Advertising is a Piece of Cake

Sorry?—?an advertisement is like a piece of?cake.

Behind every ad you see comes a long list of ingredients, requests, and plans. Working with an ad agency is a lot like ordering a cake. What do you want in the cake? Are there any allergies we should know about? Is this cake for a large party or for a small gathering? Do you need the full cake or just a slice? Do you even want a cake or is this a social obligation cake because it’s someone’s birthday?

There are a lot of moving parts and, with that, a lot of pre-determined considerations that should go into producing your next great campaign. When ordering a cake, very rarely do you change your request or ingredients halfway through the baking process. Doing so may very well sabotage tomorrow’s dessert. Understandably, sometimes this can happen and those bakers will do their very best to accommodate without making unnecessary sacrifices. And yet, there will always be some sacrifices. The best cakes are made with experience, love, and planning. Lots of planning.

Imagine a scenario:

It’s a busy November morning at Sweet Cheeks Bakery in Brooklyn, New York City. Romeo Cheeks is working the counter today, the phone is off the wall for birthday orders. Ah, the annual V-Day boom. Cheeks answers his next call:

“How are yah? Sweet Cheeks Bakery outta Brooklyn. This is Romeo, how can I help?”

“Hi, I’d like to order a cake for this Saturday, please.”

“Notta problem, for how many?”

“For everybody, please.”

Why would your cake have to suit everybody? Only a select group of your friends will be eating this cake. Wouldn’t you get more value out of aiming to please only those at your party? Think of the compliments?—?your guests would be lined up for next year’s birthday!

What does cake have to do with?ads?

1. You need an ad campaign. This is the cake.
2. Something to avoid based on past learnings or campaigns? Allergies.
3. Do you need general brand awareness versus a specifically targeted recruitment campaign? The flavour of cake you’re ordering.
4. Full slice versus full cake = size of your campaign and the deliverables.
5. And is this a social obligation cake? Do you actually have goals that require a campaign or is this year’s budget gone unspent and unspent budgets this year mean smaller budgets next year?

The first step before engaging a creative agency is to know exactly what it is you’re looking for. Lock this in now and try to avoid big changes in strategy once creative has been briefed. Different goals and needs lead to different creative executions. Executions aside, where said creative shows up would look much different for a recruitment campaign versus an awareness campaign. Having a “Look at my logo!” piece on blast at your city’s big job fair wouldn’t create much buzz. We won’t get much into your media buy in this article but think of it this way: would you serve your $2,500 wedding cake on styrofoam plates?

What’s important about knowing what you’re looking for is that you understand your unique problem. You needn’t know the answer. Leave that thinking to the agency?—?that’s why you’re paying them! By knowing your exact problem, you can get specific solutions. Admittedly, I over-simplified my examples above. An awareness campaign is a valid request, yes, but even better when we can get hyper specific. You want to bring brand awareness to 25–33 year old Canadian women that work as accountants and frequently read romance novels in their spare time. Awesome. We know where to reach them (both physically and mentally), what pays their bills, their professional language, interests associated with their lifestyle and location, and a slew of information that comes with their generational upbringing. A lot better than “give me an awareness campaign.” Of course, these audience specifics ought to be driven by your buyers otherwise the targeting is all for not. With this example in mind, it’d be totally useless if your primary customers were actually 45–60 year old men who worked in trades. That is, of course, unless you wanted to expand your reach. More on that thinking another time.

Enable insight.

Without getting too in the weeds, every good advertisement starts off with good insight. Specific information helps creatives crack that insight.

An example:

Ogilvy launched Unilever’s Dove Real Beauty campaign with the insight that women didn’t feel beautiful in their own skin due to unrealistic beauty standards found across major media?sources.

This sort of insight may have been missed if, during the brief, creatives weren’t set down the right path for who exactly it was they were talking to. And while my scenario with the 25–33 year old women specifically mentions targeting, these sorts of insights can be included outside of targeting when kicking off a project. It’s kind of like telling the baker that you know the birthday girl really likes blue icing.

Of course, the reality is that you may not always know all of your customer insights—especially the ones that could serve as the flint to spark a creative idea. That’s fine, creatives typically dig these out for your audience. Just don’t withhold anything interesting. Even if it’s small. Small sometimes leads to big.

When you’re hungry, you don’t act yourself. And when you don’t act yourself, you don’t mesh with your?friends.

Seems obvious, right? Here’s what DDBO came up with for Snickers (you’ve probably seen this, it was everywhere):

Something that is easy to forget: you’ve been working with your brand for days, months, or even years. You know your customers, product, problems, and industry pretty well. It’s important to remember that this is not the case for the agency you may be onboarding—don’t just tell them what you want to achieve, tell them everything. It’s their due diligence to learn as much as they can about you, but if you set things off in the right direction it could lead to gold. If you want your next ad campaign to be your secret weapon, consider information the ammo.

Think of it like this: the same way you know your business better than anybody, a creative knows idea generation. A piece of information that may be “too small” to share could ladder up to a eureka moment. You’re uncovering breadcrumbs. Maybe one breadcrumb leads to another which leads a creative down a path with a pot of gold at the end.

So next time you’re working to bake an ad remember that you’re ordering a cake. Communicate clearly everything you want both in your cake and out of your cake. How big is your cake? Who is your cake serving? Any flavours to cater to? You know the drill. Arm your baker with everything they need and maybe you’ll even get some bonus sprinkles on top. After this, your party with be the talk of the town.

If you liked this read, you’ll like my newsletter. Give it a shot to read creative blurbs like this just more personal and, well, blurbier. Plus, I’ll let you know when I publish my next article. And feel free to reach out if there are any specific creative affairs you’d like me to attempt to unpack.

Stay curious, keep learning.

Kenzie.