk-in’ signs designed by the people who either own the shops we walk past, or run them.

One of them I saw recently was this:

Is it brilliant? Not really.
It it it clever? A little, but not much.
Does the store have anything to do with Christopher Walken? Not at all.

But I tell you what, it caught my attention, made me smile and made me pay attention to it – and the store it was for – far more than I do with many of the dot-to-dot, paint-by-numbers ads that have been tested to within an inch of their life to ensure the message achieves maximum comprehension, does not – in any way – offend or alienate audiences and hits every category cue, brand ‘asset’ and ‘purchase driver’ to ensure the people behind it can tell their bosses it ‘achieved all the metrics’, even if no one in the real world paid the slightest bit of attention to it whatsoever.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a world of difference between developing the communication for a major, national/internation brand and doing a ‘walk-in’ sign for a local suburb – but somewhere along the line, we seem to have forgotten the point of ads is to stand out, not blend in which is why it might be a good time to end this post by dusting off this quote by the great Mr Weigel,