The case for subtext

If you’ve heard me or Bo give an advertising talk, you’ve heard us belabor our favorite unmeasurable advertising dimension, subtext. Kickstand has an almost pious devotion to this overlooked topic – it’s front and center on every one of our creative briefs – so we figured we were overdue to bring that devotion to the one place that celebrates both niche esoteric business bullshit as well as the general overthinking of things - LinkedIn.?

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the PT Barnum age, consumers are smart as fuck. Especially on the levels of the collective and the subconscious (distinct but related categories - more on that later). People as a whole are really, really good at finding reasons to dismiss the vast majority of marketing messaging –? we all have to be to survive in this environment. If you want your brand to break through, you have to understand why most messaging is likely to get dismissed before it even rises to the level of conscious evaluation. You have to understand how good the average person is at sniffing out subtext without even knowing they’re doing it.

To do that, you have to understand what subtext is.

Text is explicit, subtext is implicit. Text is what you’re saying, subtext is how you’re saying it. Why you’re saying it. Where you’re saying it and to whom. Subtext is everything you’re not saying. It’s all the gaps in the messaging that reveal your brand’s hidden goals, hopes, and fears. Especially the fears.?

Subtext, to use myself as an example, is all the questions you have about why I’m writing this, and all the answers I’m not giving you. Why am I suddenly posting on a platform I’ve been mostly absent from for years? Am I starved for attention? Am I going to sell you something? Did I lose a bet??

Very, very few brands give their subtext the attention it deserves. And the ones that get subtext right usually do it either on instinct or accident. It’s time to bring subtext out of the shadows and make it a critical dimension of the advertising skillset.

Take any big public advertising campaign disaster, the kind with months of schadenfreude-based postmortem takedowns, and we’ll wager 10 to 1 that the core issue was that the campaign’s subtext was in direct disagreement with its text.?

But most subtext failures don’t rise to the level of disaster. They just make themselves profoundly forgettable.

We’ll start with an over-the-top example.

I once saw this billboard in North Texas, trying to drum up tourism for the South Texas border town of Laredo.

Laredo is safe!? Great news guys! Let’s all book a flight.

You don’t have to look up the campaign results to know this didn’t work out well for them.?

I don't even have to explain why this messaging is wrong? –? on this magnitude of a miss, you already understand subtext instinctively. We wouldn’t have the careers we have if our experience and instincts didn’t stop us from making blatant messaging mistakes like this. But we all, no matter how seasoned, still make small misses that can be harmful to our intended outcome when we don’t keep subtext in mind.

“If it’s true, why do they have to say it?”

One of the benefits of getting the subtext right from the beginning is making sure your audience never asks this question. When they ask, “Why is this brand telling me this?” we’ve already lost. If you’ll allow me to commit the unforgivable sin of explaining a joke, I can unpack this a bit more by turning to a timeless scene from the movie Elf. ?The one where Will Farrell’s character Buddy walks past a diner with a “World’s Best Cup of Coffee” sign in front and rushes inside to congratulate everyone on their achievement. The whole joke is that we all know it’s not the world’s best cup of coffee, and the way we know it is precisely because their messaging claimed it was. Their subtext argued against the text. How? Because in our lived experience, never once has the world’s best at anything claimed the title for themselves - they let others do it for it. We don’t even have to evaluate this claim logically; ancient sophisticated internal machinery does it for us entirely below our awareness.

In the coming weeks, we’ll turn to research in neuroscience and behavioral psychology to look in more depth at that ancient machinery in hopes of understanding how subtext lets consumers make these kinds of subconscious snap judgments.

We’ll also dissect more of our favorite advertising failures, looking at historic mistakes through this new lens.

All to bolster our central argument: that we all get better when we bring subtext into the light, rather than leaving it to our own subconscious instincts as creatives and planners. The more we wrestle with subtext explicitly, the lower the chances our audiences will sniff out a misalignment in our messaging and, heaven forfend, ignore it.