Three seconds too long
The ‘Tina from Turners’ campaign has been pretty successful for Turners Cars, but one of their ads really bugs me:
You might be thinking “What’s wrong with it? That’s a solid effort.”
It’s the final couplet that kills it for me:
“They aren’t coming back, are they?”
“Nuh-uh.”
The problem I see is that the punchline was already delivered:
“You should’ve come to see me at Turners!”
“Yeah, probably.”
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Stopping that ad at 27 seconds makes it funnier, and cleverer. It lets the joke breathe, and it lets the audience have a little ‘a ha’ moment. The audience is an active participant in making sense of the joke and making them an active participant in receiving the message. The holy grail!
The problem is, the writers shut down any opportunity for that to happen by letting the ad run three seconds too long.
They forgot to mind the gap.
Mind the gap
Creativity coach Richard Holman describes this as an ‘advertising strategy’ that we should all be using more (though I’d argue it’s more of a principle than a strategy). Whatever term you use, "minding the gap" is a simple and vital thing to understand:
“By ‘the gap’ I mean the space you leave in your communication for the reader or viewer. Most advertising, most of the time, leaves no gap. There’s an image, some copy and a message which is self-evident.” - Richard Holman, 'Minding the Gap'
If we apply this to the Turners ad, we can see the gap closing in real-time. For whatever reason - client pressure, wishy-washiness - the script ruins the dramatic irony. From the moment the little old lady laughs, it’s obvious to us that they are indeed stealing this mope’s car. The joke is not that they’re stealing his car - it’s that he’s too dumb to realise it.
The crickets could have been a nice subtle touch. But by closing the gap with “They aren’t coming back, are they?”, whoever wrote the script has decided the audience is even stupider than the protagonist. And then for the real idiots, Tina from Turners spells it out again. Just to be sure.
Find the gaps
I’m being a little facetious, but I do think this ad is a good example of how little respect is given to audiences’ intelligence - and how closing the gap means closing down your opportunities. It’s not easy, but giving your audience a bit of agency in understanding the message is a truly powerful technique for creating memorable ads.
I’ll write more about how to do this in a future post. For now, mind the gap: look for examples of ads where the reader or viewer has to do a little bit of mental work for the ad to make sense. They’ll stick out like sore thumbs.