In advertising it is believed that the better communication strategy is to get your point across without actually having to spell it out to your audience. As such, advertisers often use metaphors to communicate their ideas. We believe, however, that there are reasons and degrees of deviance away from this advertising strategy that are appropriate. There are times when you can use a metaphor to support your idea, but also directly tell your audience how it is.
The recent E*Trade Super Bowl ads give us one example of appropriate deviance - watch the commercial:
In this ad, a talking baby shows how easy it is to buy stock when he says, “Check it, Click – I just bought stock. You just watched me buy stock. If I can do it, you can do it.” Then seems very surprised as he spits up on camera and says “Woah!”
The use of a baby by E*Trade is intentional. The baby is a metaphoric representation of how easy it is to trade stocks online with E*Trade. This creative advertising probably surfaced as the creative team brainstormed the metaphors they could use to communicate how easy their system is to use. Someone may have said something like, "so easy a baby could do it."
Using a baby to communicate ease of use is about as close as you can come without spelling it out to their audience. The creative execution of the ad kept people entertained and pleased to see the ad again. You might argue that the ad wasn't creative because they did spell it out to their audience by having the baby say: "If I can do it, you can do it." Your argument would be very correct, had we not planned to introduce two exceptions.
Two exceptions to spelling it out for your audience are:
- When a new product or service is being introduced and the customer needs detailed explanation.
- When the point of the advertising is to demonstrate a function of the product(s)
The goal for E*Trade was to communicate one function of their product, how easy it is to use. Other advertisers have successfully used the same strategy, but a different metaphor, to communicate ease of use.
This campaign has been successful for E*Trade. Google searches for eTrade nearly tippled the day of the super bowl and the week after, as well as the February traffic to etrade.com has beat the trend line average.
Other advertisers have used this tactic as well. Remember, Geico's Cave Man commercials?
Their tactic was the same: "So easy a Cave Man could do it!